The retail market is having a drastic shift recently. People these days traded the struggles of shopping outside for buying from countless options from the comfort of their home. And why not, it comfortable, affordable and customers can choose from millions of options.
But from this shift there is also an extensive requirement for data to survive in this fast-growing market.
Today everyone is stepping on E-Commerce platform, from a fashion designer who have unique passion for outfits to a grocery store owner who wants to expand their business.
Today everything is available online, from something as cheap as toothpaste to as expensive as diamond jewelry, everything is reachable on fingertips.
Only in US there are more than 14 million of E-commerce website, and numbers are growing drastically every day.
And the latest statistics assuming, this market is going to expand around 20% in 2025.
With millions of similar products, with most competitive pricing and thousands of similar SKU, it somehow becomes overwhelming for the new businesses, who wants to step into the E-commerce market.
So how to survive in this fast-growing competition?
The only weapon which can save a business from this cut throat competition is knowledge.
Knowledge about products and pricing.
Knowledge about what your competitors are trying.
Knowledge about what customers are demanding these days.
And here E-commerce web scraping comes to picture.
E-Commerce web scraping mostly used to extract competitors’ data and meta data of products like product details, description, price, review, etc.
E- Commerce Web Scraping: -
E-Commerce web scaping is the process of extracting data from e-commerce websites. These data can be extracted manually or through web scraping tool. There are two types of web scraping techniques
Manual Scraping: -
In this, someone manually copy and paste data from the websites to another source of data like spreadsheet or database.
Well, manual scraping is free of cost and anybody can do it, but it is very time consuming and is prone to human errors. Scraping a small website can take hours to days, in manual scraping.
Automated web scraping: -
Automated web scraper uses a web scraping tool to crawl the web scraper for extracting data from e-commerce website, automatically. This process can extract large amount of data at with less times which is accurate and have no human errors.
You can use these services by vendor in the form of API, Paid Scraping tool or Scraping services providers whose in-house team scraps and cross checks data for you.
Benefits Of E-Commerce Web Scraping
Price Comparisons: -
Through E-Commerce web scraping, you can have data which will help you to compare prices with similar products you are dealing with. This can help you to make pricing strategy. It can also help you to decide what price you can keep of your products.
Competitive Advantage: -
By having data of your competitive website, it helps you to understand how you competitors is playing in the market, even you look closely you can understand the strategy of your competitors.
Understanding Market Demand: -
By having data of the market, you can analyse the market and understand what customers are demanding and how can you deal with it. Even you can strategize your services and production services to make most profit during market shift.
Targeted Advertisement: -
Having data of number of customers who are interested in your product and what type of audience engages in your content, saves you from vast advertisement expenditure. On the other hand, you can choose to advertise targeted audience to maximize your profit in less cost.
Analysing Customers Review: -
With the help of web scraping, you can collect the reviews of customers from your competitors’ websites, which can help you to understand what products your customers are choosing and what are their preferences and expectation regarding the product.
Types Of E-Commerce Web Scrapers: -
There are number of web scraping tools these days which can help you to scrap a website without any problems. Some of the common type of web scrapers are as follows.
E-Commerce Web Scraping Tools: -
Custom Script: -
In this, you can customize your web scraper by writing a code in python, JavaScript or transcript. It is a bit complex process and needs someone who have at least minimal knowledge of programming in one of the three steps.
Other than that, they should also have some experience about trouble shooting, so they can make sure that their web scraper is working properly.
No - Code Scraper: -
As the name suggest, no - code scraper is the type of tool which does not require any kind of prior coding or programming experience. It is a user-friendly tool which is used to scrape the website without any coding.
The interface of no-code scraping tools are mostly very simple, where you need to just copy and paste the URL of the website you want to scrape and then you can get all the data required from the website.
Mostly anybody can use no-code scraper as it doesn't need any specified knowledge or training. But it is most probably a paid tool.
Web Scraping API: -
Many vendors and big websites provide their API on monthly or yearly subscription. Many big websites knows that they will be scraped, so they launched web- scraping API of their websites, where the user can take the subscription and use the API.
Websites for example like Flipkart has launched their API for web scraping.
How To Web Scrape a Website: -
Want to try web scraping for your business through e-commerce web scraping but don't know where to start?
This is a step-by-step guide to scrape of how to scrap any website.
Step 1: Identify Target Audience
Before extracting data, you must identify which type of people can be your clients. For this you can classify the audience into: -
* Industry
* Job roles (e.g., CEOs, Marketing Managers, IT Professionals)
* Location
* Contact details (emails, phone numbers, LinkedIn profiles)
After classifying the audience into these categories, you can take the group falls common in all the parameters.
Step 2: Select Websites to Scrape
After identifying the targeted audience, the business needs to select websites which can be most useful for them.
