Amazon is known as the biggest Internet-based retailer in the world in terms of total sales and market capitalization. This eCommerce platform contains massive data that is critical to online businesses. In this article, I listed 7 reasons why people scrape data from Amazon.
Collect data on competing products
One of the greatest ancient Chinese military strategists Sun Tzu said, “Knowing yourself and your enemy helps you win every war.” This saying works as well in business. Collecting competing products’ data helps a company develop proper strategies and make the right decisions.
Collect data of products ranking first on a page
How to make more sales is always a concern of all businessmen. For Amazon dealers, the best way to make more sales is to have their products appear on a page of the most relevant search.
To do this, they need to understand the algorithm that Amazon applies to calculate product rankings. Having the data of products placed in the front row, Amazon dealers can find elements that affect product ranking. By careful observation and data analysis, they should be able to know the weights of each ranking factor.
Collect information from top reviewers
Product review plays an important role in Amazon’s ranking formula, but how to invite more people to write reviews remains to be a question.
On Amazon, there is a page listing the top 10k customer reviewers. Whenever a new product comes out, Amazon dealers can invite them to do some reviews for their products.
However, copying and pasting repeatedly for over 1,000 pages would take lots of time and labor costs. To accomplish this job, you can take advantage of web scraping tools like Octoparse. They can help scrape data from the web.
(P.S. Inviting reviewers to do reviews violates the rules of Amazon. Amazon dealers should weigh on the advantages and disadvantages)
Collect reviews of their own products
A business should always know how its products are doing on the market. One way to see its products’ performance is to study products reviews and do sentiment analysis. There are positive, neutral, and negative reviews. With the data of products reviews in hand, Amazon dealers would be able to decide what they should do to improve their products, customer service, etc.
Collect customer profiles
Every business has its target niche, and so does an E-commerce business. However, unlike other lead generation-based business, customer profiles are well-protected by Amazon. Amazon dealers switch strategies to collect profiles of customers who have bought their products. By studying their shopping habits, dealers can plan different sets of product combos for them, thereby increasing sales.
Collect data over the market
Some Amazon dealers have great resources for manufacturers. To make good use of it, they may make more products and sell them on Amazon. However, it’s unclear what kind of product to manufacture so that they can make more sales and generate more revenue. To find out what kinds of products are the most demanded, Amazon dealers collect data over the market to study what is sold the most. Then, they can make good use of their manufacturing resources.
Customers use data to compare online stores
An E-commerce platform contains a variety of products, and it’s common that customers to want to do a comparison and filter out the bad ones. This process would become easier if the information regarding the product, such as pricing, was extracted into structured data formats such as Excel, JSON, CSV. Data extraction tools like Octoparse can scrape the data required and put it into excel sheets, which can be further analyzed.
