E-commerce is a field that will always be competitive. We’ve covered a number of topics related to data scraping from particular E-commerce sites like Amazon, Shopify, eBay, etc. However, the reality is that many retailers might have various marketing strategies on different platforms, even just for a single item. If you want to compare products’ info on diverse platforms, scraping Google Shopping will help you save a lot of time.
Known as Product Listing Ads before, Google Shopping is an online service provided by Google that allows consumers to search for and compare products across online shopping platforms. Google Shopping allows users to easily compare the details of various products and their prices from different providers. This post will show what it offers and how you can extract data from Google Shopping.
What You Can Scrape from Google Shopping
Google Shopping is essentially a price comparison site. When you search for an item on Google Shopping, you’ll get a list of results, just as on other online shopping sites. You can easily get the product name, brand, size, item price, total price, etc. Along with the basic information, it also shows the sellers of each product. If a single item is available in more than one shop, you can compare prices from these shops directly on Google Shopping. This type of data is ready to be scraped as well.
Why scrape Google Shopping
Scraping Google Shopping data has obvious advantages. The biggest benefit is that you can save time by gathering all the prices on a single website rather than visiting multiple websites and conducting information searches. In addition to this, data from Google Shopping can engage your market research in price monitoring and competitor analysis.
Price Monitoring
As mentioned before, Google Shopping provides a service of price comparison. Customers look through this website for a perfect deal. And industry professionals like you can see how competitors price their products. Monitoring the dynamic prices will help you create a winning pricing strategy.
Competitor Analysis
On Google Shopping, you can collect many parameters of products along with prices. Data like product size, materials, colors, etc. This information can help you better understand your competitors’ positions, strengths, and weaknesses. Eventually, you can better position yourself in the market.
Is it legal to scrape Google Shopping
Scraping data is not hacking because it only collects public information. So, data scraping does not break the law in most situations. But we still highly recommend you read the platforms’ terms of service before launching a scraper to extract data to avoid any unexpected unpleasantness.
Does Google Shopping have APIs
Google used to provide a Search API for Shopping. But Google shut it down on September 16, 2013. This decision scared a lot of retailers at that moment because they might lose their overviews of the market without this tool. There is currently a Content API for Shopping on Google that enables retailers to control and keep track of their advertisements and goods. But for data extraction, you might need other tools to achieve this goal.
Scrape Product Info from Google Shopping without Coding
Talking about web data extraction, many people might assume that web data extraction requires coding expertise. With the advancement of web scraping tools, this viewpoint might be altered. Now people can easily extract data with these tools regardless of coding experience.
Here, we’ll walk you through the process of using Octoparse to scrape Google Shopping data. Octoparse is an easy-to-use tool designed for everyone to extract data. You can download and install it on your device for your future data scraping journey.
If it’s your first time using Octoparse, you can sign up for a free account to log in. Then you can follow the steps below to scrape product information from Google Shopping with Octoparse!
Step 1: Create a new task
Copy and paste the target URL into the search bar on Octoparse, and click “Start” to create a new task. After a few seconds, the page will finish loading in Octoparse’s built-in browser.
Step 2: Auto-detect Google Shopping
When the page has completed loading, click “Auto-detect webpage data” in the Tips panel. It’ll allow Octoparse to scan the page and highlight extractable data. You can quickly check if Octoparse makes a good “guess” on your desired data on the page. Meanwhile, you can preview these data fields at the bottom and modify them as needed by deleting or renaming them.
Step 3: Create and modify the workflow
It’s time to establish a workflow after confirming that every desired data field has been chosen. Click “Create workflow”, then a workflow will show up on the right-hand side. It presents every step of this scraper. You can check if each step runs properly by clicking on it in the workflow.
Step 4: Run the task and export scraped data
Once you are sure that all the information is correct, click “Run” to launch the scraper. Octoparse provides you with two options to run the task. If you’re working on a small project or need a quick run, running it on your local device might be what you need. By contrast, you can hand over the task to Octoparse’s cloud servers. Select an option, then Octoparse will take care of the rest.
Once the task has completed running, you can export data as Excel, CSV, JSON, etc., or directly to a database like Google Sheets.
If you still have questions about the steps, you can move to the Scrape product info from Google Shopping page to learn more details.
Wrap-up
With Google Shopping, you can easily spot market trends. You can use it to collect data about your target market, consumers, and competitors. It offers information on so many distinct platforms, in particular, that you might have to spend a lot of time gathering the same type of data from several websites. With only FOUR steps, you can scrape Google Shopping with Octoparse. This tool is also available on a wide range of e-commerce websites. Please check out the articles below to find out more guides.
