1. E-commerce
  2. 21 Jan 2022
  3. 14 min read

7 Ways to Use Data Scraping to Boost Your eCommerce Store

7 Ways to Use Data Scraping to Boost Your eCommerce Store

What is eCommerce Data Scraping?

Ecommerce web scraping provides insight into pricing data, market dynamics, prevailing patterns, competitors’ practices, and the challenges they face. Using data scraping for e-commerce is a way to stand out in a competitive industry and expand your online store’s capabilities.

Web scraping enables companies to offload vast amounts of data for analysis and extraction to adjust their strategies, identify best practices in their industry, and predict future trends.

Most e-commerce data is publicly available because such platforms put out product and transaction details for customers, and it can be collected through web scrapers or RPA bots  to search and collect all visible e-commerce data relevant to your business interests. These bots then extract the right data and compile the information into systematic reports.

Thus web scraping has become a part for e-commerce businesses to operate, where the data collected can help, for example, determine consumer preferences, conduct market research or assess trends in buying behavior. 

Web scraping has been helping companies like Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, eBay, and many other online retailers for years.

Read more about Web Scraping: Web scraping: explaining where, why, and how

7 Ways to Use eCommerce Web Scraping to Increase Sales

For online stores, web scraping is an extremely powerful business tool. You can use data collection for marketing strategy to create a comprehensive business development and digital marketing plan to attract and retain potential customers.

So if you’re interested in automatic data collection, you need to know what details to collect and how to use it. Here are some ways you can use web scraping to mine data for the benefit of online stores.

Demand Analysis & Forecasting

Web scraping makes it possible to effectively and accurately forecast demand. Because automated data collection allows analysis of user attitudes, desires, and preferences, detailed predictive analysis can also be performed. 

Discovering the most sought-after products can be identified with a targeted web scraping strategy: bestsellers, new categories, customer comments and other publicly available information from users provides the insight needed to measure market movement. 

Strategies that track a set of targeted websites with specific keywords in a particular location can provide insight into demand and product creation for sale elsewhere, perhaps on opposite sides of the world.

For a deeper understanding of demand and product popularity, we collect data from Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner, which show how interested users are in certain products. 

Now we will present some examples of how we can compare data from Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner. 

Sleep Gummies

Sleep gummies have begun to gain popularity as a way to combat anxiety, depression, pain and to improve sleep, and users have gradually started to show interest toward this product. In turn, online retailers noticed the growing curiosity and began actively selling sleep candy starting in March 2019.

Automatic Soap Dispenser

Increased demand for liquid soaps and hand sanitizers in a pandemic environment has led to increased use of automatic dispensers. Comparing data from stores, Google Trends and Keyword Planner, as in the case of medical masks, a significant increase in product demand is noticeable.

Matcha

The demand for tea has increased considerably recently, especially organic tea, which is very healthy. Matcha is a finely ground green leaf powder that is a healthier alternative to regular green tea. The trend predicts that demand will continue to grow.

Lip Mask

The lip mask trend originated in Asia, especially Korea, and became known in the U.S. thanks to influencers like Kim Kardashian. Google Trends shows the rise in popularity and the potential of how much profit you can make by selling this product in your store. 

Understand Product & Market Trends

Trend analysis reveals patterns in business data that signal declines or increases in strategic performance. Previously, trends were analyzed based on a company’s data, such as sales history or stock prices. Now, it’s possible to detect changes in the marketplace in real-time and improve decision-making with web scraping. 

Data scraping is one effective way to identify market behavior and trends in e-commerce. Automated data collection can help you see which products in your niche are performing best, what additions you can make to improve the effectiveness and accuracy of your research methods, and develop a successful product strategy. A time-based strategy can be used to extract information about trends that are emerging with others that are losing popularity. Which is especially useful for cross-border companies operating around the world.

We develop solutions that scrape online stores data on various platforms and allow us to find products that are rapidly gaining popularity and are in great demand. We scrape  all available data on stores and their assortment: names, descriptions, prices, product publication dates, whether products are popular, and more from platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, Wix, Magento and other ecommerce sites and marketplaces containing over 7 million active stores. 

Here are a few examples of how with the growing popularity of products online stores are actively adding products to their catalogs.

Sleep Gummies

As the popularity of sleep gummies has grown, so has the number of stores that have added the product to their store for sale.

Automatic Soap Dispenser

In the chart below, you can see an increase in the number of online stores selling automatic soap dispensers.

