How Ecommerce Data Can Fuel Your Online Business

Data has become a crucial aspect of the ecommerce sector. Businesses can use it to grow and gain a competitive advantage in the market. For instance, data can be used to adjust strategies, forecast the future demand and even gain insights on the best practices in the industry.

Thankfully, the ecommerce world is filled with a lot of potential data that can be used to gain a competitive advantage. But, the data isn’t available in one single place. It isn’t accumulated but scattered across multiple web pages. This is one of the reasons why business owners usually have no idea of how to use the ecommerce data to fuel their business.

But, fortunately, there is an effective way of leveraging this data to advance your business. Data scraping for ecommerce is a technique that can meet your business’s need for obtaining data on competitors and the market.

In this blog, we will shed light on a few ways you can use ecommerce data to fuel your business. But, before diving any deeper, let’s understand –

What is data scraping?

In simple terms, data scraping is a software technique of extracting certain unstructured data from websites. These accumulated data is then converted into structured data and stored for further processing.

Here is what you should know about the price

1. MAP compliance

   MAP or Minimum Advertised Price is an agreement set by retailers, brands and distributors to avoid unhealthy competition or price war. As per this compliance, all parties agree on not selling or advertising products or services above the set price.

   By using ecommerce web scraping, the brands can gain real-time prices of their distributors and retailers across various ecommerce platforms. With this freshly obtained new price data, the brands get to know if anyone is violating MAP. Therefore, web scraping proves the best practice to monitor MAP and protect the brand reputation.

2. Market competitiveness

   Almost every time, prices sway the customer’s decision. Based on the price, customers decide if they want to purchase a certain product or another.

   So, to maintain the price competitiveness in the competing market, the brands require investing in price monitoring. If a similar product on two different websites is sold at very different prices, then the brands need to be alert and look into the matter.

3. Discount tracking

   Holiday marketing is one of the effective ways of increasing ROI in the ecommerce realm. Marketers usually brainstorm new strategies to deploy compelling marketing strategies in order to harvest the highest ecommerce buyers.

   By using ecommerce data scraping, it becomes possible for businesses to keep track of the competitor’s pricing. They gain insight on how much discount is offered by the competitors during the holiday marketing season.

The story of stock data

1. Stock level and popularity

   Many times, even stock data can suggest to you how the products sell. You can easily track the sales number by assessing the stock number, therefore gaining a sight of how popular the product is in the market.

   By choosing to scrape the stock data on a regular basis, you can gain fresh data at any given interval as you want. The fluctuation in the stock changes can easily be tracked by comparing sets of data.

2. Regional availability

   When it comes to physical retailers, relying on web scraping to scrape ecommerce data according to the geographic location can prove a little tricky to know the product availability for the neighbourhood.

   A lot of physical brands and retailers have started offering direct-to-consumer online platforms. If you can view their stock data for a certain location, you can scrape it from the web pages.

   It is always best to offer the consumers something that isn’t available at the competitor. This way, you give the customers a reason to buy from you more.

How does web scraping help in product ranking?

1. Monitor your keyword ranking page

   The most important question you must ask as an ecommerce platform owner is, “how can my brand become visible to the customers?”

   For instance, established ecommerce platforms like Amazon has more than 2 million sellers. Your notion should be of making your product stand out from this listing.

   Work with experts or use an ecommerce product scraper to scrape relevant details. You can use the obtained data to see who is the forerunner and where you are situated.

   It is best to keep the listing up and obtain alerts whenever there is a drop. Also, keep the marketer in the loop to find solutions for optimization.

2. Monitor the category page ranking

   Some customers may just surf casually on the ecommerce page, while others may have a list of what they wish to purchase.

   You can use the category page ranking to present the products to the casual shopper’s group. Also, keep in mind that these rankings are regular jobs for many ecommerce marketers. So, it is best to keep an eye on your competitor as they monitor you.

How does web scraping offer a competitive edge?

1. Research customer reference and feed

   Every business wants to know the desires and likings of the target audience so they can satisfy them accordingly. But identifying the customer’s liking and desires cannot happen without using proper tools and techniques.

   Data scraping can prove a major factor here. It can help you perform sentiment analysis and predictive analysis to understand what the customers are talking about online. For instance, customers use social media to share hundreds, if not thousands, of experiences and opinions.

   By analysing these posts, you can evaluate their attitude towards a particular product or brand based on the evaluation of context and tone. This, in turn, will help you gain better insight into their experience and engagement intent.

2. SEO analysis

   The web is full of vital information that, when used properly, can impact the SERPs effectively. The scrape data from an ecommerce website will not only help you collect valuable data but will help you know where to use the same for better returns.

   For instance, with web scraping, you can access your competitor’s content for SEO analysis. This means, if the competitor is ranking for a particular keyword is using certain sophisticated techniques, you will be able to determine what they are doing to be better in the industry.

   This ecommerce data analytics will also help you know which keywords to avoid completely to minimize the competition and which keywords to actually use to maximize the competition level. Moreover, you can also gain data on keywords density, meta descriptions, as well as other content-related indicators.

3. Lead generation

   No matter what is your marketing strategy, your expectation from it by the end of the day is to gain new leads. And data scraping can prove beneficial in that aspect, too.

   Data scraping can be used to scrape best-performing competitor’s forums, social media and other online places they use the most to connect with the customers. Check what challenges and issues the competitor’s face and what do they usually talk about in general.

   Then go ahead and address those concerns in your products. This way, you are already deploying what customers want.

   Besides scraping the competitor’s website, make sure to target popular news portals in your industry to inspect who are engaging with the content. This way, you can scrape interesting data and use it to improve your content personas as well as buyer personas to make smarter decisions.

Signing off

It is evident that web scraping for ecommerce can prove an effective technique for a business advantage. Explore the value of our data-as-a-service capabilities at Wersel. Our price intelligence and web scraping solutions lets your organization invite multiple layers of benefits. You can use it to gain useful insights into market research, customer preference, needs and other important factors. Besides, it offers a better overview of the competition along with details on practices that drive better results.

So, no matter if you are a start-up or a well-known player in the market, make sure that you give the ecommerce product scraper from Wersel a try. Our reliable industry experts will help you leverage it for optimal benefit.