Product Data is the variety of internet data that is seeing the greatest level of demand from e-commerce companies. Product data has a variety of applications, including price intelligence and seller experiences.

What strategic approaches do e-commerce product data support?

These are the main use cases for this data from the standpoint of e-commerce organizations:

1. Price Intelligence
2. Compliance
3. Enhancing the Vendors’ Experience
4. Market Analysis
5. Competitor Intelligence
6. Internal Data Obstacles
7. Vendor Management

Following this, we will provide a high-level overview of each of these use cases and the questions that they contribute to the solution, but in separate use case articles, we will go into much greater detail.

1. Price Intelligence

If your pricing strategy is in any way related to that of your competitors (for example, you always match the price, or you constantly want to be one penny cheaper than them, etc.), then you need to gather their prices.

2. Compliance

This is more commonly seen in the context of brands that wish to guarantee compliance with MAP (minimum advertised pricing), branding rules, and marketing copy. Other factors to take into account are the ease with which customers can locate products using search terms or category navigation.

3. Enhancing the Vendors’ Experience

The uploading process can be sped up, and the quality of the information can be improved if you pre-populate your database with products your sellers would be interested in selling. This will make it easier for your sellers. In addition, suggest a selling price by basing it on the data of your competitors. Another rich source of information may be found in the form of customer reviews; for example, do you receive more positive evaluations than your competitors do for the same product? If that’s the case, what is it that you do particularly well?

4. Market Analysis

What kinds of goods or vendors are currently popular, where are the holes in the market for those goods, and do you have a dominant stock position that you can use to your advantage?

5. Competitor Intelligence

Who is entering your market (by area, category, etc.), who is succeeding in your market, and who may you possibly learn from to improve your own performance?

6. Internal Data Obstacles

The elimination of all the internal barriers to data access within an organization is one of the most unexpected applications of this technology. Surprisingly, many clients actually scrape data from their own websites in order to circumvent the variety of internal roadblocks that stand in the way of accessing data and to make certain that the data will more closely resemble the organization of product data on target websites.

7. Vendor Management

Are your suppliers giving you access to the full scope of their product offerings, as well as the most affordable pricing and the highest possible quality collateral?

How may I obtain information regarding products sold through online retailers?

A computer can be thought of as a simplified version of a website visitor in that it can visit a webpage and collect the specific data that you require. It is not very difficult to do, at least not until you start scraping e-commerce websites for 20,000 things per hour on a daily basis.

When we look at the process of acquiring these data, we see that it consists of multiple parts. Each of these steps, depending on a number of criteria, may be handled in-house, or they may be contracted out to a third party.

• Determine the pages from which you must collect data
• Visit the pages and gather the information
• Take the data and convert it into a format you can use (e.g, JSON, CSV, etc.)
• Refine the data (e.g. deduping, matching, cleaning, etc.)
• Utilize BI tools to visualize the data (not always)
• Integrate the data with your company’s systems

The aforementioned is obviously simplified and ignores many complexities, particularly how challenging it can be to obtain the raw data in the first place. Many well-known e-commerce businesses have sophisticated algorithms to ensure their websites are always available; however, these measures may unintentionally obstruct legal and ethical web scraping. This is just another reason to always scrape e-commerce websites legally, sustainably, and without having any detrimental effects on the target sites.

Frequently asked questions:

What is scraping in e-commerce?

E-commerce scraping is the process of obtaining publicly accessible e-commerce product data from online markets or independent stores.

Which technique is used for extracting a large amount of data from websites?

A method for gathering vast amounts of data from websites on the internet is called web data extraction (also known as web scraping, web harvesting, screen scraping, etc.).

What is scaling in e-commerce?

Scalability in e-commerce refers to the capacity of your e-commerce platform to expand to meet the demands of your company’s online expansion.