Do you want to give your e-commerce business a competitive edge over other companies in your industry? Data scraping (sometimes called web scraping or web harvesting) can help you achieve just that.
In fact, there are many different ways in which data scraping can help you improve performance and grow revenue. You can acquire data by building a custom scraper or using third-party providers like SERPMaster.
For example, you can scrape competitor data to identify exactly where and how they outperform you. Or how about finding out what your customers really think of your product, so you can optimize accordingly?
In this short post, you’ll learn more about the top 5 e-commerce data scraping uses. These techniques are trusted by businesses around the web, from giants like Amazon to smaller forward-thinking startups. So if you want that competitive edge for your e-commerce business, you need to get in on the action. Let’s find out how!
E-commerce data scraping uses
1. Pricing strategies
This is probably the best-known way in which e-commerce companies use data scraping to their advantage.
It is often called competitive price monitoring or pricing intelligence, and it refers to scraping competitor pricing data from the web to inform your pricing strategy.
Back in the day, you would visit your competitors’ websites to check how they priced their products. You would probably pop all these prices in a spreadsheet, which you would manually update every so often by going through all their websites again.
Looking back at it now, this seems tedious and inefficient. Why do it manually, when you can have a robot do the work for you (and do it much better)?
Scrapers not only gather this data for you, but they can repeat the whole process every few minutes so you always have the latest, most up-to-date data at hand. As a result, you can more easily implement a dynamic pricing strategy for your business, which is how Amazon does it, so you always offer the best price out there.
2. Competitor analysis
With web scraping, you can go much further than just checking your competitors’ prices. By scraping your competitors’ websites, you can gain valuable insights into all sorts of areas.
From the products they offer, to the benefits of each product, to specific features like color and style. You can even find out which products are performing well and which aren’t, or how customers review them!
And their website isn’t all you can use. Think about social media postings. By scraping what they post, you get a look into their social media strategy, how they interact with their customers, and what works well for them.
In the end, the more information you can gather the better you can analyze your competitors. And that will help you gain that competitive edge over the rest.
3. Sentiment analysis
Do you want to know what customers think and want? Of course you do!
Now you could just create a survey and send that to your existing customers. Sentiment analysis is a great way to get customer insights and it should definitely be part of your business strategy. But as you probably know, response rates can be fairly low and it still only tells you what already existing customers think.
Instead, why not use data scraping techniques to learn more about your customers? We’ve already mentioned that you can scrape social media, so use that to learn what customers are saying about both your own and your competitors’ products.
For example, as done in this study, you can find out what the public opinion about a certain product is before you decide to launch it as a product of your own.
Additionally, the web is full of review sites where thousands of users share their unbiased, honest opinions about products within your niche. Forums are another great source, which can help you spot trends by monitoring what potential customers are talking about.
4. Lead generation
Data scraping can help you find your target audience and win them over. By scraping competitors’ social media accounts or websites you can find out who their customers are. Since they follow or have purchased from your competitor, there’s a good chance they could be interested in your product too, making them highly qualified leads.
So once you know who these leads are, you can start to find ways to win them over. For example, why not analyze what they don’t like about your competitors’ products, and launch a new marketing campaign highlighting how your product won’t cause that same issue.
Another example of lead generation is to scrape blogging sites (like Entrepreneur or Medium) for content on topics related to your product or niche to find highly-engaged potential customers for you to target.
5. SEO analysis
Data scraping for SEO analysis can help your e-commerce business in two ways.
First, you can use SEO scraping tools (like Screaming Frog) to scrape your own website. It works the same as a search engine web crawler (like Google Bot), so it gives you insight into how search engines like Google view your website.
This helps you spot mistakes, like broken links, and all sorts of other potential problems for you to fix to help you improve your rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs). It also shows you what content is performing well and what isn’t.
Second, you can do the same thing for your competitors’ websites. This way, you can analyze how their websites perform and learn from it to further optimize your own site.
