Ecommerce Web Scraping Services?
How do you grow your eCommerce business? Become data-driven. In fact, many eCommerce businesses have already adopted a data-driven approach to growth. In the age of digitalization, most online activities are recorded on the internet, and data analysis sheds light on how we should conduct our business.
#1 Learn about your customers
Web scraping is the best way to gather web data. If you want to improve your customer experience, one of the ways is to collect your customers’ reviews and get a closer look at their grievances and complaints, which implies your customers’ needs and the weaknesses of your current products/services. Now you will know where you need to work on it and data will continue to give you feedback on the changes you have made.
Read more: Twitter Sentiment Analysis
#2 Keep an eye on your competitors
They are very likely doing the same, looking at your business. Web scraping is a brilliant technique that helps you get a head start. You can do this more efficiently and effectively with the help of web scraping. If you are a SaaS company, service review websites are one of the places you can learn about your competitors. If you are in the retail business, you may track the product information of certain brands on marketplaces like Amazon, eBay or Target.
Read about: Competitor Price Monitoring and 9 Ways Ecommerece Data Can Fuel Your Business
Web scraping can help you get web data easily. However, there are 3 things you should consider before choosing a web-scraping service!
3 Things to Consider Before Choosing Web Scraping Services
To bring things into a better perspective, we have decided to group these things into three classes: the product offered, service provided, and quality of data. These three things need to be carefully checked before choosing a web scraping service.
1. Product
Make sure you are choosing a web scraping service that is excellent in what they do. Web scraping could be challenging in some cases, and they must know how to handle problems such as anti-scraping systems. Many eCommerce websites have anti-scraping systems that could make web scraping difficult.
Scalability is another feature that must be considered in a web scraping service. Their web scraping product should help you rest assured that your website is safe from future lags. That is, as your data gets bigger, they shouldn’t decrease in their performance. They should have enough resources to cater to all your future data. In other words, a web scraping service must be scalable.
Read about: eBay Seller Getting Millions of Data with Web Scraping
When choosing a web scraping service, you should also consider the format in which they deliver data. The web scraping service should be able to deliver your data in the format you want. If you want your data in CSV, then go for web scraping that can be delivered in CSV. Or better still, go for a web scraping service that can deliver in many formats. If you want your data in another format, they will be able to deliver.
2. Service
Having considered the web scraping service product’s offering, you should also check the quality of their service. Transparency is key, and you should only consider a web scraping service that is transparent with its price. The pricing should be easy for anyone to understand. Ideally, a good web scraping service would have a pricing plan that accurately predicts your future cost without any hidden costs. Ultimately, you should avoid web scraping services with complex pricing plans.
Additionally, the customer service of web scraping must be a top factor to consider. You will likely have questions when handling your scraped data. Hence, you should only consider a web scraping service with working customer service. With this, you don’t have to waste time trying to figure out things yourself.
Read more about: Octoparse customer support
3. Data Quality
The quality of the data scraped should be another major criterion when choosing a web scraping service. The data scraped should be very accurate. You don’t want to gather false data that would end up being useless to your eCommerce business.
A good web scraping service should also guarantee quick delivery of data. They should be timely in their delivery. Also, when your website expands, your data becomes bigger. You need a web scraping service provider that scrapes data at high speeds. They should have the right technology that can keep up with your increasing data.
Read about: Researcher Gets Livestreaming Data for Academic Research
Top Web Scraping Tools Comparison
Before we wrap up this article, we’ve decided to compare Octoparse with 5 of the top web scraping service providers in the United States. This will give you a better idea of what to expect from eCommerce web scraping services and will make it easier for you to choose the right web scraping tool for you.
Octoparse vs import.io
Even though there are quite a number of differences between these 2 web crawlers, there are still some key similarities. One obvious similarity is that the two make use of the point-and-click principle in their user interface. Hence, users can select the data they want to scrape with clicks which makes the crawler-building process easier to handle for non-coders. Both can handle AJAX and JavaScript pages and can even scrape data behind a login.
However, the main difference we see between the two is that Octoparse can scrape data from interactive websites, which requires inputs from the users. This is because Octoparse has the technology that makes it possible for it to mimic human behavior when interacting with a website. For example, the crawler can input different queries and scrape from different sets of results. If you are scraping from complicated websites like eCommerce websites where consumers have to interact with the site, Octoparse may be a better choice.
Read about: Ecommerce scraper templates
Octoparse vs Mozenda
Similar to Octoparse cloud extraction, Mozenda offers its users cloud-based web scraping services. They both have a nice looking user interface that makes it pretty easy for anyone to start a web scraping project. Many people agree that Octoparse and Mozenda are way easier to use than most web scrapers. Both work majorly with Windows OS and can be a little tricky for Mac Users. However, while Octoparse has both Local and Cloud Scrape mode, Mozenda only features Cloud Scrape Mode. If you are scraping data on a large scale, cloud mode can get the scraping task done at a higher speed. In a local mode, the process of scraping can be visualized through the built-in browser.
If you want to study how the crawler works, local mode can help you get a glimpse of it visually on your browser. They both have similar data export formats, but Mozenda offers more formats for exporting scraped data. If you want the data in JSON or XML format, Mozenda can deliver in those formats.
Octoparse vs Parsehub
Parsehub is another web scraping service provider that is similar to Octoparse in terms of features. Like Octoparse, it has a very friendly user interface that makes it quite easy to use for non-programmers. However, Parsehub application is designed for various systems. It works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Octoparse also supports non-windows system.
They can both scrape data from complicated websites with a high user interaction. While Octoparse features both Cloud and Local Scrape Mode, Parsehub only has Cloud Scrape Mode. With Octoparse, you can scrape data visibly on your browser via Local Mode, and you can also scrape at a higher speed through the cloud via Cloud Mode. So, if you want both features, then you should choose Octoparse.
Octoparse vs Dexi.io
Dexi.io is one of those web scraping tools that can be difficult for non-programmers to use. It is a very powerful tool that has more advanced features than Octoparse. In other words, it has different robots for different web scraping tasks as well as a master robot feature that is capable of carrying out many tasks.
Dexi.io gives you the option of designing your own powerful robot to carry out very specific tasks. But like I said, it’s not easy to do. Octoparse on the other hand allows you to build your own web crawler with more ease. Ultimately, Dexi.io is great, but if you have no programming knowledge, it’s better you go for something that is more user friendly like Octoparse.
Read about: Extract Data with Auto-detection
Octoparse vs Content Grabber
Content Grabber is another web scraping tool that can deal with complex websites with high user interaction. Its software application is mainly Windows-based.
To use Contract Grabber, you would need to be familiar with HTML and HTTP. However, Octoparse still makes it easy for you to scrape data without any knowledge of programming. They both have a click user interface where you can browse a website and click on data elements in the order of how you want it collected. In all, if you have no knowledge of HTML and HTTP, Octoparse can be your first choice.
Final Thoughts
Don’t be hasty when you are deciding on the web scraping services to use. Take your time and make sure that all the necessary boxes are checked. Just go for web scraping service providers that are capable of meeting your needs. And hopefully, with all the information in this article, I’m confident that you would make the best choice.
If you’re looking for a data service for your project, Octoparse data service is a good choice. We work closely with you to understand your data requirements and make sure we deliver what you desire. Talk to Octoparse data expert now to discuss how web scraping services can help you maximize your efforts.
