How to Improve Your Product with Hard Data — The Web Scraping Way

In today’s hyper-competitive environment, being analytics-driven is the best path for an eCommerce company to thrive. Web scraping has now become the latest tool for companies to take that quantum leap in gathering data for their product.

Scraping is used in data-centric industries such as the stock market, research and investigative journalism, tourism and hospitality, retail, and so on.

Marketing, finance, and management departments all depend on reliable data to make targeted business decisions. The majority of small and medium-sized eCommerce-focused companies aren’t up-to-speed with the most recent tech solutions. They don’t have the technological know-how to set up a lucrative plan to extract data and derive information from it.

Say you want to sell wristwatches on eBay or Amazon. Scraping customer data from Amazon and other major eCommerce sites is essential competitive intelligence. Amazon alone has a vast amount of data, and manually extracting this information on a daily basis would mean progressing at a snail’s pace.

Your wristwatch may show the right time. However, it cannot bring to the table the perfect timing for it to be put out on the market. No matter, here’s what you can do with the right data extraction tool:

Identifying Customer Pain Points

Customer pain points are as complex and varied as the potential customers themselves. That being said, not all prospects will be aware of their difficulties, which will make selling to them challenging. You’ll have to successfully help them understand they have an unfulfilled need and compel them that the product or service is a good fit.

Perhaps the target audience is in great need of a temperature measuring watch, without it becoming a smartwatch. You just need to pinpoint where the liability resides and provide the solution.

It is critical to have access to a prompt, credible source of high-quality data in order to make profitable pricing decisions. Large-scale sales tracking using web harvesting allows businesses to have their finger on the pulse of the global industry, allowing them to implement competitive pricing, sales management, and stay one step ahead of their competitors’ product positioning strategies.

The financial pain point can be seen amongst customers who want to lower the costs by switching to a better product alternative. You have to make sure that alternative is your product. Business intelligence executives can confidently place their goods and services and make more educated pricing choices by scraping pricing and inventory details.

Suppose your prospects’ primary concerns are economical. In that case, you might stress the benefits of your services in the sense of a cheaper monthly subscription or the improved ROI your happy customers can enjoy after their purchase.

Since pain points are extremely subjective, you’ll need to perform qualitative testing, which focuses on informative, individualized answers to open-ended questions, rather than quantitative research, which prefers structured questions and representative, statistically relevant sample sizes.

The productivity pain point is when customers demand a more seamless experience when contacting companies, which actually points towards a need for an easy-flow purchasing experience. To escape boredom, they want to make the best of their time. The below are few examples of competitiveness issues:

• Use of the commodity is inconvenient;
• The purchasing process is difficult;
• The user encounters redundancy and friction.

You can scrape customer reviews and forums to find out what other wristwatch retailers lack, and how you can improve your own product. This grants you access to genuine, updated information on whichever product or service you are selling.

Competitor Analysis

Web scraping gives you a bird’s eye view of price details, market dynamics, current patterns, your competitors’ plans, and the obstacles they face. As a result, you will put your product with all of the aforementioned factors in mind, giving you an edge over the competition.

Your competition has favored quartz and other embellishments over coming up with a waterproof mechanism for their watches? Research shows that upon typing ‘waterproof watches’ into the Amazon search bar, the first page only contains men’s waterproof watches. This is the kind of example that can lead you to improve your marketing strategy.

Furthermore, it is capable of saving the extracted data in a structured and readable format. The extracted data is usually available in CSV format.

Scrape competitor’s products on a daily basis if you want to stay ahead in the industry. This will come in handy if you’re researching businesses that are ahead of you or are business leaders in general. You want to scrape their stock lists to see which brands and divisions are the best. Find more about their perks, exclusive features, and package deals. Analyze the design, color, and design of the goods and see which ones work better. Look for distinct patterns in the things that are doing well and those that aren’t.

This will assist you in identifying the basic success parameters that will enable you to determine what people like and dislike. When you’ve discovered patterns, you’ll compare your goods to theirs to see if there are any correlations or variations. All of this will provide you with information to help you develop your product description and catalog.

Using data gathered by site extraction or scraping, you can keep track of the rate and speed at which items in a given category are released, and then use it to prioritize the goods, areas, and categories you can concentrate on.

On the Watch for the Better Price

With increased competition and growth in online marketplaces, price scraping is becoming more common. Using price and content scraping services, a new player in the industry will easily get up to speed. Scraper bots can theoretically obtain access to details such as Stock Keeping Units (SKU), inventory lists, past prices, and a website’s entire product collection when they target it.

This wealth of data will offer potential competitors a high return on investment. Competitors will automate their scraping operation to the point that, after comparing pricing from rival platforms, their website automatically displays the best bid.

We don’t have to go to any of these different rival websites every day to see what their pricing looks like, write it down, and so on because we have a data scraping app. We will start building our own price database with data scraping instead of having to explicitly take notes.

You’re a watch retailer, remember? You will detect market volatility by scraping data from your rivals. Maybe one day they’ll charge $2119.99 for a Cartier, and the next week they’ll charge $2009.99. You’ll need to re-price your own stock of watches if you want to keep selling a consistent number of them. Start by creating an account on a website like WebScrapingAPI to begin scraping for prices online. You’ll get 1000 free API calls as a gift from us.

Clock Watching for Results

Hopefully, this article has helped your business build a data-driven product. Otherwise, we do expect you to give us a slap on the wrist. It’s good to see companies skyrocket once they implement web scraping in both creating and maintaining their products on the market.

Don’t miss the boat on eCommerce success.