We all know that data is the new oil and if you are working in the marketing department, analytics would be a must-have skill for you to be a qualified professional. This is true especially for e-commerce marketers. The hidden truth of your e-commerce business is just behind the data scattered on the web pages. How do they use e-commerce data to fuel their business?
There are more you should know about prices
Most of the e-commerce companies scrape price information from e-commerce web pages. Price information of competing products is so important that all brands and retailers won’t be happy to miss it. However, the same set of price data can render different values.
1 MAP Compliance
To avoid price war and unhealthy competition among retailers and distributors, brands have to set a Minimum Advertised Price so that all parties agree not to sell or advertise above this price. By scraping from e-commerce web pages, brands can get real-time prices of their retailers and distributors across multiple e-commerce platforms. By getting fresh new price data, they get instant alarm when the MAP is violated. That’s how brands monitor the MAP and protect their brand reputation.
2 Market Competitiveness
For most cases, price can sway consumers’ decisions – to buy one product instead of another. In order to maintain their price competitiveness in the competing market, brands have to invest in price monitoring. If the same product on your shelf is sold at much lower price on others, you should be alert and look into it.
3 Discount tracking
Holiday marketing is a sprint competition for e-commerce runners. Marketers always rack their brains to find an effective and compelling marketing strategy to harvest the most e-commerce buyers. By scraping prices on ecommerce websites, you can track your competitors pricing strategy – how much discount they are giving to their consumers during the holiday marketing season.
What stock data can tell you
4 Stock level and popularity
Sometimes, stock data can tell you how the product sells. You can track the sales number by monitoring the stock number and hence gain a sight of how popular it is on the market. Scraping stock data on a regular basis, that is to use scheduled web scraping, can give you fresh data at whatever interval you want. How the stock changes over time will be easily spotted by just comparing sets of data.
5 Regional availability
For physical retailers, using web scraping to scrape ecommerce data based on geographic location can be a tricky way to know the product availability for the neighborhood. Many physical brands and retailers are also offering direct-to-consumer online platforms so if you can see their stock data for a specific location on web pages, you can scrape it. Offer what is not available from your competitors, this gives consumers a reason to come to you.
>Read the customer story: Web Scraping Manages Inventory Tracking
How web scraping helps with your product ranking
Many SEO marketers use Octoparse, a web scraping tool, to implement SERP monitoring, that is to monitor their web page rankings under certain queries. This is a transferable skill that can work as well for ecommerce marketers.
6 Monitor your Key Word Page Rankings!
>Watch video: 4 SEO Hacks Using Web Scraping
When you sell on an ecommerce platform, how to get into the sight of your customers is always the right question to ask. Ecommerce websites like Amazon have over 2 million sellers. How can your product stand out from millions of listings?
If you are an Octoparse user, you would know that the software can interact with the web page you are scraping from. Just enter a list of queries and it can automatically search them one by one and scrape search results accordingly. With this data, you can monitor the Key Word Page Ranking and see who is the fore-runner and where you are located.
Better keep you listing up, and get alert when it drops – go talk to your marketer and find solutions for optimization.
7 Monitor your Category Page Rankings!
Some consumers go online with a shopping list, while some just surf casually on the ecommerce page. Category Page Ranking is your chance to present your products to this group of casual shoppers.
These ranking monitoring are routine jobs for many ecommerce marketers. If you are running an ecommerce business, watch your competitors as they watch you!
Listen to your customers
Due to accessibility or cost of time, not every business gets opportunities to talk to their customers. If you can’t talk to them, listen to them. To win back disappointed customers is way more difficult than to keep them when they are still interested.
8 E-commerce reviews reveal
Reviews are the most direct way to get your customers’ feedback and you should never turn a deaf ear on them. Their complaints somewhat shed light on how you should improve your products and services and their compliments put a finger on what is your strength, which you should definitely cling to.
If you’re finding a data service for your project, Octoparse data service is a good choice. We work closely with you to understand your data requirement and make sure we deliver what you desire. Talk to Octoparse data expert now to discuss how web scraping services can help you maximize efforts.
9 Conversation on social media
People share and talk to each other on social media. That is where you can see their genuine attitude towards different brands and products. Octoparse offers not only ecommerce web scraping templates, but also templates to scrape from social media. Not only the ecommerce industry, many investors and professionals in other fields get social media data to carry out sentiment analysis.
Conversation on social media gives clues to how the crowd would act. By looking into reviews in your store, you get ideas about how to maintain your strength and make improvement; while looking into conversation on social media, you can keep track of where the trend is going.
Conclusions
Ecommerce websites are the most frequently scraped websites. Although not every ecommerce business has web scraping experts or a data analytic team, most of them are trying to keep track of the ecommerce market. Octoparse is offering services to help ecommerce businesses of all sizes to get the needed data:
- Ready-to-use ecommerce templates for non-coders
- Customized crawler building service
- One-stop data service
Go talk to our support team if you are ready to get ahead in the ecommerce competition!
