eCommerce Web Scraping – Download Product Data from Ecommerce Websites

Relative data extraction and analysis from any website through an automated method, is more than important to stay competitive in the eCommerce world.

Scraper bots and various tools provided by web scraping providers are mainly used for this purpose. But if you are a coder, you can build a custom scraper by yourself.

So, there are several ways of product data extraction that differ in terms of pricing and usability. In this article, we’re going to reveal what kind of methods are used for eCommerce website project download and which one you can choose for your project.

A web scraper is an automated customized tool that enables a quick product data extraction tailored to focus on your specific business requirements. This method is highly popular among those who are technically skilled and have pretty good knowledge of programming. But even if you are a newbie, there are various easy-to-use tools and useful sources that may help you with self-service scraping.

Python with its BeautifulSoup framework is highly recommended for building your own scraper. So, if you are more or less familiar with Python, start with it.

Still, there are other programming languages with third-party libraries that can be really helpful in eCommerce scraping. Here is a short list:

• PHP
• Node.js
• Ruby
• C++
• R

Parsehub, Mozenda, Octoparse, Scrapy, Diffbot, and many other web crawling tools can help you with product data extraction from eCommerce web pages.

These high-end tools are coming with extra features, allowing to download the unstructured product data quickly and efficiently. There are various options of web scraping tools, so before jumping in purchasing the one, it is really important to study the web pages of your competitors, make some research, and after that make your best choice in terms of pricing and customer services.

The main factors that should be considered when choosing the right eCommerce scraping tool are listed below :

• Scalability
• Quality of the product data scraped
• Anti-scraping techniques
• Transparent pricing
• Customer support

These tools act as browser extensions and enable you to run the scraping tasks right from your browser while searching the internet.

Web scraper extensions automatically copy and paste product data while you are searching manually through web pages, and help to perform a thorough scrape of product data from eCommerce web sources. Web scraper from webscraper.io and DataMiner from dataminer.io are among the most popular extensions to use.

In case you are not skilled enough to parse and download data from eCommerce websites, you can always hire a freelance web scraping developer with the required product data crawling and mining skills.

There are several benefits to this alternative approach. First, such professionals are experts in their field and know all the nuances. Scraping experts know all the essential techniques and can provide you with the quality product data scraping services according to your business needs. You can find your scraping expert on freelance job platforms like Upwork, Peopleperhour, Toptal, Fiverr, etc. Keep in mind that you should choose a web scraping developer based on professional experience, reviews, and recommendations.

A really competitive option is to outsource web data scraping for your business to proficient data scraping service providers. They offer the best solutions and have highly experienced teams of web scraping developers, data analysts, and customer care.

They know how to download data from websites of any type and any structure, especially when it comes to eCommerce websites. The professional QA team involved in the web scraping process will assure your data quality and through manual and automated ways. You can trust them to extract tones of eCommerce web pages to get high-quality structured data and to make sophisticated decisions.

Like any other website, you can scrape eCommerce sites. You can write your own scraper on python, PHP, or C++ if you have the skills. You can also use third-party scraping software or special browser extensions.

There are many web scrapers of different power and functionality, and some are better suited for working with e-commerce sites. Check out the following products: Parsehub, Mozenda, Octoparse, Scrapy, Diffbot, 80legs, and Import.io.

E-commerce scraping is used for the following purposes: monitoring competitors’ prices, tracking the product range that competitors offer, the popularity of products or product categories in online stores, the frequency of mentioning products or brands, etc. All this data can be used to build your own marketing campaign.

Once you decide to outsource eCommerce website scraping, keep in mind that at DataOx we are always happy to help you with data mining, real-time scraping at a large scale, automated scraping, and web harvesting, as well as with professional advice and consultancy. Schedule a free consultation with our expert and delegate your web scraping responsibilities to professionals!