eBay Scraping - A Clever Way to E-commerce Success
eBay is a huge eCommerce giant that specializes in resale. Being one of the oldest Internet businesses founded in 1995, eBay has been among eCommerce leaders for decades now.
It executes B2B and C2C sales through its website. People and businesses from around 30 countries use the eBay platform to sell their goods either directly or via auctions.
In May 2019, eBay has topped the list of top 10 resale sites based on search data. The list was created by analyzing more than 80 million websites. After almost 25 years, eBay still dominates the eCommerce resale market.
The great success it has is mainly attributed to its unique business plan. It allows individuals and businesses to list new or used items for auction for a pretty low price. Such an approach has helped the company grow from its very first day of operating.
Now, imagine how immensely the website has grown for these years. It now carries so much data about top-selling products, prices, different merchants, etc. Such data can be truly valuable to businesses.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss why you should consider eBay data extraction for your eCommerce growth. you will learn the many ways you can use it.
How eBay Scraping Can Help Your E-commerce Succeed?
Let’s start from the basics. Web scraping helps eCommerce businesses grow and achieve success in the eBay market. Considering that eBay is a huge eCommerce website that has many stores within, the amount of data it carries is tremendous.
So getting data from eBay only would provide you with enough information for analysis and decision-making. Let’s consider the most fundamental ways of how eBay scraping can help other online stores achieve success.
Analyze Product Reviews
The rise of virtual shopping has brought up new challenges for business. It might seem that it’s more difficult to engage with your customers face-to-face and ask for their honest opinion in the virtual environment.
The good news is that with the rise of online retailing, the internet has transformed into a huge review platform.
Almost all eCommerce stores encourage consumers to write reviews and leave feedback about the products sold. This feature allows brands to communicate with their customers and discover their opinion.
Knowing what people think about your products is crucial for any business’s success. You create your products keeping in mind your target market’s needs. So it’s important to understand how satisfied the consumers are.
With eBay scraping, you extract data from the review sections and get insights into what people think about your brand. In fact, we have to say that the feedback section has immensely contributed to the websites’ huge success.
eBay was one of the first online retailers that created the ability to leave comments. People can post reviews and give ratings to the item and seller, making their reputation better or worse.
Such information is highly valuable to businesses. You can collect such data to analyze it and understand what should be improved about your product or reputation.
Predict Market Trends
Nowadays, the market changes very fast. Consumer preferences and buying behavior is hard to predict and understand without proper analysis.
Web scraping eBay site can help you make comprehensive market predictions about the future. Ideally, in order to always satisfy your customers, you need to be aware of their expectations in advance.
How exactly web scraping eBay can help you reach this goal? By tracking your customers’ previous buying habits and collecting this data. Such user data is very helpful for making data-driven decisions.
You want to create a marketing strategy that is mostly based on predictive analysis. To create insightful and effective marketing campaigns, you’ll need data that can be easily extracted from eBay.
Track the Market in Real-Time
The competitive nature of the e-commerce market is fierce. If you want to succeed, you need to be fast in your decision-making. You need to proactively react to all changes in the market.
To make smart decisions regarding the unexpected changes, you must be well-aware of what’s currently happening in your industry. By scraping data from eBay on a regular basis, you will be updated on the latest changes in the eCommerce industry.
For example, you can see when a certain product that your competitors sell goes out of stock. So you can make sure that your stock of that product is full and people can buy it from you.
The same thing applies to your own product lists. When a product runs out of stock, you have to quickly restock it. You don’t want to lose customers to the competition because you weren’t fast enough in restocking the inventory.
Real-time tracking is also very important if your business belongs to a fast-changing industry. For example, there are industries (e.g. petrol or oil market) where prices change on a daily basis. So you have to always be updated on the latest market prices.
Since we’re discussing eBay scraping, consider the number of auctions that are generated on the website per day. You need to be informed of all the bids that are happening on your competitors’ products.