Matcha

Here you can see how stores have gradually begun to add matcha to their assortment. 

Lip Mask

This chart shows the number of stores that have added lip masks to their assortment.

Thanks to these combined approaches to data analysis, you can not only track the popularity of seasonal products, but also identify growing trends in the market, make predictions, and find those products for which demand is actively increasing.

Find Out Your Competitors’ Best Practices

When developing an e-commerce strategy, you need to have a clear picture of who your competitors are and how they do business. WP Forms estimates that there are about 12-124 million e-commerce sites in the world.

Here, web scraping will allow you to analyze the necessary characteristics of your competitors in your business to understand what areas you should focus on.

You can find out about the latest developments of your competitors by parsing web pages:

  • Obtain product information from competitors’ websites to react in time to a new product launch and create a new market strategy.
  • Analyze how competitors promote their products and services and understand their budgets.
  • Keep track of competitors’ prices and their changes to set your pricing policy.
  • Find out what delivery services competitors offer. 
  • Research how many products customers purchase from your competitors’ stores due to certain offers. 
  • Find out what promotions and discounts competitors are offering to customers.

The e-commerce business can also analyze site performance in real-time through API integration from these sites. Using data scraping will provide information about what’s working for your competitors and what might also work for you.

Stay on Top of Price Monitoring

Stay on Top of Price Monitoring

Regular real-time data collection of product prices into software for dynamic pricing has become a core principle of e-commerce companies. Automated price tracking and analysis reduce the time it takes to compare competitors’ prices and optimize their own pricing policies. 

Also, product cost becomes the deciding factor in purchasing, so accurate pricing is especially important because customers compare prices in different stores and choose the lowest ones. This is a common online shopping strategy, so you need to know what other shoppers are paying and what the average prices are in your niche. 

Remember, customers are willing to pay more for a higher value product. It’s essential to improve your service where your competitors fall short. How to do it:

  • Gather information about your customers and find out how you can meet their needs by adjusting your market strategies.
  • Develop a dynamic pricing strategy. 
  • Your prices must keep up with changes to maximize profits. Web scraping allows on-time monitoring of changes in market prices and promotions.

Smartest Way to Generate More Leads

Scrapers can help your business generate more leads. You can collect data from the social media accounts and websites of leading competitors to discover the problems they face in selling their products to customers. And then use that information to prevent similar difficulties from occurring in the future. That way you can attract and retain more customers. 

You can also extract leads’ contact information online from millions of websites in a short period. When you search, you can set your target persona: education, company, job title, etc., and collect addresses, phone numbers, social media profiles, zip codes, and more.

Contact lists are a very valuable asset. With names on hand, you can attract customers by sending out mass campaigns and newsletters.

Improve Customer Sentiment Analysis

Improve Customer Sentiment Analysis

For a truly actionable e-commerce marketing strategy, you need to make sure you understand how your customers feel about your business and competitors’ products and brands to expand your influence and increase sales.

Web scraping allows companies to identify the desires and sentiments of potential customers, as collecting data from reviews, feedback comments, and customer impressions will create identities to:

  • optimize existing products;
  • launch of new products;
  • effectively target relevant content to the audience;
  • Improvement of marketing strategy.

Customer feedback from multiple comments and social media platforms will help launch new products based on customer preferences, experiences, and opinions, which will increase the appeal of your business and improve the user experience.

Find the Best Elements to Improve Product Ranking 

SEO is part of successful e-commerce marketing. Web scraping competitors’ sites will provide valuable data for analysis, including meta descriptions, headlines, keyword density, and the type of content they put on their sites. 

This way, you can learn information about your competitors’ top-ranked products so you can use similar techniques for your store to rank higher on Google, increase sales and attract more positive reviews.

Read more about Web Scraping: Web scraping challenges and how to deal with them

e-commerce data scraping

Conclusion

New entrants and experienced e-commerce players will find that a company is more competitive with the use of web scraping in its strategy. 

By doing web scraping for e-commerce businesses, you can only get real-time, relevant data such as product and service prices and customer preferences, generate leads, and perform high-level SEO analysis to improve your products or create new stores.

By following the above approaches, you can use data scraping to take your e-commerce store to the next level of growth.

We can help with data or automation needsTechvice helps companies adapt and execute best-in-class programs to drive customer insights and revenue opportunities. Write to us to get fresh data daily.

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