The E-Commerce market is always changing, and the year 2022 is going to be no different. The fundamental shift in consumer buying patterns and behaviors, especially due to the pandemic – turning to their devices for their apparel, grocery, and home furnishing purchases – has resulted in heightened expectations regarding what consumers expect from their online experiences.
It is projected that E-Commerce sales will reach $5 trillion by the end of 2022 and $6 trillion by 2024 globally. To meet the ever-changing consumer preferences, E-Commerce businesses utilize cutting-edge technologies and automate marketing, production, fulfillment, and other parts of their businesses. According to an estimate by GlobalDMA, 49% of marketers use data to improve customer experience.
This makes web scraping essential for online E-Commerce platforms, which utilize publicly-available data to analyze competitors, monitor customers, and generate leads.
E-Commerce Web Scraping
Also called data scraping, web scraping is a process of retrieving and organizing data from websites for further processing and analysis to form an actionable, effective business plan. E-Commerce companies use this information in a number of ways, for example, to improve performance, stay informed about competitors, recreate marketing strategies, and so much more. They use high-end tools like scraper API to scrape competitors’ web pages and collect data from their business. One of top providers of such tools is Oxylabs – they offer various proxy and scraper API solutions. If you’re curious to learn more, click here to read about the proxy technologies and their own Scraper API services.
With web scrapers, you can better monitor what consumers think of your brand and products and tailor your marketing strategy to improve brand perception. Price intelligence is another common use that enables you to monitor competitor prices in your industry. It can help with dynamic pricing, revenue optimization, competitor monitoring, and more. You can gain better insight into your target audience and market, which will help you develop better strategies. It also makes it easy to obtain data in a structured way, even when it comes from partners or internally.
Primary Use Cases of Web Scraping
Web scraping helps businesses that want to take a step forward and make more informed and precise decisions. Here are some standard and common use cases of web scraping that normally need most of our attention.
Price Monitoring
Prices are the biggest influencers of buying decisions. When prices are set too high, around 94% of online buyers compare rates between different online stores before purchasing. Therefore, it is crucial for businesses to always monitor prices across different markets to ensure their competitors are not winning the market. You can do this by doing price monitoring. It allows you to see the best rates and adjust your prices accordingly to retain customers while generating revenue.
Competitor Monitoring
To maintain market leadership, you need to find out what your competitors deal with. You should monitor their social networks the way you monitor your own and collect and analyze the data to offer your target market a more attractive product at the best price. This is where web scraping services come into play. Web scraping enables companies to keep close tabs on their competitors. Competitor data gives you insight into their marketing techniques, product line, inventory availability, customer feedbacks, etc. You can use the tool to attract your competitors’ potential customers to your store with information obtained from their stores like price, sales, rating, shipping details, etc.
Lead Generation
Customers are vital for any E-Commerce business. No company makes enough money unless it has a steady supply of customers. While recurring clients are admissible, getting new leads is important as the company expands. Web data extraction can help businesses with this activity. Web scraping extracts information about how other firms generate leads from their sites. You can study the profiles of your competitors on social media and other platforms and pay attention to popular news portals and forums.
Web scraper API can retrieve customers’ contact information, such as contact numbers, email addresses, social media accounts, etc. E-Commerce marketers can use this data to reach out to potential customers and introduce them to their platform.
SEO Analysis
SEO is the procedure of making the website and its content suitable for search engines and users. Companies collect and analyze SEO-related data to optimize keyword density, make meta descriptions, headlines, and other metrics useful, and discover and utilize the best techniques used by competitors in their niche. For this, web scraping is a useful method to collect and organize such information. It helps you determine which SEO techniques your competitors are using to rank high in search results.
Feedback Tracking
Another great use case of web scraping is feedback tracking. Nowadays, more people can drop their opinion on whichever topic they are interested in. Now, it is expected for some of this feedback to be negative because of how popular and easily accessible these platforms are. With web scraping, companies can monitor and track feedback across multiple platforms to know when negative feedback has been dropped so that they can address it in the right way.
Final Words
In this increasingly crowded E-Commerce market, you need a web scraper to stay ahead of your competitors. Use web scraping for E-Commerce to collect important real-time data and generate leads. Though scraping may sound difficult, tools like scraper API make retrieving data quite user-friendly. With just a few steps, you’ll get detailed information about your competitors and become a stop member of your industry.