For example, if the business fall under the niche of Job Consultancy or Placement Providing Agency, then their selected websites should be well known Job Portals.
While if your business is about clothes or electronics product, then E-commerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart can help.
Step 3: Develop the Web Scraper
You can develop web scraper from a lot of languages like .NET, Python, JavaScript or Transcript.
You can use PyCharm for Python or VSCode for JavaScript and .NET.
Below here is a basic web scraper by .NET which can give an example of how to develop a Web Scraper.
Step 4: Store and Organize Data
Once data is gathered, next step is to store it and then organize it.
- Data can be saved in multiple structures like CSV, Excel Database, etc, as per the requirement and further uses of the business.
- Organizing data is very important step as it lets the user to read and understand the data. User can use **Google Sheets** or **CRM systems** like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Zoho to organize data effectively.
Step 5: Clean and Validate Data
After organizing, the data needed to be cleaned and validated to increase its efficiency during analysis. Some of the key steps one can follow to remove noisy records from the database are: -
- Remove duplicates: -
One must remove duplicate records for accuracy and reduce to the size of data which was increased because of repetitive data.
- Validate emails using `email-validator` library: -
This can help checking the authenticity of the data as email is considered one of the most important attributes in the data. Email can also be used on universal basis which can help you to create demographic classification of your customers.
- Filter irrelevant contacts: -
Getting rid of the irrelevant records saves a lot of time as well as efforts from your sides as you can then focus your potential customer to expand your business.
Step 6: Use Extracted Leads for Marketing
After cleaning and studying data, the businesses can reach out to the potential leads to convert them as clients or make meaningful connections.
Cold Email Outreach–
Cold Email is a good way inform potential clients about your business's existence. But lets be honest, there are very rear chances of converting them into leads. It's like pinching the right person at right time with right product. But if user really wants to do it, they can use tools like Mailchimp, Snov.io, or Hunter.io.
Personalized LinkedIn Outreach :-
The business can reach out to the potential leads or people near them to catch some of their attention which can make convert them in leads. As LinkedIn is considered as one of the most important place for business.
Targeted Ad Campaigns
User can take a alot of advantages of collected emails and demographics analysis to understand from where they can get most outcome from offline and online advertisements.
Ethical Concerns in Web Scraping: -
While scraping website for data you should keep in mind some of the ethical boundaries a scraper should follow to keep internet safe for the consumer.
Do not scrape robots.txt File: -
There can be some part of website which contains sensitive information about the companies or their user. The type of data, company don't really want to share and wants to keep it to themself. These areas are also known as outlined area which are outlined by the owner of the website.
The scraper should respect their areas and should not scrape data from it, its is the ethical responsibility of the scraper to accept these outlined areas as their limits of scraping. As it is best for scraper as well as website owner's interest.
GDPR & CCPA Compliance: -
The scraper should not scrap personally identifiable information without the consent of user, to protect user's privacy as well as it is unethical and most probably illegal.
Personal information, scraper should avoid are, name, email, address, financial information, etc.
Avoid Data Theft: -
There are mainly private and public websites. The user should only scrap data from publicly available websites which expects and accepts automated scraping activities. If a scraper caught scraping or trying to scrap from a private website, legal actions can be taken against them. So, make sure that the website you wanted to scrape is publicly available.
Follow Terms and Condition of the Website: -
Every website contains their personal Terms and Conditions on how to use the websites and what are the limitation of using the websites.
In other words what are the features accessible from the website and what are not. As a scraper you should make sure to read Terms and Conditions of website you wanted to scrap and also avoid scraping website who restricts web scraping.
Best Practices of Web Scraping
While writing a code, coder should always keep in mind best practices to ensure code's efficiency and effectiveness. While it also helps the coder to make user light weight.
Some of the important practices are: -
Use API Endpoints whenever possible: -
API Endpoints is the entry point URL that is used to inform about the functionality and resources provided by the respected API. It works as an interface filter where request and information are received from or to client and forwarded to that's hosting API server.
Set Rate Limits: -
Setting rate limits on the request can be helpful to avoid the IP address to be
blocked as the website will not find the number of requests as a threat.
Use AI & Machine Learning: -
Use of AI and Machine Learning can be helpful for gathering reliable and efficient data and lead generations.
Regularly Update Data: -
Updating data on regularly ensure the latest data is collect and it helps the business to be up-to-date about the market conditions.
Conclusion: -
By now, you would have understood that web scraping is a must to grow your E-Commerce business. But even if you are taking a second thought about web-scraping for E-Commerce services, then you should know that every E-Commerce giant these days uses web scraping to keep an eye on their competitors and stay up-to-date about market condition.
Hence we can say that, web scraping is a powerful tool to gather and analyze data, if used correctly and in healthy manner, to not break any rule.
