If you sell products and services, you know just how many competitors you have. Customers, thanks to the internet, have a limitless choice in regards to what they can buy (and from whom they can buy). They are always looking for better deals, better prices, and better products.

That’s why, if you have an online store, you can’t afford to make decisions about your business without knowing what the rest of the industry is doing. And that’s where ‘e-commerce scraping’ can help you.

With eCommerce scraping, you can get real-time data on things such as pricing, inventory lists and other data in your market. Web crawling services get this data for you by scraping prices and product names from the competing online stores.

Equipped with this data, you will gain valuable insight into how your competitors operate their online stores. You’ll know which products you need to stock, how to strategically price your inventory and how to improve your supply chain management. You will be able to make decisions that will help you outsmart your competition and make more sales.

Ready to see exactly how web crawling services can help your online business? Let’s get started.

Product Scraping to Find New Ideas

The fastest way to lose customers is by not having the products they want to buy. Your online store must always be stocked with the latest and most relevant items to them.

Researching for new items that are trending in the market manually can be an extremely time-consuming process.

But here’s where web scraping comes in. You can use this service to scrape the product inventory lists from your competitor websites. You can perform product scraping to gather product inventory lists from both: your small-time competitors and giant online retailers like Amazon.

It’s a great way to find new products in your industry. You’ll be easily able to see which products people are buying that you don’t have. And then, thanks to this information, you can go one step further and stock an even better variety of products in your online store.

Thanks to product scraping, you can save significant time researching for trending items in your industry and have a better stocked online store with awesome products. All by scraping eCommerce websites.

Scraping Prices of Your Competitor’s Products

In retail stores, people usually pick the items they want without spending too much time thinking about the price. But on online stores, customers do what we call ‘comparison shopping’.

This means when a customer wants to buy a product, they will first compare the price of it on different online stores, including yours. They’ll have lots of tabs open and once they find the best price for the product they want, they’ll buy from that website.

Scraping prices can help you win in this area as well.

With price scraping, you can easily collect the product prices on your competitors’ stores and see their whole pricing strategy. This will allow you to price your products competitively according to the market so that you don’t lose sales.

Another cool thing you can do by scraping prices is finding out which products your competitors don’t have in stock. That’s because the products that are out of stock don’t have prices written next to them or are generally displayed as $0. And if you have these products, you can increase the prices a bit to improve your profit margin without losing sales.

This alone is a great example of why you should consider scraping the prices of your competitors’ products.

Another handy tip to keep in mind is you can change the frequency on when you scrape prices of your competitor’s online stores. Regularly scraping eCommerce websites will ensure you have the latest price figures with you.

Inventory Management

We’ve discussed two kinds of important information you can get by scraping prices and products:

• The pricing strategy of competitors
• Inventory information of competitors

With this information, you can improve your pricing strategy and add more items to your store. But that’s not all… You can also get additional data that will help you improve your inventory management.

For example, by scraping prices and products, you can find out when a product’s price gets higher or lower in the market, which months a product gets sold out the most, when do competitors stock new items etc. And by identifying these trends and patterns, you can order your products from suppliers in advance.

This way, you will remove any bottlenecks and hiccups from your supply chain and improve inventory management. You’ll know what discounts you need from your suppliers to keep your pricing competitive. Know when to increase orders for certain products. Also, decide which items to drop from your store.

In short, you’ll know how to manage your inventory in the most effective way possible. All thanks to the real-time data you’ve gathered through data scraping services.

An example of how you get this information is through data feeds, like Answers Engine, that are updated on a regular basis with the specific information of your request. Using this tool, you can get information such as which locations are storing a certain product, what its variations are, is it currently available at a discount and the whole price history of the product. It visualizes all the necessary information in ways and formats convenient to you so that you can, later, identify the trends and patterns. This process is performed on a continual basis to keep on par with the most recent information available.  

Conclusion

What this shows is that data gathered through web scraping services is more valuable than it seems on the surface. The data you collect never gets ‘old’ because you can use it to identify trends and patterns. However, this does not mean that you’re finished with data scraping once you get the data you want.

No. The market, the prices, the trending products – everything is always changing. And without this automated process of data collection, it will be hard for your business to stay on top of the game and ahead of competitors. That’s why it is important to regularly collect fresh data by scraping eCommerce websites.

Ecommerce scraping is the only easy and affordable way to make sense of this crazy, ever-changing marketplace. We suggest you give data scraping a try for your business. Once you realize exactly kind of data you can get, it will be hard for you to make decisions in your business without it!