Product Data is the most used online data type for e-commerce businesses, with seven typical use cases ranging from pricing intelligence to seller experiences. This blog serves as a guide to the fascinating and ever-changing world of e-commerce product data. Our over a decade of scraping e-commerce websites has impacted this essay, as has a recently completed independent body of study that included interviews with 30+ e-commerce industry professionals.
Who will Require E-Commerce Product Data?
It's usually businesses that sell the same or comparable items. These organizations are divided into three categories for ease of understanding:
- Marketplaces
- E-commerce – retail
- Brick-and-mortar retail is a type of retail that takes place in a physical location.
Marketplaces
These businesses are frequently digital natives (i.e., they were born digital) and data natives (i.e., data has always been at their core). Marketplaces have the largest staff of data scientists, and they are nearly wholly data firms at their core, at least for C2C Marketplaces.
They can move more freely in the world of data since they are not inhibited by the inertia of stock and traditional merchandising models. Marketplaces needs for e-commerce product data are similar to those of their retail counterparts, but they also have certain unique data requirements, which we will discuss down.
E-commerce – Retail
These are e-commerce-only merchants (think B2C), with a warehouse but no physical store. Naturally, these are digital natives, but because they frequently come from conventional retail backgrounds, they may not be data natives yet, but they are on their way. In the last few years, we've noticed that several of these firms have begun to open brick-and-mortar locations.
Brick-and-Mortar Retail
These are conventional, typically long-established shops that have made significant investments to avoid being left behind during the last decade. Because these businesses aren't digital natives or data natives, they frequently buy data firms to speed up their e-commerce journey (e.g. Homedepot bought BlackLocus in 2012, and Lowes bought Boomerang Commerce in 2019).
Finance Using Alternative Data
Another group that we notice looking for e-commerce product data is financial institutions, which regard it as Alternative Data. But that's a tale for another day; today, let's focus on e-commerce businesses.
What Kind of Assistance Does E-Commerce Product Data Provide?
The following are the important use cases for this data from the point of e-commerce companies:
1. Pricing Intelligence
If your pricing approach focuses on your competitor's prices (e.g., always cover the full cost, always or be 1 cent lower, etc.), you must obtain their prices.
2. Competitive Intelligence
Who is entering your market (by location, category, etc.) or who is succeeding in your market that you might learn from?
3. Market Analysis
What items or sellers are in demand, what product gaps exist, and do you have a dominant stock position that you can use?
4. Vendor Management
Are your suppliers offering you their whole product line, the best pricing, and similarly high-quality collateral? I'm not sure, but you'll need to obtain that information.
5. Compliance
This is particularly common with businesses who wish to guarantee MAP (minimum advertised pricing), branding rules, and marketing copy compliance. Product discoverability via categories or keyword searches might be another factor to consider.
6. Enhancing Seller’s Experience
Pre-populate your database with things your sellers could sell to speed up the uploading procedure and assure greater metadata quality. Also, depending on competition data, suggest a selling price. Buyer reviews are another source of information; are you receiving better reviews for the same product than your competitors? If that's the case, what exactly are you doing well?
7. Internal Barriers to Data
One of the most startling applications is to remove all internal data barriers inside a company. Surprisingly, many clients scrape data from their own websites to reduce the internal friction of data access and to guarantee that the data matches the format of product data from target websites.
What Kind of E-Commerce Product Data is Available?
Data about e-commerce products are acquired in four different ways:
- Information on the product
- Lists of products
- Product evaluations
- Details about the product's seller
Product Details
This is what product data is all about, and it's commonly referred to as the “Product Details Page” (PDP). It is here where you will discover information such as the following:
- Name
- Price
- Availability
- Unique identifier
- Brand
- Description
- Delivery date
- Features
- Physical properties
- Ratings
- Reviews
Product Listing
Consider this one the product category page or the search result page, where you'll find a column (or grid) of items ranging from a few to hundreds. It has little information, but depending on your needs, it may be sufficient. The following are examples of common data fields:
- Name
- Price
- Page
- Position
- Ratings
- Delivery Data
Product Reviews
However, the “Product Details Page” (PDP) may show the top, most current, or most popular reviews, the entire list is usually found elsewhere and provides considerably more information. The accessible fields are limited, but they can be fruitful.
- Rating
- Date
- Review
- Reviewer
Product Seller Details
Not as well-known, but it might be wherever you locate your next big seller or figure out what's trendy. In terms of the availability of these pages, the sorts of data fields, sub-pages, and so on, there is a lot of difference.
How Will You Receive E-Commerce Product Data?
A machine, at its most basic level, imitates a website visitor; it visits a web page and gathers just the information you want. It's simple enough until you're scraping e-commerce sites for 20,000 things every hour, every day.
When it comes to gathering this data, there are various phases that may be handled in-house or outsourced, depending on a variety of criteria.
- Determine the pages you'll need to gather data from
- Visit those pages to collect the data
- Extract the information into a format that you can work with
- Analyze the information
- Using BI tools, visualize the data
- Integrate the data with your company's systems.
However, the preceding is oversimplified and ignores many intricacies, including how difficult it may be to obtain raw data in the first place. Many famous e-commerce companies have sophisticated procedures in place to guarantee that their websites are constantly available; yet, these measures can occasionally obstruct legitimate and ethical web scraping. This is just another reason to guarantee that scraping e-commerce websites is done in a compliant and long-term manner that has no negative impact on the target sites.
Final Words
The preceding ideas are, of course, only an outline of what is, in fact, a well-established and rapidly expanding sector. The ultimate purpose of scraping e-commerce websites is to increase product sales, and this is the success metric you should constantly strive for.
When it comes to exploiting product data and scraping e-commerce websites, there are several shortcuts and trap doors. We've been collecting e-commerce data for hundreds of marketplaces and merchants for years, so you can trust us. Tell us more about your e-commerce project if you have one in the works. We have data scientists and project managers on staff with years of expertise who can quickly analyze your best line of action.
For more web scraping services, contact X-Byte Enterprise Crawling today!!
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