A Beginner’s Guide to Web Scraping

A business establishment, as a whole, has to deal with tons of activities. Lucky for modern business owners, tech advancements have made working on these tasks far easier than it used to. Speaking of tech trends, web scraping is surely one of these advancements.

The market today is competitive and if you want your company to grow effectively, keeping up with the pace is important. In case, you want your business to reach the heights of success too, web scraping will play a major role. If you are wondering why and how? Let us start from the beginning.

Web Scraping – Brief Introduction

In the business world, web scraping is the process of gathering structured automated web data. Companies opt for web scraping mainly when they want to make the most of extensive web data available on a site. Web scraping also goes by the name of web extraction or web harvesting.

Today, many reliable data entry outsourcing companies are out there that can assist you with your web scraping requirements. With the help of a quality web scraping service, you can get any kind of data manipulation and operation. Ever since the introduction of web scraping, businesses do not have to copy the data manually.

Web Scraping – The Advantages for your Business

Here we are going to discuss some of the major benefits of web scraping. Go through them below:

  • Data Analysis: The first and most important benefit of web scraping is data analysis. Through web scraping, you can gather and track data and make your data analysis tool.
  • Effective Price Comparison: Web scraping allows you to obtain prices from different websites and compare them so as to get an overview of the market and how you can save your company money in the long run.
  • Low Maintenance: Newer services when added to a business working most often than not requires a special focus on maintenance. But not in the case of web scraping. Here, you don’t have to put in extra effort for maintenance. Once the service is up and running, it will help you get precise results in the long term.
  • Unmatched Accuracy: Data accuracy has always been a concern for manual web scraping. But modern automated data collection through experienced web scraping ensures you get honest results every time, regardless of the data size. Besides, automation of web scraping also means a faster workflow.

How to Choose a Web Scraping Service Provider?

When you are looking to hire a web scraping service, there are a few questions you might ask first. In case, you don’t know what these are, let us guide you through them.

  1. Can the provider handle large-scale data?

Web scraping services for a business may differ from company to company and project to project. Sometimes, the data to be scraped are too much, and sometimes, they aren’t. Either way, you must ensure your hired professionals are capable of handling large-scale data and bringing results on time, whenever needed.

  1. Are they flexible enough to work for you?

Many business owners, initially forget to consider the flexibility of the service. As mentioned, these data requirements do not come in set-pattern and time restraints. At times, you could require a bulk of data to be scraped within 2 days. Therefore, you should have a team with enough resources to get the job done.

  1. Do they offer honest pricing?

It is no surprise that pricing matters the most, especially if you are already low on budget. When you check on the internet for a web scraping service, compare the pricing and features of a few good options you have. Then choose the one whose services are most suitable for your needs and offer them at genuine rates.

Conclusion

Is the information given above enough for you to choose web scraping? If not, then let experts in the field help you understand better. Choose Computyne as your ideal web scraping service provider today. Here you will get an extensive range of outsourcing services including catalog management, web scraping, virtual assistants, and many more. The best part is all these services are available for you to gran at pretty reasonable rates.

Read More

How to Extract Product Data from Ecommerce Websites

The ongoing trend of brands moving their businesses to the online platforms has hiked the competition for providing the best prices in the e-commerce world. This calls for a high demand in tools and ways to extract product data to be the best in the industry.

Why is web scraping important for ecommerce?

There is no doubt that prices are the key to make your business a success. When people look up online for any product, they tend to go to consider various factors such as product ratings, prices, customer reviews, loyalty programs , etc, that affects the quality of a business. With tools that extract product data from the key e-commerce stores, the competitors can benefit a lot. They get to understand what necessary changes they need to make in their own strategies to achieve better results in the market.

Web scraper tools help in extracting data from leading e-commerce websites and incorporate required practices in your own enterprise. This is a great way for businesses to involve product optimization as it provides optimum results and helps in narrowing down the sets of product variations. All of this play a crucial role in deciding whether a certain discount offer or any other plan would work or not. It serves as a great way to transform the future of any business by retrieving much required details to make their name shine.

The data could be present in any form such as; tables, texts, graphics, semi-texts, etc. And there are various ways to extract product data, which includes; Manually copy-pasting the data, HTTP Programming, HTML Parsing, Vertical Aggregation, Computer-based webpage analysis, etc.

Benefits of web scraping

The practice of web scraping helps businesses with the price battle by letting them perform an in-depth analysis of sales trend history of leading e-commerce websites. Web scraper technique provides quick updates in terms of a product’s performance rate in the market. By reading the analytical reports, one can easily determine the future of any product. It also helps by understanding the resource requirements with the latest industry norms. They are great for lead generation and integrated solutions for the new business set ups.

Looking for a web scraping partner?

How to extract product data from ecommerce websites?

There are various ways in which you can go ahead with the extraction process of online data on an e-commerce website. Each of them varies in terms of pricing and intensity. You can choose as per your requirements and the scope of project you are working on.

1. Building customized web scraper: Python, C# and more

  • The automated web scraping tool that is tailor-made to provide you customized results for your business is highly beneficial. It ensures quick data collection that is concentrated on your business requirements and crawls data from the leading organizations from your business niche. It ensures relevant information that is solely made for you. A web scraper can be created with Python, C#, Selenium libraries that offer great support. BeautifulSoup is a python based framework that is highly recommended for web scraping requirements. Even if you are a novice without any knowledge about programming, there are several easy-to-use tools that you can check out for amazing results.

2. Invest in third party scraping tools

  • There are various web crawlers tools to extract product data from the e-commerce websites. If you are new to the world of data scraping then there are various third-party tools that you can purchase for high-end advanced solutions.
  • You can check out and select from a variety of options including; Octoparse, Mozenda, Crawlmonster, Parsehub, etc. But, before jumping straight into using the tool, it is a must to go through the web pages of e-commerce businesses in your competition and closely notice their HTML structure. Then, finally begin with your web scraper tool’s application.

3. Hire a professional programmer from online platforms

  • In case you lack skill-set of coding, programming and wondering how to extract product data, then do not worry. There are various ways in which you can perform data mining for your business. Some business owners do not wish to handle data crawlers by themselves. In this case, you can always hire a professional programmer or developer to do the job for you. There are several benefits this strategy serves.
  • These people are experts at their work and have years of experience. Professional data scraping experts understand the industry trends and they are well-versed with the techniques that are essential to make your business stand out. There are platforms such as Fiverr, Peopleperhour, etc., where you can find freelancers that provide web scraping services and help you with web scraper services at different prices. You can hire someone with good recommendations.

4. Outsource web scraping

  • If you are looking for a competitive option for your business, it is wide to consider the option to outsource web scraping responsibilities to a company that is proficient at it. Such services have efficient infrastructure to provide you the best solutions. They know how to deal with a certain query and maintain data quality. They are experienced data scraping professionals having a widened industry experience. These companies are expert at scraping data through manual as well as automated ways.
  • Data mining outsourcing services work by extracting various minor to major information like address, phone number, product details, rating, customer experience, reviews, department, country, etc. You can always contact them in case of confusion and stay carefree as you will be getting custom-made solutions for your business venture.

Conclusion:

Product data extraction is a powerful way to upscale the growth of any business. You just have to be careful and stay updated with the most recent norms of the business you are working for. E-commerce websites like Amazon, E-bay, etc. are the king of the industry and understanding their business patterns deeply with the help of web scraper technological advancements can help you sky-rocket the sales chart the smart way.
Read More