For all businesses, one of the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the dramatic increase in the use of digital technologies, driven primarily by the need to reduce human interactions and protect public health. These include consumer applications such as food and grocery delivery services, business-to-business e-commerce innovations, and video conferencing solutions that seem to have entered the consumer and business world. . The result has been a dramatic increase in global traffic to e-commerce platforms, with 22 billion visits in June 2020 compared to 16.7 billion in January 2020, according to Statista. But as more consumers go online, companies are turning to new technologies and strategies to capture their attention. So the real question is how do they do this? Now is the time for innovative and agile companies to transform their eCommerce marketing strategies and increase brand awareness through the effective use of ethical web scraping. About the Author Julius Cerniauskas is CEO of Oxylabs
Access reliable data
To understand today's consumer and ecommerce landscape, you need access to reliable data, and lots of it! For e-commerce platforms trying to operate in a Covid world, a cost-effective, fast and accurate solution is essential, allowing platform providers to constantly monitor competitors for price/product books, best sellers and even shipping information, to name a few. But the type of data valued and the way it is collected have changed dramatically. When you think about it, the fact that data is made public essentially already makes it valuable, but it is imperative to collect web data following best practices and ethically. Web scraping simply means obtaining large amounts of public data from websites. This data may come from several different web pages and the process itself may also include cleaning and transforming the data into a suitable format. By accessing this variety of information, an organization can understand the movements of its competitors, anywhere in the world, and use that knowledge to stay ahead.
Why is web scraping important?
What makes web scraping so important today is the fact that all the knowledge in the world exists on the Internet. In most cases, a piece of data gets stuck on a web page, but in order to process data sets, companies need to extract each of those pieces and put them together. Individually, this data isn't of much use, but when enough data is collected, it can be put together in a usable format, providing important information that keeps an organization ahead of its competition. Retrieving this data involves several processes, and many companies hire staff specifically to manually collect data from the Internet. Its main function is to manually browse websites and copy/paste data from one or more websites into a spreadsheet or form every day. This approach has many drawbacks, including: labor pay, lower data accuracy, and time constraints. Data centers and residential proxies allow data to be extracted internally by acting as intermediaries between the requester and the server. The choice of either type depends on the business use case and/or specific geographic locations. Not all companies have the resources to perform data mining internally. In these cases, outsourcing to a reliable solution is ideal because you can free up resources to focus on data insights instead of being overburdened with the challenges associated with data acquisition.
Have an advantage over the competition
Since most companies set their prices based on the laws of supply and demand, pricing flexibility is crucial. This way, it's easier to stay competitive in the marketplace while generating as much revenue as possible. If a company doesn't price its products properly, it risks missing out on potential revenue to its savvier competitors. However, this does not have to be the case, as data collection services can be used to define an effective dynamic pricing strategy, which means that it automatically retrieves the latest pricing information instead of manually acquiring it. Once this data is obtained, a company can price its product or service appropriately, based on market conditions.
Web scraping should be the norm
As companies have adapted to Covid, many have accelerated their digital transformation journey. Ethical web scraping is quickly becoming an integral part of these programs as they automate data collection, allowing them to become more agile, cost-conscious, and more consumer-focused. Retrieving this valuable public data through ethical web scraping will help businesses better tailor their marketing strategies, improve their target messages, and update their eCommerce offerings, automating a once manual and time-consuming process. . . Data is all around us, which means web scraping is worth it as many companies have built successful businesses around the ability to collect public data and serve it where it is needed most.