Almost every player in the eCommerce industry knows about the importance of web scraping eCommerce websites for competitive intelligence. For many, it’s a necessity and a proven method for an eCommerce business to get in line with its industry.

When used for competitive intelligence, scraping eCommerce websites will allow you to gather information such as product data, reviews, tracking prices, and more valuable information, which could improve your business, marketing, and pricing strategies.

What is eCommerce Web Scraping?

Scraping eCommerce websites is quite similar to the standard and more well-known web scraping.
It allows you to extract structured and unstructured data from eCommerce websites, convert it into a specific format, and store it for later processing and analysis.

Web scraping is one of the easiest methods to audit your eCommerce competition. It will allow you to gather information on your competitors affordably and quickly.

What is Competitive Intelligence?

Competitive intelligence is another form of market research, but for an immediate to short-term implementation. It means exploring and understanding what happens outside your business, to assist in becoming more industry-ready and aware of the challenges and opportunities presented to you.

When practiced right, competitive intelligence can help you discover trends and business opportunities by observing your market and competitors’ activities. The gathered information is then analyzed to make efficient and effective strategic decisions.

How Competitive Intelligence Works

Competitive intelligence gives you the ability to collect and use data effectively and ethically while affecting your company’s competitive advantage.

With competitive intelligence, you can surpass the typical way of knowing and understanding your business rivals.

It is an in-depth analysis that aims to reveal your competitors’ plans. It includes marketing placements they are operating in and the customers they aim to serve. It also analyzes how different events disrupt your competitive businesses.

The use of competitive intelligence varies for business and depends on the industry.
Relatively, the common goal for any business is to follow competitive intelligence practices for making better decisions. Additionally, strengthening the company’s performance by exploring different opportunities and risks.

Using E Commerce Web Scraping for Competitive Intelligence

Common uses for web scraping eCommerce websites to perform competitive intelligence are listed below;

Explore and Extract Product data

Access to high amounts of data, from information found on product pages to price comparisons, customer reviews, and market trends. As a result, make better marketing decisions, implement business strategies, and be more prepared for a product launch.

With a web scraping tool, you can automatically gather information about what your competitors are operating. Learning from product data can help make timely decisions and introduce insights that could drive more sales while keeping pace with competition and efficiently running your business.

Lead Generation

Getting new leads is a primary goal for any business. Web data extraction can help with this activity. Scraping data from social media channels, forums, and other commerce websites will allow you to interact better with potential customers.

Extracting such data enables you to identify challenges and issues that the rivals’ consumers encounter while using their products.

Plus, imagine the opportunities you could create when reaching out to new partners, influencers, and affiliates.

Audit competitors’ SEO Strategy

Besides tracking search results pages, you can audit your rivals’ SEO strategy rather than envying their eCommerce business’s popularity. With SEO web scrapers, you can target popular keywords and get more insights by auditing web pages and landing pages.

You can also use the data scraped to know what your rivals are doing wrong. By exploring what keywords they are ignoring or ranking poorly, you have a chance to create a dominating SEO campaign.

Using Scrapingdog for scraping Amazon

With the insights gained from web scraping Amazon product details using Python and BeautifulSoup, you have the tools to make well-informed decisions in your business or personal ventures. This comprehensive guide provides a step-by-step approach to extracting essential information such as product names, images, prices, ratings, and specs from Amazon. This method proves invaluable for businesses aiming to track product performance, monitor competition, and identify market trends. While this method focuses on Amazon, similar approaches can be used for data extraction from other eCommerce platforms. With continuous advancements in web scraping technology, it becomes increasingly vital to adapt and utilize these techniques for staying competitive in the eCommerce landscape. Further, read Scrapingdog’s post.

Benefits of eCommerce Web Scraping for CI

Here are some of the best uses of scraping eCommerce websites for competitive intelligence:

  • Conduct a fast-paced market research
  • Expand Business strategies
  • Shape counter-competitive strategies against competitors
  • Launch new market products and strategic moves
  • Benchmark other businesses
  • Evaluate the effectiveness of competitors

Types of Competitive Intelligence

Competitive intelligence activities are classified into two as tactical and strategic;

Tactical intelligence focuses on short term issues such as gathering markets or increasing revenues.

Strategic intelligence focuses on long term issues such as risks and the opportunities facing the business.

In both cases, competitive intelligence differs from industrial or corporate espionage. It means competitive intelligence doesn’t involve unethical or illegal methods to have an unfair competitive advantage.

 

 

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Scraping eCommerce Websites for Competitive Intelligence
Senior Growth Marketing Manager
As NetNut's Senior Growth Marketing Manager, Or Maman applies his marketing proficiency and analytical insights to propel growth, establishing himself as a force within the proxy industry.