Price scraping and product scraping are the two major ways that will help your eCommerce grow. We consider these in detail next.
eBay Price Scraping
Price scraping is often used by eCommerce businesses for different purposes. Let’s see below the benefits that price scraping may offer in general:
Competitive analysis
To have a winning position in the market, you need to be a step ahead of the competition. Identifying competitors’ prices is a crucial part of the competitor monitoring process.
Only by regularly scraping your competitors’ prices on eBay you’ll understand the minimal and maximal price sets of the industry. Given the extreme competition on eBay, you will have the advantage of real-time analysis with the help of web scraping.
Winning Pricing Strategy
The most obvious benefit of price scraping is that it will help you establish a winning pricing strategy. If you regularly follow-up with all the prices changes in the market, you can create your own unique pricing strategy.
Today, online shopping gives customers the ability to surf the web and find products that are well-priced. They take their time and carefully analyze the prices to find exactly what they’re looking for.
Since eBay gives the bidding option, customers can find their desired prices even easier. So it’s even harder for eBay shops to always satisfy the potential customer because of the competition.
With eBay price scraping, selling on eBay will be less challenging.
eBay Product List Scraping
You and your competitors on eBay offer similar products to consumers. So since you operate in the same industry, you also target almost the same people segments. Staying competitive can seem to be impossible when you and your competitors offer nearly the same solutions to people.
But if you compete in the same industry, that does not mean that you can’t get new insights from them. No matter how similar some companies’ offerings are, there are no two businesses that are exactly the same.
Keeping all of that in mind, we suggest one of the most effective ways of getting new insights from the competition. That is extracting product data from you eBay competitors. All eCommerce shops try to differentiate their product offerings in one way or another.
If you scrape product details on a regular basis, you’ll understand what’s your competitors’ special approach towards the customers. You want to scrape your competitor’s eBay store to see their best product lists and categories.
You’ll get insights into the special features and benefits that they offer. You can also see which keywords they are targeting in their descriptions.
Product scraping will be especially useful if you extract data about companies that are the industry leaders and giants. Having such data at your disposal, you’ll analyze it and understand the strategy that they use.
By analyzing the performance of the products, you would spot why some products perform well, while others are poorly performing. Such information will guide your decisions regarding improving your product offerings.
Start to scrape product details from eBay to discover the specific performance indicators. Understand which features people tend to love the most and what are the indicators of poorly performing products. All of these will make you stand out in the market by your own unique and effective product offerings.
What Else Can You Extract from eBay
If you want to get involved in eBay scraping, then you might consider working with a web scraping service. A web scraping service will provide you with reliable data. It will be getting data from eBay based on your requirements and preferences, as regularly as you wish. Here are the types of data you can get besides products and pricing:
Seller’s information
The web scraping service can provide you with information about the sellers if needed. For example, how long they operate their eBay store, what types of products they sell, how competitive they are, etc.
Product availability
You always want to know which products are in-stock and which have run out. This is important for effective inventory management. Also, you want to know when your competitors run out of stock to make sure that your products are available.
Image URL
Images display the looks of the products. By web scraping eBay you can also extract image URLs. You will use the data later to analyze the types of images competitors use and how each one performs.
Manufacturing details
Manufacturing refers to the production process of the products. If you look into product details and description, you’ll see that most carry data about the manufacturing too. So by scraping this data, you’ll get insights into labor, machines, tools and all the processing information of products.
Shipping costs/destinations
You will also be presented with shipping costs to different destinations that people offer on eBay. This will include information on shipment details. People pay a lot of attention to the shipment options when buying online. A study found that 51% of customers abandoned a sale at the checkout because of a few delivery options available. So you definitely want to offer different shipping options and costs to your online customers.
The list can go on and on. Basically, whatever data type you wish within legal and ethical restrictions – you can get it with the help of a web scraping service.
It’s High Time You Optimize Your eBay Store
The aim of eBay scraping is to gather data, which you can analyze and use for your store’s betterment. You’ll conduct a competitor analysis, price monitoring, analyze the reviews and predict the market trends. Your eCommerce success is very much dependant on these factors. And all of this can be achieved with the help of eBay data extraction.
With eBay scraping, you’ll get valuable data to successfully optimize your eBay store and with the right eCommerce, strategy boost your sales.