Amazon is undoubtedly the world’s largest online retailer. More than 12 million products are sold on Amazon. In addition, there are more than 206 million people around the world visiting it every month. Given such a large volume of visitors and products, many retailers strive hard to improve their online presence above the stiff competition in Amazon.
Web scraping can help gain valuable information from Amazon: product reviews, product prices, top sellers, etc. As such, it allows retailers to gain useful business insights and eventually increase profit. In this article, I will walk you through how to monitor your business with an Amazon scraper.
Example 1: Monitor Product Reviews
As a retailer, feedbacks from customers are always useful. From their words in the reviews, emails, or even phone calls, you could understand their expectations, shopping experience, and complaints. Therefore we can improve the service to meet their experience.
Now one of the most popular methods to analyze the feedback is through NLP technique. After scraping product reviews, you can analyze the frequency of each word in comments about the product and fine-tune the marketing strategies based on the voice of customers.
Example 2: Monitor Market Price
In order to compete with your rivals at an optimal price, you can monitor current online pricing and stay ahead of competitions. Being a start-up company, it is not sustainable to hire people for data scavenging and scraping, even if you are willing to spend on manual labor, it is still impossible to keep watching their products 24/7/365. With an automatic Amazon scraper, you could monitor any price fluctuation of other retailers in a real-time manner. Once they raise the price because of an inventory shortage, or they give out a discount as a promotion, you can change quickly in response to demand shift.
Example 3: Who Are the Top Sellers?
Businessmen should always know the latest industry news, which could provide them with the insight of how the market change. Knowing the information about the industry leads could increase their business opportunities potentially. The leads could be the top sellers on Amazon. If a new lead happens to be the competitors, retailers should check out their recent movement and figure out what are the changes that enhance their sales. If they provide complementary goods, you should contact them and try to discuss whether they could have some co-operation opportunities.
There is other useful information we could scrape from Amazon and analyze to make better business strategies. But the first question would be how to scrape the data.
One way is to scrape with a programming language, there are various programming languages like Python, PHP, Java, and Beautiful soup you can choose from today, however, the learning curve is quite steep for people with no programming backgrounds. Even if you are a quick learner, the process to write the script could be quite tiresome and time-consuming. Living in this tech-savvy world, why not simply use a scraping tool to tackle your hunger for data?
When talking about scraping Amazon specifically, the ready-to-use JavaScript template wroten by the Octoparse engineers comes in handy, it can help you scrape basic product information from Amazon:
the product name, price, ASIN, images, descriptions, categories, shipping, delivery, customers reviewed products, ratings, number of reviews, Amazon bestseller lists, and page URLs.
All you need to do is type in the product name you want to scrape and Octoparse will take care of the rest. Octoparse also provides scheduled extraction and incremental extraction in the cloud, with which you can always get the freshest data on a regular basis.
Besides the task template, you can also use Octoparse to build a 100% customizable task in the built-in browser with several clicks. With the extracted data, you can get immense value to your company with a plethora of information with only a few clicks.
