E-commerce Scraping Solutions for Market Expansion

The way business is carried out today differs greatly from how it was done during the last decade.

For instance, while in the past, companies only had to buy and sell products or offer services in a physical store to make sales, today, businesses have to engage in a myriad of activities to get customers, beat the competition, make sales and grow revenue.

Some of the things that a typical brand in today’s highly competitive market has to do include being active on various social media, continually growing their email list, and keeping close eyes on their brand reputation and the competition.

All the above activities can be done using web scraping. This scraping data online serves as a befitting solution for e-Commerce brands.

And in this guide, we will understand what web scraping is and its main use cases.

What Does Business Growth Mean For Modern Brands?

As discussed above, just buying products and selling from a physical store no longer guarantee profitability for modern brands.

For a company in today’s market to grow and record revenue increases, it has to collect and monitor data continually. Collecting data regularly has several benefits, as we will describe in the next few sections.

It can help you expand your market reach to regions beyond your physical location while helping to attract new customers.

Harvesting market data also helps to understand both the market and your competition better while providing you with the necessary information to outperform them.

How Web Scraping Helps Overcome Hurdles

However, data collection is neither simple nor straightforward and can be quite challenging. For the most part, the challenges center around collecting an enormous amount of data at once.

It can also be difficult to harvest a large expanse of data in record time with the possibility of getting high-quality data.

The best solution to the challenges of data extraction is web scraping. Web scraping is the process used to harvest an enormous amount of data automatically.

It uses high-end tools such as a scarper API which can handle a large pool of data. They can quickly access multiple web pages and harvest their content without too much input from the user. They can also bypass internet limitations such as IP blocks, CAPTCHA tests, and geo-blocking. If you’re looking for a reliable scraper API solution, Oxylabs offers exactly that – definitely check it out on their website to learn more.

Aside from these, other tools such as proxies used for web scraping also conceal your identity while surfing the internet on your behalf. This helps not only to keep you safe and anonymous but also to ensure your competition cannot trace you online or see what you are doing on their websites.

Main Use Cases of Web Scraping

Web scraping has several use cases, with the ones explained below being the most common ones:

1.Competition Monitoring

One of the main uses of web scraping is to allow companies to keep close tabs on their competitors.

With web scraping and its many tools, you can easily monitor everything your rivals do online, from what ads they run to how much they sell certain goods and services.

This is especially useful to help businesses strategize and outdo the competition.

2.Price Monitoring

Prices are known for being the greatest influencer of buying decisions. When prices are set too high, customers check alternatives or go to other sellers.

This is why it is crucial for businesses to always monitor prices across the different markets to ensure that their competitors are not selling at better prices and winning the market.

Price monitoring will allow you to see the best prices and adjust your prices to retain customers while profits.

3.Lead Generation

While there are more consumers today than they were 10 years ago, it is no hidden secret that finding buyers is becoming more challenging for enterprises.

Buyers are now torn between multiple options and are more intentional about how they buy. To win these customers over to your side, you will need to build trust, amongst other things.

And building trust often starts with building a solid lead list. This is done through lead generation.

And lead generation often starts with gathering the right information about your potential buyers from multiple platforms.

4.SEO Analysis

Search Engine Optimization is the process of making both websites and content most suitable for search engines and internet users.

Companies that collect and analyze SEO data often have better websites and content, making them perform better than their competitors.

The more attention you pay to SEO, the more likely you will rank better than your competitors and grow your business.

5.Feedback Tracking

The downside of the internet being free is that now people are more likely to drop their opinion on whichever subject they are interested in.

For instance, buyers can now go on forums and discussion platforms and drop reviews, remarks, and feedback about companies they have patronized recently.

As should be expected, not all of this feedback is positive because of how widespread, and easily accessible these platforms are; it is never too hard for the negative feedback to ruin a company’s reputation if left unattended.

Web scraping is used to monitor and track feedback across different platforms to know when negative feedback has been made so that it can be addressed quickly and appropriately.

Conclusion

The coming of the internet meant that businesses could now sell well beyond their borders, but it also meant new problems for several businesses.

Data has become so important and indispensable that no modern brand can do without it. Web scraping provides the most effective way for accessing internet data using tools such as a scraper API, and it offers several benefits, as we have considered above.