Entrepreneurs starting in the eCommerce space face fierce competition. They have a ton of load from finding the right product to competitor analysis to getting leads and eventually sales. To avoid all of the hassles of the old-school hit-and-miss model, you will use a combination of old-school as well as a modern, data-oriented approach to make meaningful decisions.
If you know what your competitors and customers are doing, you can remain one step ahead of the market. Web scraping eCommerce websites can make a huge difference for your business. You can use eCommerce product data scraping to analyze competitors, generate leads, understand market trends, target advertisements, manage brand reputation, and more.
What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping s a research technique wherein information is gathered by extracting data from different websites. The unstructured data of a website is then converted into structured data. This data can then be stored, analyzed, and used to identify patterns and draw statistics.
You can conduct eCommerce web Scraping manually or use eCommerce data scraping services to automate the process.
Benefits of Web Scraping Tools
The eCommerce data scraping is used to gain information about competitors, customers, market trends, online reviews, and customer sentiments.
You can browse websites manually for eCommerce web scraping. But it will take you hours to go through a single website. Even then, you will only get to extract limited information. Plus, manual web scraping is exhaustive and opens up possibilities for human error.
On the other hand, automated eCommerce product data scraping can extract data from several websites within minutes. You will also get access to hidden information that is inaccessible with manual browsing. At the end of the process, automated scraping will present the data in a convenient format to analyze.
You can save time and get accurate data using eCommerce data scraping services like Crawlbase. Crawlbase is a data scraping tool that crawls millions of websites at once and help you extract data easily.
9 Uses of Web Scraping for eCommerce
eCommerce businesses primarily use web scraping for market research and analysis. But you can do much more with it. Below are a few ways web scraping can help you grow your eCommerce business.
Price Monitoring
All eCommerce platforms can benefit by monitoring their competitors for product prices. It might take hours to analyze a single eCommerce website if done manually. Imagine how tiresome it would be to monitor multiple competitors with hundreds of products and prices. But efficient eCommerce data scraping services will scrape several competitor websites in a matter of minutes.
Product price is the most important purchase decision factor. eCommerce customers browse multiple websites before making a purchase.
If you know how your competitors are pricing their products, you can customize the prices on your eCommerce website to gain an advantage over them. Monitoring competitor prices over a few weeks will also give you a sense of their pricing patterns. If you know when a competitor is likely to pull down their prices, you can beat them to the game by changing your prices before they do. This can be extremely useful for running a wholesale B2B marketplace or even a small online store for everyday items.
Super Targeted Ads
Web scraping eCommerce websites can help you directly target your competitors’ customers. Scraping your competitor’s eCommerce website will give you crucial lead generation data such as email sign-ups, membership emails, newsletters, social media engagement, and so on. Crawlbase can help you scrape small eCommerce websites and industry giants like Amazon or eBay. You can also unleash the web scraper onto a competitor’s social media and draw data from their followers, posts, comments, and engagements.
You can then direct your advertising towards these individuals and entice them with better offers, lower prices, free shipping, or discounts. Moreover, by using platforms like Proxy Coupons, you can list your coupons and discounts to attract these potential customers. Leveraging such strategies can significantly boost your competitive edge and increase your market share.
Another way of generating quality leads is by scraping internet directories. Web scraping internet directories will provide insightful data about potential customers based on several demographics. You can pick the demographics most likely to purchase your product and direct your advertisements towards them.
This way, you can easily pick out highly relevant customers to target for marketing your products.
Influencer Research
If you are worried about finding relevant influencers, you can use web scraping to analyze social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter and source relevant influencers. You will only need to set the parameters for the influencers and define criteria for relevance.
A web scraper can browse large data from social media sites and present it in an organized manner. You can then analyze the data to find influencers who are most revered by your target audience.
These influencers already have a large following and a significant sway on customers’ purchase decisions. 80% of consumers made purchases recommended by an influencer. A web scraper can help you find relevant influence without hassle. You can also use a web scraper to check the authenticity of an influencer’s followers and their engagement statistics. You can even target these individuals directly through ads without involving any influencers in your campaign.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is an integral part of SEO. Targeting the right keywords can help you gain organic traffic from relevant audiences. But, keyword research for eCommerce can be an exhaustive process.
