In this blog, we will discuss three benefits of large-scale and enterprise eCommerce web scraping, three disadvantages, and finally, the best enterprise web scraping team to work with.
Large-scale web scraping, also known as data harvesting, is utilized by a number of companies that require big data and is especially useful for eCommerce applications. There are several benefits that come with large-scale web scraping. Firstly, it helps businesses to access an abundance of data in a cost-effective and efficient manner. This means that you can gain an exact understanding of your customer base, competitors and industry trends in a much more comprehensive way than is possible with manual data entry. Secondly, it allows for faster decision-making and insights into trends, which we will discuss shortly. Finally, web scraping can be used in the e-commerce field to improve revenue, by conducting market research, price monitoring and other marketing endeavours.
Benefits of Large-Scale eCommerce Web Scraping
Web scraping is great for efficiency, but what are some pros of using large-scale or enterprise web scraping for your eCommerce business?
1. Market and Competitor Research
Large-scale eCommerce web scraping can get you large amounts of competitor product details, prices, reviews and more. With these data points your company can make informed decisions for future products, or adjustments for current offerings. By having large amounts of competitor and market data, your business can set itself apart from its competitors; resulting as a clear winner between them all. Your business can also utilize the scraped data with machine learning algorithms to make better e-commerce predictions and recommendations for your customers.
2. Price Monitoring
One of the best things you can do with large-scale e-commerce web scraping is price monitoring. In fact, we also wrote a guide on enterprise price monitoring in 2023 with web scraping! By having large amounts of competitor data in real time, your business can price its products competitively and will increase its traffic and checkout rates. People care a lot about price, especially for commodities that have an average market price. By improving your data strategy, and having the prices of your major competitor’s products, your business can win over more customers from your competitors.
3. Sentiment Analysis
Large-scale e-commerce web scraping can be used for sentiment analysis, which once again gives your more insights into your company’s or competitor’s products. This data can be used to identify trends and can provide valuable analysis that you can use to improve your content strategy, marketing campaigns, customer service initiatives and more. In fact, large-scale web scraping can help automate your customer service as well, improving the overall sentiment around your business or brand. Aside from scraping e-commerce websites, you can also scrape Reddit, and other social media platforms, or review websites to get a better understanding of what your customers are thinking about.
Cons of Large-Scale eCommerce Web Scraping
Although web scraping is amazing and makes your life much easier, there are a lot of obstacles in large-scale web scraping.
1. Legal and Ethical Issues
Web scraping can be legal, however, it depends on what you’re scraping. You should ensure the data you’re scraping is public-facing and does not require a login. Private information is illegal to scrape and should not be conducted. Ethics is also something you should consider when web scraping, as large-scale web scraping can slow down servers if done excessively.
It’s important to work with an enterprise web scraping company, to ensure you’re ethically and legally sourcing your e-commerce data.
2. Getting Blocked
Running into blocks is a major issue when large-scale e-commerce web scraping. It’s easy for a company to detect custom-written web scraping scripts, as they often web scrape in an obvious manner on the target’s website. Sometimes there are hidden javascript files that detect most web scrapers. Also, a lot of websites will send CAPTCHA blocks, which can be hard for your custom script to bypass. Finally, you may even get IP or user-agent blocked which stops your browser from loading any more pages from the target’s website. This can be frustrating when trying to scrape a large number of products for your e-commerce company.
3. Scaling Issues
Finally, another disadvantage of large-scale e-commerce web scraping is running into scaling issues. This can happen with some web scraping software or even Python web scraping scripts. The issue with these scripts are you can easily get blocked as discussed earlier, but it’s also hard to paginate through hundreds or thousands of e-commerce product pages. That is why we recommend working with a dedicated team, such as ParseHub Plus, that has helped a number of corporations with their large-scale e-commerce web scraping. Your ParseHub Plus team can scrape thousands if not millions of pages for your business in a managed manner allowing you to focus on your business… and not on web scraping or data harvesting.
Best Enterprise eCommerce Web Scraper
Ultimately, many businesses utilize enterprise or large scale web scraping. It’s great for e-commerce-focused businesses, as you can gain large amounts of data from a number of competitors. With this data, your business can make more informed business decisions, such as pricing adjustments and new product developments. Insights into trends and sentiment can also help guide your e-commerce strategy and improve business performance like never before.
ParseHub Plus takes care of your eCommerce web scraping all the way from sourcing to the actual scraping and even the data validation. Our managed team ensures all the data being sent to your business, either through spreadsheets or via our API, is a hundred percent accurate and ready to be used for analysis or decision-making.
Are you ready to improve your enterprise-level e-commerce big data efforts in 2023? Book a call with ParseHub Plus to get your free sample data export!
Happy Scraping!
