If you are E-commerce site owner then you know how difficult is generating more revenue for your store these days because of higher competition. So what should you do? Fortunately, there is a good solution called web scraping. Scraping retail websites will be a great solution for you. You can collect data about your competitors and use the metrics which you need. But where is it better to start? You should consider the largest marketplaces first for product scraping and price scraping to get needed data about your competitors.
Web Data Scraping from The largest marketplaces
As you know Those marketplaces offer products for every niche and have hundreds of millions of customers. You may think about the reasons. The main reason is the price. Here are some shocking stats will help you to consider price scraping services:
- 65% of online shoppers chose marketplaces over other retailers because of better prices (source)
- 44% of web shoppers go directly to Amazon for product searches (source)
- There are 300 million users on Amazon (source)
As you see marketplaces should be considered first for retail scraping. People choose the marketplaces as far as they find cheaper products there. The main mistake of the smaller E-commerce site owners is that they set prices for their products without doing market research. So which metrics are the most important for retail scraping?
It depends on your business model. There are several E-commerce business models so you should choose your E-commerce category first:
Let’s look at each model and choose the right data scraping service for each of them:
1. Small E-commerce site owners who sell their own handmade products and already know what kind of product they are selling.
In this case, you have already known what to sell in your store. However, you should consider on product scraping as well as scraping prices.
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Product scraping
It will help you to find out more information about your competitor’s products. You can find and check:
- How did they write their product’s descriptions which help to generate lots of sales? By checking description you can improve your product’s description and add keywords which they used.
- Which materials did they use for making their products?
- which colors are available?
- You can also get information about the reviews. All this collected data you can use for improving your E-commerce store. If there are different colors available for that product then you can also start making your products with that colors as well. Use every single line of data that can help you stand out from the crowd. It may sound that Web scraping looks like a magic tool.
You can get even more benefit from web scraping services by scraping prices of your competitor’s products. Let’s look:
what can you get from it to improve your store even more?
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Price Scraping
As it was mentioned in the above the most web shoppers choose marketplaces since they find cheaper products. That is why you should use Price scraping services. It will be done by the same way like product scraping. You will collect data about the best-selling products that your competitors sell and will check the prices that they set. Setting the right price on your products is very important. Many E-commerce site owners fail since they set prices too high. In some cases, you may also collect data about shipping prices. In addition, it can be better to set free shipping option for some products.
2. Amazon FBA Users who sell at Amazon.
If you are Amazon FBA user and selling products on Amazon which you get from different manufacturers then, in this case, it’s recommended to use Product scraping and price scraping mainly on Amazon. The most popular challenges that Amazon FBA users face is finding the right product to sell and setting the right price on it. By scraping prices and products you should pay attention to the same metrics which you found in the above. The strategy looks like the same. However, there is one more point that you should pay attention to. If you are getting your products from manufacturer’s directory or marketplaces like Alibaba then it’s also a great idea to use product scraping as well as price scraping on those directories and marketplaces. You will find trending products quite fast, check their reviews and choose the better options with cheaper prices. Web data scraping services will save your money. As you know how risky and how expensive can be Amazon’s FBA business model? So do your research before making bulk orders from manufacturers.
3. Drop shipping
There is also another E-commerce business model that is less risky than Amazon FBA’s model but it still can be risky if you don’t collect all needed information about your market. You may find many questions on drop shipping communities about setting the right price on the product or about finding the best niche to start selling. There are even many online platforms who offer you to provide some winning products each day based on the subscription model. Have you ever thought how those platforms are getting that data? They are not adding it manually each day since it will take too much time. The only way to do so is using data scraping services. So you can use data scraping and get as much data as you want and choose the metrics that you want to get instead of paying the same price every month and getting limited products with limited data that will even be from another niche that is not required.
Web Scraping from The small stores
If you are working in the small local market and have already known your competitor, then it’s a good idea to use a retail scraping to collect data from your well-known competitor. You can use product scraping as well as price scraping services since the approach to this E-commerce type is the same like in the above-mentioned E-commerce types.
Conclusion
As you see how much benefit you can get from web scraping services. Also, please note that it doesn’t matter if you have an online store or not. You can use online price scraping and product scraping to get the main idea about your niche.