Scraping eCommerce Websites: 7 Ways To Beat The Competition

People are spending more of their budgets online than ever before. According to Statista, the number of digital buyers in 2021 grew to 2.14 billion people worldwide. And everyone knows that good, reliable data is the key to growing a business, which isn't just a way to analyze traffic and monitor statistics, it's a useful way to respond to growth potential when the opportunity arises. Structured data makes businesses more successful.

There has been a shift in data consumption, and now we can get all the important insights we need anywhere, anytime. Information gathered by a scraper can be used for many different purposes, but it only makes sense when you have a clear plan and then organizations can act accordingly. Such pieces of information can take an eCommerce enterprise to great heights. That's how web scraping is very important for business. And we'll talk more specifically about all the benefits of getting this kind of information below.

Read more about Web Scraping: What is Web Scraping and What is it Used For?

What is Web Scraping in eCommerce?

Web scraping in eCommerce is a fundamental tool that helps retailers collect data on what people are searching for online, analyze trends, and uncover opportunities for online promotions. This way, you can focus on using marketing strategies that align with what your customers actually want.

Because there are so many eCommerce stores, it would take an eternity to manually extract each competitor's price data. That's why web scraping is popular among eCommerce companies. Especially when it comes to creating extensive data analytics. For example, eCommerce web scrapers help determine consumer preferences and tastes or find out how their competitors price their products. Since its inception, scraping has helped eCommerce businesses such as eBay, Amazon, Walmart, Aliexpress, Google, and many others.

Web scraping will help you whether you own an eCommerce site, marketing firm, or brand community. A web scraping tool will allow you to get leads, stand out from your competitors, improve pricing, increase revenue and even gain trusted allies.

Is it Legal to Scrape Data from an e-Commerce Website?

Website scraping is not and has never been illegal. But if the data you're trying to collect is private, protected by laws, copyright, and so on, then it's illegal to collect and use it. If it is, the eCommerce authority you're trying to scrape data from can take legal action against you. If you try to hack into eCommerce sites, that would also be against the law.

Sometimes it depends on the local laws of the respective countries that have rules that need to be followed when you are web scraping eCommerce sites. Therefore, it is worthwhile to read the terms and conditions of the eCommerce site regarding web scraping before collecting the data. Most of them allow scraping, but not for commercial resale purposes.

Ways Data Scraping Can Give An Edge in eCommerce

Customer Preferences & Needs Research

Of course, every business wants to know the wants and needs of its target audience to satisfy them. You can properly plan your operations and deliver the right products and services at reasonable prices by determining what customers want. Here, of course, data scraping can help. You can use it to analyze sentiment, find out what your customers are talking about online, or learn about market trends.

For example, on social media, thousands of people share their experiences and opinions about various products and services. You can assess customer loyalty toward a particular brand or product by analyzing posts and comments. Best of all, all this information is easily accessible, and you can get it to improve your eCommerce strategy.

Plus, you can determine customers' opinions specifically about your brand to better understand what they feel about you and how to improve those impressions.

Competitor Monitoring

To maintain market leadership, you need to know what your competitors are dealing with. To do this, you should monitor their sites and social networks as closely and as often as you monitor your own.

And this is where web scraping services will be your faithful helper. Competitor data will give you insight into their marketing strategies, inventory availability, customer reviews, product line, etc. Also, collecting data from competitors allows you to determine what products their customers like or dislike and how they would like to improve them.

After collecting and analyzing the data from competitors' websites, you can offer your target market a more attractive product at the best price. Best of all, not everyone uses this information. And if you do, you're already ahead of the curve.

Improve Marketing Strategies

The online marketplace is a huge repository of supply and demand data. Businesses use market data to analyze and identify market trends so they can tailor marketing strategies according to the preferences of their target audience.

Marketing managers constantly use data to make important decisions so that they can subsequently attract consumers' attention to the brand and thereby improve conversion rates. Improving product design, enhancing customer service, and running promotional campaigns - data scraping will allow you to benefit from the data you collect.

Listings Optimisation By Product Data Extraction

When it comes to product listings, knowing how to properly optimize a page can greatly increase conversion rates. Typically, online shoppers rely on the product information on the store's website before making a purchase. And they will leave the site if it doesn't have good content.

Earlier, employees were hired to manually copy up-to-date product information from manufacturers' websites or popular eCommerce platforms like Amazon and Walmart every day.

So to speed up this process, online retailers scrape data from e-Commerce sites to extract images, product names, color and size options, descriptions, product features, and reviews to fill in or update product description pages. Pages with good product descriptions will inform customers about the features and benefits of the product you are selling. In addition to names and descriptions, other product details such as delivery times, product availability, recommended products, and so on can also be extracted.

