Shopify is an all-in-one commerce platform to start, run, and grow a business, especially an online business. As of January 2022, Shopify supported over 1.7 million merchants to manage their stores worldwide. That makes Shopify a significant player in the e-commerce landscape. Data from Shopify stores is the gold mine to understand market trends. Many tools now seek to solve the pain point of collecting Shopify, and Niche Scraper is one of the best. What can Niche Scraper do for your business? And what is the best Niche Scraper alternative? Let’s find out the answer in this post.
What is Niche Scraper
When you hear the name of Niche Scraper, you might expect it to be a professional web scraping tool. Well, to some extent, it’s a scraper. But it provides more information than just scraped data. It’s a tool to reveal winning products with a research bot. There are five main features of Niche Scraper, including Product Scraper, Hand Picked, Store Analysis, Ad Spy, and Video Ad Marker.
The Product Scraper can analyze millions of products on Shopify and help you research your competition. Hand Picked can let you monitor other Shopify stores to understand their best-selling items, store popularity, traffic data, etc. Meanwhile, Hand Picked provides product information, recommended selling prices, product costs, and more. Ad Spy and Video Ad Marker can help you analyze ad performance and quickly create product videos. Whatever feature you use, scraped data is the foundation. Web scraping makes everything happen on Niche Scraper.
Octoparse – the Best Alternative of Niche Scraper
Talking about web scraping, Octoparse is an expert with no doubts. It’s an easy-to-use web scraping tool that is designed for anyone regardless of coding. That’s why it can be the Niche Scraper alternative. While using Octoparse to scrape Shopify stores, you can quickly create a scraper with the auto-detection feature and schedule the task to grant the latest product information frequently. The scraped data can be the raw material for price monitoring, customer sentiment analysis, data-driven decisions, etc.
Four Steps to Build a Shopify Scraper
If you don’t have Octoparse now, please download Octoparse and install it on your device first. To log in to the software, you’ll need an account. You can sign up for an account for free or login with your Google or Microsoft account.
Step 1: Create a new task for scraping Shopify
Copy the link to any Shopify you want to extract data, then paste it into the search bar on Octoparse. Then, click “Start” to create a new task.
Step 2: Auto-detect data in Shopify stores
Octoparse’s built-in browser will load the page in seconds. Next, click “Auto-detect webpage data” in the Tips panel. Then Octoparse will scan the page and detect all extractable data for you. You can preview this data on the page, or the “Data Preview” panel at the bottom and remove unwanted ones.
Step 3: Create and modify the workflow
After you’ve selected all the needed data, click “Create workflow.” Then a workflow will be auto-generated on your right-hand side. The flow chart presents every action of the scraper, and you can click on each action to check if it works properly. Also, you can remove any unwanted steps or add needed action to it.
Step 4: Run the task and export the data
Click on the Run button once you’ve double-checked all the details. Next, select to run the task on your device or run it on Octoparse cloud servers. When the running is completed, export the scraped data to local files like Excel or a database like Google Sheets for further use.
With Octoparse, you can scrape different Shopify stores. This data is valuable for conducting marketing research, such as monitoring competitors, tracking product prices, analyzing customer sentiments, etc., that can contribute to data-driven decisions and smarter business strategies.
Octoparse vs. Niche Scraper: Pros and Cons
Niche Scraper is the e-commerce growth platform that can provide you with in-depth information on successful stores, and give you winning products. However, it’s just a one-man-shop. And you’re not able to customize the scraper based on your particular needs. Thus, your competitors might have access to the same products or stores you do and then apply similar strategies to yours to their business. In addition, you cannot scale with the suppliers that Niche Scraper recommends which means the available Shopify stores and products are limited.
On the other hand, Octoparse excels at processing websites written in various languages and frameworks. Users can build scrapers based on their detailed needs and schedule scrapers to launch automatically and get up-to-date data frequently. Also, there is a list of preset templates on Octoparse. With templates, you can grab data from most mainstream platforms by filling up several required parameters rather than building scrapers yourself.
However, you might meet some challenges while using web scraping tools, such as IP blocking and CAPTCHA. Octoparse can solve such problems with features like IP rotation, IP proxies, and CAPTCHA solving to maintain your web scraping task running in a smooth mode.
Compared to Octoparse with Niche Scraper, Niche Scraper is a one-stop tool to find the right product to sell. But it can only analyze Shopify stores it recommends, and you can not get the scraped data in bulk for further cleansing and analyzing. In contrast, Octoparse can provide one-hand data from most Shopify stores and other online shopping platforms. Thus, you can get the raw materials that can reflect trends of the entire online marketplace. You can employ these materials for more diverse purposes besides identifying the next hit and eventually benefit from market research based on data.
Wrap up
With Niche Scraper, you can identify products with a high potential to sell on Shopify. But we all know that many factors can affect the sales performance of a product, and the e-commerce market is rapidly changing. Keeping an eye on Shopify is not the same as knowing the entire market. Octoparse is a tool that can offer you the data to get a deep insight into the whole market. You can pull data from almost every online shopping platform to catch market trends and bring your business to the next level with its help. Try Octoparse now. You’ll be impressed by how powerful this tool is!
