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The Easiest Way to Extract Data from E-Commerce Websites

Tuesday, January 19, 2021

Retailers online want to extract data from e-commerce websites to gain insights of what’s trending these days. But given a large swath of product information is often trapped inside web pages and things on the web are super dynamic (Information keeps changing more often than you think). Extracting product data from such e-commerce websites is extremely painful if it’s to be done at a regular interval.

And thus people often doubt whether they can extract the data they want in such big players (Amazon, Walmart, eBay, etc.). Below are the questions that people often query:

Why do I miss data when extracting ecommerce data?
Why does it often crash when extracting ecommerce data?
How could I crawl data across multiple pages (like eBay)?
What if the location data is not visible?
Can I extract real-time data within a few simple steps?

The Easiest Way to Extract Data from E-commerce Websites

Without powerful techniques or programming skill, extracting data would quite challenge your time, resources and even creates a mess to be resolved on a daily basis. But such problems could be solved with several tips. Before knowing how to make it, we could learn the hidden rules of websites.

Products sold on the same platform often have similar structures, which have a lot of information in a similar format. Let’s take Amazon for example.

1. Ecommerce Data format

You could find that similar products are shown in the same formats and that's how we build templates and implement auto-detection feature for the convenient use of our users.

2. Ecommerce URL format (query)

You could also find the similar rule on the URL. Such features can be found in many e-commerce websites and it makes you get the data easily by setting a loop or changing the URL. This is capitalized by Octoparse to build template tasks (Amazon as an example) where our users can input the keywords and get the needed ecommerce data right away.