What is Web Crawling in E-Commerce?
Web crawling in E-commerce means when a spider bot or search engine bot goes through e-commerce websites to gather information.
To keep your business on the edge in the market, company decisions should be taken based on Data. Information should be extracted from the competitor websites. Using this information, a strong marketing strategy can be built for an e-commerce business.
E-Commerce Business
E-commerce businesses are one of the fastest-growing markets. As per Stats, e-commerce had revenue of $2,237,481m in 2020 and is growing constantly. There are hundreds of new players entering the game every day. If you have an E-commerce business, you would understand that being ahead in the competition is very important.
One of the ways to empower your business is to make decisions based on accurate and updated data. Data includes product price, reviews, descriptions, reviews and blogs. You can get all this data by crawling or scraping E-Commerce websites.
What is Web Crawling in E-commerce?
Web crawling in E-commerce means when a spider bot or search engine bot goes through e-commerce websites to gather information. The bot searches websites for information. Google, Yahoo, and MSN crawl different websites for gathering information.
Web scraping targets specific websites, looking for specific information. For every type of information, you want to extract. There is different software and methodology.
Benefits Of Web Crawling in E-commerce
E-commerce websites use web scraping tools to gather data from competitors. Companies crawl and scrape websites to gather competitors’ product data, promotions and campaigns. It allows a business to decide its strategies and act accordingly.
It will also keep you updated with competitors’ new products and trending items. It will be easier for E-commerce businesses to make decisions about the range of items.
So web scraping will let you keep track of your competitors’ new actions. You can keep your game up and stay relevant in the competitive e-commerce market.
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Challenges of web crawling
Web crawling indeed has a lot of advantages for your business. But this process is also a bit challenging.
Web crawling requires resources. In order to gather data from websites, companies need to develop a system. Allocate human resources (developers) or write a website scraping code.
Another challenge is bypassing website security. Many E-Commerce websites do not allow their websites to be scraped. They add Captchas to their websites. Some also block IP addresses to protect their data from crawling. Many crawlers and scraping tools are not efficient enough to enter secure websites.
Some scraping tools use rotatable proxies mimicking customer behaviour. These rotatable IPS work best for small websites. Some E-Commerce websites have tight security firewalls. They identify and block bots quickly.
Another challenge is the quality of the scraped data. If you extract data from hundreds of different websites every day. It will be difficult to check the data quality and you might have incomplete information.
Related: Best Walmart Price Scraper Tools
What Data Can You Crawl from E-Commerce Websites?
Web Crawling: Keyword Research
If you are thinking about what product you should launch in the E-commerce world. You need to start with keyword research. It is one of the significant parts of your product listing.
We should know what customers are searching for. How do they search? How many times a month a specific search is conducted? Ranking of the products on the basis of popular keywords? Keyword research is very important, especially on Amazon. Amazon has really high traffic and making your products rank is tough too.
Using web crawlers, one can easily get the seller and existing product data from any E-commerce website. Be it Amazon, eBay or Walmart. You can crawl the E-commerce site by a set of keywords. It will reveal what products are being sold in the market with fewer or bad reviews. And can give you an idea for a better product.
Crawling and comparing products from different websites will make it easier to understand what keywords customers search for.
Web Crawling: Products
It is very important to crawl product pages to understand the competition. Crawling and comparing the product data will give you deep insights about products. The reasons their product is successful? Or the flaws in the product, that sellers are trying to improve?
Also by crawling products you get to know what are the new products in the market. Which products are trending in the market?
Web Crawling: Product Reviews
Understanding and keeping your customers happy is very important for a successful eCommerce business. Before launching a product, it is important to know the reasons for the failure of the existing similar product. All this is important for bringing an improved version of existing products to the market. It can be an improved version of your own product too.
Along with that, you should monitor the reviews you get to improve your customer service.
Web Crawling: Prices Of Products
When a customer is looking for a product. He looks for two things: the price of the product and the reviews. An E-commerce business that has good reviews with good prices sweeps the stage.
Monitoring and comparing prices of the same products that competitors are selling is very important. Prices should be changed instantly with the price fluctuations in the market. Along with that you can also monitor the discounts and offers on certain products.
Products on Amazon and eBay have pretty intense price wars. Re-pricing your product is important and needs updated data over time. This is why price crawling is very important. Many tools are available online to find the best prices across various E-commerce platforms.
Best E-Commerce Scraping Tools
Some of the best E-Commerce Price scraping tools available for download are
These are some of the best-automated web scrapers in the market. They have an easy-to-use interface and do not require any coding skills.
If you have intermediate to Advanced level coding skills. You can use the Python package Selenium, to scrape pricing data.
Conclusions
Now that you know what an E-commerce web crawler is. You can see that an automated web scraping tool is important for data gathering. These Spider bots crawl through your competitors’ websites. They provide you with valuable data for staying competitive in the E-Commerce market.
