Introduction
Can you imagine how much data is present on the internet? In 2020, the internet had 64.2 zettabytes of data. Considering that one zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes, one can imagine the amount of data available. As more people use the internet, the information only keeps growing. It is likely to be 180 zb by 2025.
Businesses have realised that this information is useful. It could be used to give better products to customers by understanding their behavior. That’s why data-sourcing techniques like web scraping have become immensely popular. Through these techniques, businesses find relevant information from this enormous amount of data.
E-commerce businesses can especially benefit from web scraping services. Let’s understand what web scraping is and how web scraping tools like Rubick.ai would help them grow their businesses.
Web Scraping: An Effective Method of Sourcing Data
Most of the information online is stored on multiple websites. It is usually found in HTML format. Businesses need to collect it and convert it into a format that we can understand. However, finding relevant data from this sea of information is not easy. That’s why techniques like web scraping were developed.
Through web scraping, you can get huge amounts of data about anything that you like. Once you put in the instructions, a web scraping tool will collect relevant data about that topic. The tool collects relevant data from everywhere on the internet.
It takes the raw data and uses it to create reports and spreadsheets that will be extremely useful and valuable to businesses. These tools make use of artificial intelligence, so that humans need to pay minimum attention to them.
Web scraping is a data sourcing method that collects such HTML data and converts it into structured formats like spreadsheets. This is done with the help of artificial intelligence.
How Does This Method Work?
Data sourcing tools can be divided into two parts- crawlers and scrapers. A crawler is an algorithm designed to go on to different websites to search for data. The data found by the crawler is extracted using a scraper.
What is data source? Any website that you use to gather the data is called a data source. You need to provide the URLs of the websites that you wish to scrape. These AI tools search the HTML code of the website to find related data from it. Most importantly, it turns the data into a format that the user will find easy to understand. For example, you will need help understanding the data collected from website codes. You will prefer to work with a spreadsheet instead.
The easiest way to use this method is to buy an AI web scraping tool like Rubick. If you know how to code, you can write a code yourself to gather information from the internet.
How Can E-Commerce Businesses Use This Technique?
E-commerce platforms also need relevant data from the internet. They may need customer data and product data to make better decisions about their business. Data sourcing techniques like web scraping can be useful for collecting this data. Here are the possible benefits of web scraping for e-commerce businesses.
1. Competitor Research
E-commerce is a very competitive space. Multiple companies are competing to get the attention of the same customer. To succeed in this space, businesses need to know what their competitors are doing. They especially need to know the prices on competitor websites. Because most customers of these websites are price-sensitive.
Web scraping tools can collect data about competitors. They can find the pricing, their marketing campaigns, and information about their products. Using this data, e-commerce companies can develop their pricing and product strategy.
2. Tracking Product Performance
Information gathered through web scraping can help in tracking the performance of a particular product. Web scraping tools can collect customer reviews, feedback, likes, and preferences. Using customer feedback, these companies can make changes to their products to make them more appealing or useful. They can also design future marketing strategies based on the past performance of the products.
3. Forecasting Trends
If you wish to develop a plan for your e-commerce business, you need to estimate what the customers will demand in the future. Of course, it’s not possible to know every future trend. But when you have useful information, you can make more accurate predictions.
Especially for websites that sell clothing, makeup, or accessories, predicting future trends is essential. Their marketing, website design, and pricing decisions are all based on trends.
4. Designing Better Marketing Campaigns
Data-driven marketing efforts may have a higher possibility of success. Web scraping programs can extract the most relevant and recent information from the internet. This will allow you to create marketing initiatives that are in line with current trends. Data-driven marketing initiatives may help you attract high-quality leads to your website.
Challenges You May Face While Using Web Scraping
Web scraping can be extremely useful to businesses, but you may face several challenges while using the technique. Here are the major challenges you may come across and what you can do about them.
1. Maintaining good Data Quality
Companies are looking for high-quality data, not just any data. The data collected has to be relevant to the business. There should not be any mistakes or inaccuracies in it.
When the data collected is old, irrelevant, or simply inaccurate, it is ‘low-quality’. Using such data can lead to incorrect decisions. This can affect your sales, customer satisfaction, and conversion rates.
You can ensure data quality by using a trusted web scraping tool. Choose a tool with the ability to pick the best and most accurate data sources.
2. Collecting Data On a Large Scale
Imagine that an e-commerce company has hundreds of products listed on its website. Web scraping for this company would require collecting data from thousands of data sources. Plus, this data has to be factually correct and relevant. Gathering such a huge amount of data can be a challenge.
The best way to handle this is the use of artificial intelligence. AI web scraping tools can effectively collect data at a large scale without affecting its quality.
3. CAPTCHA and Website Protections
Websites use techniques like CAPTCHA to keep their data secure. Although web scraping is not against the law, companies do put up protections to avoid it. These website protections can create hurdles for web scrapers.
This problem can be solved by using advanced tools that can solve complex CAPTCHAs. AI tools like Rubick.ai’s PIM know how to surpass these security hurdles.
Web Scraping Through AI Tools
Imagine collecting relevant data from online sources manually. It would take someone days to even browse through the internet. Even if you decide to design a code for web scraping, it would be a time-consuming process. That’s why the best way to implement web scraping in your business is through a tool powered by artificial intelligence. These tools are designed to collect the most relevant data from hundreds of online sources. Plus, the data will be delivered to you in a simpler format, like a CSV file or a spreadsheet.
Web Scraping With Rubick.ai
PIM (Product Information Management) Suite is an AI-powered tool that can help businesses with their data sourcing needs. Through its exceptional web scraping capabilities, this tool can provide you with valuable product details, customer feedback, and recent market developments.
This tool can provide high-quality data that can help you make informed decisions. With this data, you can-
Improve your products based on customer feedback. Design attractive marketing campaigns based on customer preferences. Boost sales by improving your offerings. Improve your conversion rates by writing more relevant product descriptions, understanding the tastes and preferences of customers, and tailoring your products
This tool is not just a web scraping tool. It also helps in generating high-quality product descriptions that are SEO-friendly and well-written.
Conclusion
Web scraping can be useful for excelling at the e-commerce game. There is enormous data available online, and you can use it to take your business to the next level. Thanks to the recent developments in artificial intelligence, it’s easy to gather relevant data now. Through AI-powered tools, you can get useful information in a spreadsheet or a JSON file pretty quickly.
Tools like Rubick.ai’s Product Information Management Suite make web scraping seem easier. Instead of collecting the data manually, you can outsource the task to this powerful tool. It can collect customer data, product feedback, and market trends from diverse websites. With this useful data in hand, you can gain a competitive edge over the other e-commerce companies.
