Do you know e-commerce is one of the most competitive industries on the internet? So for any online retailer to stay ahead of competitors, you need to have a good pool of competitors’ data to adjust your strategies, find the best approach, predict future trends, and more. And using e-commerce web scrapers is one of the smartest ways to achieve results and stay ahead.
You need to think unconventionally to make your product stand out. Web scrapers help you establish your product as a brand and win the right audience.
Undoubtedly, you cannot run a successful e-commerce business without access to data. For you to maximize sales, you need to get a good grasp of data available on the internet. Hence, the two most essential drivers for growth in any e-commerce company are web scraping and data analytics.
The good news is that you can now use effective web scrapers like “web automation” for scraping useful data from e-commerce websites in minutes. You can turn these websites into a spreadsheet or API and transfer your data to Shopify, Dropbox, Google sheets + and more.
Gathering information manually, does it work?
The process of copying and pasting data from the internet is archaic, mistake-bound, time-consuming and labor intensive. You cannot beat your competitors and increase your sales by getting useful data online manually. The bitter truth is that you’ll be left behind.
So for you to stay ahead of your competition in the e-commerce space, you need something more powerful and sustainable. Web scraping automates the process of data collection and analytics, helping you make the best decisions and boosting overall sales.
Supercharging your E-commerce with web scrapers
We cannot overemphasize the usefulness of data in business. It is essential for attracting the right customers, converting them to regular customers and selling to them repeatedly.
However, for you to have real-time faultless reports on information, e-commerce data scraping is the best way to go.
For example, we all know price is a critical factor that customers’ consider. Most times, people visit different online stores just to compare prices before making their final purchasing decision. So you can use web scrapers to track and monitor your rivals’ prices and provide the potential customers with the best deals.
We shall discuss the benefits of web scraping for eCommerce in detail below, but we haven’t given a proper definition of web scraping; let’s quickly do that before we move on to its benefits.
What is web scraping?
Web scraping is an automated method of extracting and organizing data from websites for proper analysis and effective decision-making.
Web scraping is a timely solution and alternative to the old-fashioned manual method of sitting in front of a computer copying and pasting data from different web pages into a spreadsheet.
In other words, web scraping bots have made the idea of extraction obsolete. Now, automated and prebuilt web scrapers like web automation make it easy and faster to locate and input information from target websites.
Interestingly, you do not need to have knowledge of any programming language to use data scrapers.
What benefits do web scrapers offer in e-commerce?
Web scraping can help you achieve a lot of functions and help you stay ahead in the eCommerce industry.
Here are some of the ways you can supercharge your eCommerce using web-scraping tools:
Price tracking and comparison
You cannot stay ahead in the e-commerce industry if you don’t consider how your competitors price their products.
However, you cannot research all of this data manually because there are so many eCommerce stores online and copying and pasting their data to track and compare prices would take ages. That’s where web scraping comes in.
You can use pre-built scrapers for e-commerce websites to locate and analyze specific data categories, including pricing. This way you can adjust your prices as needed to gain a competitive edge.
Some good pre-built scrapers for e-commerce websites include the
- Amazon product details scraper
- eBay Listings web scrapers
- AliExpress
- Skroutz product web scraper
- Alibaba web scraper
- Walmart Canada Grocery Extractor
All these ready-made extractors are available on web automation. You simply scrape data with just one click and export data in XML, CSV, JSON, or XLSX.
Research customer preferences
You need to understand what people are searching for and their preferences to stay ahead in the world of eCommerce. Web scrapers can help you extract and analyze product range from competitors to get a better idea of how you can do it better.
It is crystal-clear that the new products and services are being introduced into the market daily. So how do you manage all of this data manually? It just won’t work.
But you can use eCommerce data scrapers to compile a list of products and services from diverse brands. You can use keywords to determine the product and service you could offer to stay ahead of other eCommerce businesses and stores.
Web scraping is also useful for performing predictive and sentiment analysis to know what consumers or customers are discussing online.
You can easily scrape through social media platforms to gather vital statistics about consumer experience, preferences, and opinions on different products and services. This will help you make an informed decision on doing it better.
SEO analysis
Web scraping can help you have an advantage in SEO analysis over your competitors. You can get valuable SEO analysis data – including things like titles, Meta descriptions, keyword density, and posts.
You can focus on websites that rank high on Google and see what keywords and SEO techniques they’re using. This way you can boost your SEO game to move to the top of search engines such as Google.
Web Scraping eCommerce sites with an API
Now that we’ve shown you the benefits of web scrapers for eCommerce, we need to quickly inform you of the importance of scraping real-time data and why use API in web scraping.
Real time data is data you get access to immediately after collecting it. Some good examples of real-time eCommerce data you can get from web scrapers include:
- eCommerce purchase
- visitor engagement (how long each visitor is staying on a page, and how many web pages they visit on average before leaving
- Referral traffic from different sources (where you visitors are coming from and how to target them from these sources)
Observing consumers’ behavior and data trends in this manner can help you identify their purchasing pattern and discover what would work best for your eCommerce store.
However, to get real-time data, you need to use an API – a software interface that can transfer data between your scraping software and your database. This reduces the need for manual input.
It can be difficult to use most APIs, especially if you’re not a coder. But fortunately, eCommerce web scrapers like web automation pre-built scrapers do not require you to code anything. Instead, they are free, browser-based API scrapers that you can use with just a single click.
After scraping all the data, you can export to your analytics program or spreadsheet for further processing.
Conclusion
To stay ahead of your game in the eCommerce industry, you need efficient web scrapers to gather real-time data such as prices of products, customer preference, and traffic sources. You will also generate leads and engage in high-level SEO analysis.
You don’t need to have any knowledge of programming to use web scrapers. You can now use automated pre-built web scrapers for eCommerce to gather useful data in an incredibly use-friendly manner.