You can use a web scraper for SEO - to analyze your competitors’ websites and check the keywords they are ranking for. You can do this for individual product pages or entire websites. This method gives you a comprehensive list of keywords to target.
You can also use web scraping to get keyword data from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Web scraping search engines will give you an overview of audience searches and popular search results. You can use this information to draft your content strategy for SEO.
Content Analysis
Once you have your keywords, you need to create high-quality content supported with high-intent keywords to rank on search engines. This is crucial to get organic traffic with relevant search intent. But, before you create your content, web scrapers can help you understand what kind of content is performing well.
You can analyze crucial information like product descriptions, product images, media formats, reviews, ratings, and more. You can compare pieces of information provided elsewhere with the ones on your website and upgrade them to get better results. You can use this method to find additional images and videos for products on your website as well.
Aside from competitor websites, you can also use web scraping on search results to gain more information. Data acquired from search engines will also help you find popular websites that rank for your targeted keywords. These are ideal targets for guest posting opportunities to gain backlinks for your eCommerce website.
Competitor Analysis
Each eCommerce company follows a different strategy to convert visitors into customers. You can use eCommerce data scraping services to extract crucial information from other eCommerce websites and analyze the data to understand their strategies.
One of the most crucial aspects to analyze is the offers and services competitors are offering after the purchase. If you have accurate information, you can outshine them by offering better deals or services. If your competitors are offering delivery in 2 days, you can offer same-day delivery using a micro fulfillment solution.
eCommerce product data scraping will give you information on competitors landing pages, marketing strategies, product line-up, key traffic sources, and audience engagement. This information will help you analyze their strengths and weaknesses so that you can improve your website accordingly.
Market Sentiment Analysis
Market sentiment analysis is understanding what customers or potential customers are saying. You can use market sentiment data to create better ads, improve content relevance, optimize marketing strategy, design products, offer services, and more.
You can use a web scraping tool to analyze social media platforms to collect industry-relevant posts, comments, engagements, and so on. You can target followers of your competitors, influencers, and social media groups to extract the most relevant data.
These indicators will help you analyze the likes, dislikes, compliments, and complaints of customers regarding products, services, and brands. You can stay abreast with changing market trends and popular demands.
Reputation Management
It can take several days to search multiple websites, blogs, and social media for the mention of your brand name. A web scraping tool will get this information for you rather quickly.
Reliable eCommerce data scraping services can monitor social media sites, community forums, and review sites to understand what customers are saying about your brand. This knowledge can help you address crucial issues with your products, prices, offers, and services.
Use eCommerce data scraping to compare your reputation against other eCommerce brands. You can see how customers perceive your brand and how it fares against competitors. This information will help you identify gaps in brand awareness and draft a robust perception management strategy to outshine your competition.
Advance Marketing Automation
You can use eCommerce data scraping to automate your marketing, lead generation, and customer acquisition process. 80% of the marketers observed a higher volume of leads and about 77 % of them saw increased conversions when using marketing automation tools, saving about 30% of their time. You can use data from eCommerce web scraping from your competitors’ websites and combine that with an automation system to create a marketing system.
This system can automatically fluctuate prices, target potential customers, target visitors of competitor websites, advertise to an industry influencer’s followers, re-target visitors to your website, find email addresses for marketing, modify advertisements based on identified trends, and so on.
Applying marketing automation requires careful planning and graceful execution. But it requires data to build the automation upon. This is where eCommerce data scraping services are crucial.
Scrape Information To Make Informed Decision
Each piece of information is an insight into the competitor’s strategy and customer’s mind. This information can be used to optimize your website, products, SEO, content, and marketing strategies. Proxy scraper like Crawlbase lets you get data at scale, so you don’t have to manage colossal infrastructure. Additionally, you don’t need to have resources in an instant, which saves a lot of time. Building a web scraper from scratch is a very challenging task specially for scraping the brands like Amazon, Nike, etc.
Depending on how efficiently and creatively you can utilize the data, web scraping can be a game-changing tool for overall eCommerce business development. Web scraping will facilitate you with data. But to truly enjoy the benefits of data scraping for eCommerce, you must analyze the data and make decisions based on it. This information gives you a competitive edge in a constantly evolving eCommerce landscape.
