Web Scraping with E-Commerce
In the last decade, e-commerce platform has experienced an exceptional growth, giving opportunities to retailers to sell their products around the country rather than just their marketing, due to which retailers’ sales have skyrocketed from $297 billions in 2014 to approximately $1.9 trillions in 2024, which is around 300% of increase.
The pandemic of 2020, as well as the adaptation of mobile technology ensure the success of this new way of buying and selling. But when there is an opportunity, there is also competition and competitors to fight with.
As the e-commerce platform achieves its popularity, from small businesses to large brands are all competing on the same platform, which gives some businesses advantages, while for some businesses, survival is a challenge. And that’s how slowly-slowly the whole market became digitalized, as customers traded the experiences of walking in the aisles of products for choosing from thousands of products on their device’s screen.
Fast-forward to the present, if we are talking about e-commerce, the seller doesn’t imagine thousands of sales per month, but the tiering routine of checking thousands of customers every day to keep tabs on their prices and then changing the pricing strategy to ensure it will work in the market, as the market has become more volatile than ever.
But as there are industry leaders who can afford the whole team for research, now small or middle businesses can’t, and due to this, they need to do the research on their own with other business work, taking a toll on them as well as affecting the quality of their services and data reliability.
This is the time when web scraping comes into the picture, and the same retailers who need to spend hours and hours in data collection can check the real-time data whenever they want with just a few tabs. Sounds like a dream, right?
Well, it could be your reality if you use the right tools and techniques, which will not only save your time but also add to their perfection and knowledge in their business.
So, in this blog, we will discuss about the web scraping for e-commerce data and why it is important and everything around it.
Table of Content
1. Role of Web Scraping for E-Commerce
2. Importance of Web Scraping for the E-Commerce Industry
3. Conclusion
Role of Web Scraping for E-Commerce
This era isn’t just about quality; it’s also about speed. There are so many companies that are lagging behind because they believe that if they have to get the best quality, they need to compromise on the quantity of the data. But a small amount of data, even when it is accurate, is like having half the information in the best handwriting, yeah, it would be useless if not harmful to start with.
Today, even if the business needs to survive, they need to compromise quality as well as quantity at a certain level, as huge data with zero accuracy is as harmful as small data with full accuracy. But then come the leaders of today’s business, who never compromise in anything, whether it is quantity or quality; these businesses are the ones that get the huge amount of data with 99.9 per cent accuracy.
But how can these business can have a win-win situation in this fast, competitive era? So that’s where web scraping comes into the picture. Today, when e-commerce isn’t just an addition to shopping, but a whole industry of shopping is based on it, having to collect the data manually is like having a bike in a motorcycle race. You will lose the race horribly.
With e-commerce platforms changing their policies and your competitors making it harder for you by launching new offers and discounts at the right time, it is important for your business to have a tool that can notify you about your competitors’ moves the moment they have played it.
Importance of Web Scraping for the E-Commerce Industry
Everything we try, we all want to know what it works for, what the advantages of doing it or not doing it are. So let’s understand the same in detail why it is important to use web scraping while working in e-commerce.
With e-commerce having a hyper-competitive market with everything available there, and that too from countless products, it is important to understand through which strategy and tools you can work towards your success and how it is important for your business. Let’s find out.
Dynamic Pricing
Over 80% of retailers all over the world today use automated price tracking or pricing tool stay always up to date in the market and never let your competitor play their moves in silence.
For those who don’t know what dynamic pricing is, dynamic pricing is the method of altering the pricing of your products by keeping in mind the factors which are impacting the market, like demand for the product, supply of the product, competitor’s time, upcoming season and many more factors are used before fixing or changing the price of the product.
Traditionally, this analysis is done through agents who wander around the market researching these factors, but as the physical market shrank and digitalized to behind the screen, this analysis became much easier for a few retailers and a bit tougher for others. But with the help of scraping, you can keep a closer eye on your every competitor, regardless of whether they are hundreds or millions, they will always be under your watch.
Market Intelligence
There was a time when quantity mattered more in the market. If you have enough products or the quantity of your products is unbeatable, then there is no doubt that you will succeed. For example, if your websites are posting a blog daily, then they have more chances to rank on the Google search than the websites that are posting one blog a week.
Similarly, in the initial days of e-commerce, if you have enough variety of products in large quantities, you can do a lot more sales than a person who is having few variety than yours. But today the market is flooded with similar products, fast fashion has hijacked the market, where even a second can prove your success or failure.
And amid this competition stood the businesses which aren’t small enough to not think about success and expansion, and neither big enough to have a team that can keep an eye on their competitor every second and give them the report for it. And web scraping is the only solution which can help the businesses who are facing these types of issues, as web scraping don’t just provide information, it scrapes data smartly, so that the data could help you to understand the assortment gaps in the market, and the patterns, chart analysis hints you about the next emerging trends before they took their hype which can help these businesses to get the first mover advantage.
Sentiment Analysis
The rise of social media ensures that everybody has the right to give their opinion, and everyone who wants to give an opinion has a platform to give it. No matter what you say against social media isn’t running lives today, we both know that’s not true. And as the opinions and thoughts increase and get widely spread, so does the platform where you are explaining why you think something, what is the reason behind it, your first experience about something, your recommendation about others.
And in this way, the platform today, you can share your words are countless, from most popular social media like Facebook, Instagram, to the community forum like Reddit and then there are discussion centres like Discord, and the list can go on and on and on.
It’s practically impossible for a human to count the number of websites from where you can get the information about something, and as a business it is good as well as bad, because your business has the resources to promote your products in so many different places where very different people can see it, but the darker side of the story is that you never knew who given bad review about your services and how many people got influences by that experience.
Due to this, it is important to keep records of every platform where your product could be considered as a topic, but as we have discussed, it is next to impossible. That’s where the process called sentiment analysis fits perfectly into the picture.
Sentiment analysis is the process of collecting articles, posts, reviews and feedback around the internet which says about your product or services and analyze it. This won’t be possible without web scraping, you can scrape all the forum and community discussion websites to understand where you are lacking and what else you can improve in your services to satisfy your customers, as these forums can provide the best form of feedback, raw and unfiltered which if you took as positive criticism then no one can stop you from reaching your milestone and be successful in your field.
MAP Compliance
Brand value is one of the most important things in the business; the position of your brand in the market is directly proportional to what customers are willing to pay. The higher the brand value is higher the price the customer is willing to pay for your products and prices.
But there are constant threats to your brand, as there are retailers who are marketing the unacceptable prices for their own benefits, it not only reduces your margin as well as the brand value of the product, at the same time it also increases the unhealthy competition for selling the products in lower prices which cuts the margin of the seller and reputation of the brand.
Web scraping helps businesses to track all the resellers who are dealing with their products to ensure they aren’t selling the products at prices which are less than the mutually decided MAP Policy. With web scraping, you can also get the real-time information about the MAP violators, so you don’t have to check your retailers’ prices every now and then.
Conclusion
As we discussed before the rise in e-commerce industry, today data is not just a material, its that secret sauce that can make your every dish special, either it is the strategy to achieve a buy box in from amazon or attract more customers towards your products or services, web scraping can provide you the data which can work as a ladder to help you track to the peak of the industry. As we have discussed in the above blog, web scraping for e-commerce is no longer a price-tracking tool, but it has turned into a more defined market intelligence helping the business to make the right decision with its ability to collect huge data with the light of speed and clean and structure it in real time to make it analysis-ready.
If an e-commerce retailer wants to scale, its the matter of “when” rather than “if” that they have to use web scraping for the insights that they can’t track manually.