Table of Contents
Introduction
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.
Building a Web Scraper for eCommerce Websites
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:
Getting Third-Party Scraping Tools
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 :
Installing Browser Extensions for Data Scraping
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.
Hiring a Web Scraping Developer
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.
Outsourcing eCommerce Scraping to Service Providers
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.
