In the 21st century, data is a valuable asset for businesses operating in all industries, including E-Commerce, health, travel, etc. Clive Humby, a data science entrepreneur, coined the phrase data is the new oil in 2006. Similar to oil, data is invaluable in its raw condition; rather, value is taken when it is collected quickly and accurately and is linked to other relevant data.
Web scraping has now become a common method of gathering data from web pages. This process involves fetching and extracting web data from various sources and storing it in different file formats. It collects data to help businesses for further processing and analysis to form actionable, effective business plans.
In this post, we’ll cover how businesses benefit from scraping E-Commerce sites, along with some major challenges they face during this process.
Benefits of Scraping E-Commerce Websites
For online sellers, web scraping is a powerful business tool. Below are some important benefits of scraping E-Commerce websites:
Pricing Optimization
E-Commerce businesses get help with aligning their pricing standards with the industry demands and their products to flourish. Web scraping services gather customer data, which can be classified into customer survey data, demographic data, historical data, and psychographic data. The pricing optimization will increase the customer’s willingness to pay for products.
Improved Advertisements
Customer data obtained through web scraping services help with developing better-targeted ads. Insights based on customer behavior and sentiments can help brands decide the targeted approach with related ads.
Data scraping aids in deriving accurate details about customer preferences and sentiments. On the whole, it increases the chances of a product’s success tenfold, especially when your marketing strategy is aligned with productivity.
Better Customer Analysis
Web scraping techniques help businesses identify their customers and customize their products/services to drive customer engagement. Market trends and sentiments are analyzed for adjusting product development based on insights from different reviews and social media sources. This help ensures that the new products will be well-aligned with industry needs.
Continuous Improvement
All businesses need continuous improvement to move forward in the industry – there is no middle ground. Web scraping gives E-Commerce brands an edge to evolve and stay in the market. They get details of customers’ feedback and streamline their processes based on market trends, thereby maintaining their stocks to meet customer expectations.
Challenges of Scraping E-Commerce Websites
Though extracting data from E-Commerce websites can provide benefits to businesses in so many ways, this approach faces a set of challenges. Below are some challenges of scraping E-Commerce platforms.
Frequent Structural Changes
Online shopping websites undergo regular structural changes to improve customer experience and attract a diverse audience. Since the scraping bots are specially designed as per the code elements of the webpage, frequent changes in layout complicate the data extraction process. Bots demand reprogramming in order to match the new content display, or else these changes can bring crawling to a halt and result in data loss.
Large-Scale Data Extraction
Large-scale data collection usually poses a serious challenge during web scraping. This is due to the fact that almost all E-Commerce stores manage numerous subcategories under a single major category. These add up to a total of hundreds or thousands of items.
Above all, it sounds unrealistic to copy and paste every product’s information, including description, image, stock-keeping-unit (SKU), customer reviews, and shipping details, into one spreadsheet for records and analysis every day. The wearisome work consumes so much of your time, as well as leads to compromised data accuracy and quality.
Anti-scraping Techniques
Most E-Commerce site owners like to protect their data; therefore, they implement anti-scraping techniques like CAPTCHAs. CAPTCHAs are used to separate humans from bots by showing logical problems that aren’t easy to solve. Due to CAPTCHAs, the standard scraping scripts tend to fail.
IP blocking is another issue that can block the crawler even if it follows the web scraping best practices. Some site managers also set digital traps to trick bots and block their access.
Poor Data Quality
The ultimate objective of web scraping is to acquire relevant data. If a site has poorly written HTML code, there would be no structure, and the scraping program would gather unstructured data.
When it comes to E-Commerce websites, they have categorized their items based on a taxonomical approach that boosts user experience. In case of no categorization or organization, web scraping gets impeded as the program does not know any section of the website to focus on.
Geo-restrictions
Websites often display different content for different audiences according to geographical boundaries. The reason is licensing issues and the need to protect a brand’s reputation by providing it control of its online releases. However, this can get challenging for companies intending to gather information from such websites since it effectively ends any meaningful data extraction.
Summary
In today’s era, E-Commerce companies of all sizes are leveraging data for business purposes. Web scraping has been helping them collect data to gain useful insights into their business and customers. However, many online shopping site owners have implemented anti-bot techniques to protect their data.
To get around such measures, companies have started looking for specialized scraping solutions, like Wayfair scraper. The Wayfair scraperis now a preferred choice of many businesses as it not only helps collate E-Commerce data in real-time but also charges only for successfully delivered results.