This way, stores can increase conversions, rank better on search engine results pages, and boost organic search traffic to your site.

SEO Analysis

Online shoppers' path when looking for a product begins with an engine search. From your competitors' position in the SERPs to the keywords they use, all of this data is online that you can use to boost your search engine rankings. This is where web scraping is a valuable method you can use to collect and organize all of this information. If a competitor's site is ranking high on Google, they may have done sophisticated keyword research and are producing content using a variety of SEO techniques. You, in turn, can determine what keywords they use to rank high in search results.

Analyzing SEO-related data can help you optimize keyword density in product descriptions, get useful data on meta descriptions, headlines, and other content-related metrics, and discover and leverage the best strategies used by competitors in your niche.

Lead Generation

Attracting new customers is a major business goal, and data scraping can help with that. For example, studying the profiles of your most successful competitors on social media and other places where they interact with customers will reveal what problems and issues they encounter when using a product and what they talk about in general. Address these problems in your own products, and you'll have a better chance of getting new customers.

In addition to analyzing your competitors' sites, pay attention to popular news portals in your industry to see who is reading, commenting, sharing their experiences, and voicing their opinions to get data on popular readers who might be your customers.

Price Scraping for Comparison

Any customer will first compare prices on several platforms before buying. And with so many online stores, products and services are no longer unique. That's why each store does its own thorough research and tries to price its offerings correctly to maximize conversions.

Every day, a pricing specialist needs countless hours to research prices from different stores and compare them to make the best offer for their customers. And a wrong decision could cost a business hundreds or thousands of dollars.

The price scraping tool automatically gathers prices from different sites & provides recommendations based on your choices.

In The Economics of Web Scraping report, using price scraping tools is the most popular technique among businesses. The reason is simple - a crowded and competitive eCommerce marketplace.

Automated price monitoring minimizes the time it takes to compare other stores' rates, which leads to setting your own prices and adjusting them quickly if necessary. Plus, the online store builds an effective dynamic pricing strategy based on analyzed data.

Is Up-to-Date Data Important for eCommerce?

A deep understanding of your business and customers comes from analyzing long-term trends-aggregating data over months or even years. Such data is what determines the creation of a new strategy and the path of business development.

But metrics aren't just for long-term and long-range planning. They are also a tool in day-to-day operations. When situations arise that require immediate action, real-time measurements are needed to determine the situation. Real-time collection and analytics have the potential to transform eCommerce businesses by offering meaningful information for rapid response.

For instance, such data can be used to increase the conversion rate. By identifying the most appropriate sales for your online store, you can improve marketing strategies and increase conversion rates. Real-time data can be used to enhance sales forecasting and generate new leads.

It's not just the competitors that can be scraped for data. It is a good way to keep track of your own business and its performance. These are some of the main areas in the eCommerce business where real-time information is valuable:

• Site conversion rate. Tracking your conversion rate will tell you very quickly if something is preventing customers from making a purchase. If your site allows you to take key actions other than making a purchase, you'll also track the conversion rate of those actions. For example, real-time email subscriptions or account signup rates.
• Finding website performance problems. If something goes wrong on your site, you can always know about it. Real-time data is a defense against site downtime, rapid outages, and crash sessions.
• Data analysis for dynamic pricing. The online customer considers the price when buying any product and compares it across multiple platforms. Here the online store needs to understand these dynamics and put a price that would attract a large number of customers. Therefore, with real-time data available, prices can be optimized based on internal and external factors such as conversion rates, competitor prices, demand, and traffic. Regular price updates can make such a strategy effective for online stores.
• Quickly understand product insights. With real-time data, it's easier to understand how well a new or existing product is being received by consumers. Product trends can take days or hours to measure. Data collection and analytics can then uncover unidentified gaps in product selection to offer customers only the best.
• Improving inventory management. Inventory management can be improved to increase overall business efficiencies, such as scheduling the recycling of raw materials, and eliminating the possibility of excess goods or shortages. Data scraping is in high demand to take the necessary steps to increase product exposure and reach potential customers who may be interested in purchasing them.
• Improve the customer experience, to maintain engagement. Customer data is used to better serve customers. With real-time scraping, information can be processed and aggregated to generate data that can be used for delivery or to understand why customers don't like a particular service and take the necessary steps to improve performance to satisfy customers.

Closing Thoughts

Up-to-date information and changes in trends and customer preferences help companies take their eCommerce business to the next level. The real-time analysis could be combined with key performance indicators to better understand the data. This would reveal weaknesses in the business before things get out of hand.

When it comes to eCommerce, there's no denying the impact of technology. Correct use of extracted data from target websites is a talent that not everyone is destined to master. And we can help you. Contact us and get all the up-to-date information you need.