5 Major Benefits Of Web Scraping For Retail Industry And Their Future

Structured or unstructured, data plays an important role in driving growth and innovation for your business. The popularity of big data has made the web scraping process essential for growth opportunities for several industries.

December 10, 2020

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Structured or unstructured, data plays an important role in driving growth and innovation for your business. The popularity of big data has made the web scraping process essential for growth opportunities for several industries. A strong website monitoring and web crawling process is now crucial in harvesting relevant data for business.

But it all boils down to web data – sales, customer feedback, and product data. One can glean all organizational data points but for retailers, it matters a lot to make practical decisions.

Here are five ways how retailers can start using web crawling and web data scraping today and benefit from it.

Pricing strategy

With a knack to price products with the best margins, retailers can always reap success. They need to constantly evaluate and adjust their pricing strategy based on trends, customer behavior, and inventory. Measure decisions based on internal data, but you need support from competitor data and their product charges. Hence businesses are keen to scrape product and pricing data, from competitor brands on a periodic basis. After analyzing those figures, one can assess market trends and make sound pricing decisions that entail charging a premium or a discount. Web scraping can help in analyzing the competitive landscape thus offering retailers a stable platform from which to make pricing decisions.

Campaign monitoring

Many brands are relying on creative mediums and channels to promote themselves. The video marketing trend is quite popular worldwide and retailers can leverage statistics on sites like YouTube that are easily measurable in terms of views, visits, likes, and comments. Although the metrics do not indicate if the campaign is successful, you can boost awareness, while create and assess interest in the intended market. Scraping e-commerce websites and comments data from those videos can help you understand how people feel about the video. With sentiment analysis tools, one can measure current interest and then even develop future campaigns based on the results. You can even collect customer reviews of different websites, social media channels, and news coverage responses.

Demand analysis

Depending on projected demand, retailers tend to focus on products that are known to be or expected to be popular with your audience. Your sales figures are good indicators for getting a better idea of the demand right before the launch of new and similar products. In terms of web data scraping, classified sites are ideal places for e-commerce price monitoring, especially of details of the most popular ones. Even the rates in particular categories can be fetched, and some products can be prioritized in your own arsenal if they sell well in some demographics, where other brands manage to sell.

Channel partner management

If an e-commerce retailer sells through channel partners, then they are bound to observe the minimum retail price. Retailers will need to keep an eye on the changes to the rates set by these resellers. Channel partners can hold flash sales for an item for a specific period before the price gets back to normal. Some sites like Amazon even offer margins up front. with live data, you can monitor websites in real time and know when the price is less than the MRP.

Grey market policing

Web data scraping is also used when there are resellers involved. Generally, they are not allowed to sell through any of third party sites but the best way to track whether they do so is by searching these sites for each product on an automated basis. That way your legal department can easily identify all the resellers who are infringing on the rates and enforcement notices can be issued automatically.

By granting opportunities to monitor data from diverse sources, price scraping and product data scraping can aid online retail shops and businesses in branding perfectly. Web scraping companies need to work in accordance with the needs of the market while leveraging the strategies employed by competitors.

Choose an experienced and expert web scraping service provider for your retail business today.