Data scraping : How to leverage it for your eCommerce business?

In the world of cut-throat competition, every commercial enterprise is trying to outdo each other.

“Where can I get new leads?” – the question that probably worries every other entrepreneur. In an industry where everything is customer-centric, competitor analysis is not a choice but a necessity. In this article, we will shed light on why competitor analysis is essential to not only predict the future but also delve in and strengthen the present.

We probably don’t have to provide stats on the amount of readily available data that is there on the web, but, we will tell you why having access to so much data can provide a competitive advantage in the niche field you belong to. The easiest way to start your eCommerce audit is through extracting data from an eCommerce website or web scraping. Web scraping is slowly becoming crucial for eCommerce businesses in gaining rich insights to help them develop strategies to compete against their competitors and also save time and cost in the process. Let us see how scraping publicly available data will help analyze and strategize your position in the marketplace.

Competitor analysis and competition mapping

SWOT - strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats - something that every business learns but somehow falls a little back when it comes to implementation. Start by developing a custom web scraping solution to extract data from eCommerce websites for SWOT analysis. It offers eCommerce merchants with a concrete and pragmatic view of it’s standing within its niche. It will help provide a clearer picture of the marketplace conditions and provide insights whereby you can mitigate your weakness and build on your strengths to make a strategy that can take your business to the next level.

Real-time tracking of competitor prices

The global eCommerce market in the present day consists of more than millions of stores and that number is growing every day with the emergence of other businesses. In this case, manual tracking to assess and optimize product prices, w.r.t competitors are neither practical nor feasible. But is it possible to extract ecommerce web data in real time? Absolutely!! Use dynamic web scraping to build Competitor price tracking software or a chrome extension that minimizes time spent on monitoring competitor prices by providing a dynamic pricing strategy in real time.

Once you start with real-time price tracking you can see that how your competitors are changing their price over time, understand the trends and formulate strategies that will result in optimal price assessment and keep you on top of your competitors' pricing. By investing in a real-time price tracking web scraping solution, you can also be aware of the life cycle of the product, seasonal price variations, discount and promotion strategies and make accurate decisions that will enhance profits, cut costs and at the same time saves valuable time.

Sentiment analysis

“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all”. Now, what is most vital to a product’s success? Customer acceptance and loyalty. This is actually a fact that Sentiment Analysis can actually power any eCommerce website. Every single day, millions of users gather on different social platforms to express their views on various products and services. This data is what we call sentiment data and this sentiment data is what businesses can leverage to improve their eCommerce strategy. This readily available social data can be scraped and used to provide valuable information to the eCommerce merchants about customer pain points, new market possibilities in order to take actionable decisions with its help. This can also be used to personally cater to disappointed customers and market them one’s own product and services.

Predictive analytics