Ecommerce Web Scraping Solution for Small and Medium Businesses

Many eCommerce businesses know about web scraping and its benefits. However, due to certain drawbacks, many are unable to scrape the web. If you own an eCommerce business and you are looking for the best web scraping solution, this is the article for you.

Here, we start off by looking at some of the pain points of web scraping for eCommerce businesses and likely solutions. At the end of this write-up, you would know the best web scraping practices and their benefits.

Table of Contents

Common web scraping pain points for Small and Medium Businesses

For most eCommerce businesses, the main pain points are:

1. Skills

One of the commonest methods of web scraping for an eCommerce business is to build a web crawler using python. If you have no coding knowledge, it would be almost impossible for you to build a crawler with this method. Learning the ropes would take a long time. And to be honest, it isn’t a smooth learning curve.

Even if you struggle to build a crawler using python, it can be quite challenging to clean data. Scraped data would be disorganized, and if you don’t have the technical knowledge needed to clean your data, you might end up having a bunch of useless data.

It doesn’t end there. Because of the coding war between web crawlers and anti-crawler bots, many businesses are unable to scrape the web. Hence, without a counter-attack to anti-web scraping techniques, you might as well forget about getting data from the web.

If all these sound scary, not to worry, there is a solution.

2. Budget

Money is a big web scraping pain point for so many eCommerce businesses. And truth be told, web scraping can be expensive sometimes. Hiring a team of programmers to build crawlers could swallow a big part of your budget. Freelancers don’t come cheap these days, and even some web scraping tools pricing plans are a bit on the high side.

Thankfully, you don’t have to spend a fortune just for the sake of web scraping. There are ways you can get good results at a decent price.

Common Solutions to these Problems

As we discuss the solutions to the problems just mentioned above, note that we will be stating the advantages and disadvantages of every solution. Discussing the pros and cons of each will help you decide the web scraping solution for your business based on your pain point.

So, let’s go>>>>>

1. Build a web scraping team

Hiring a team of professionals is a great way to solve a bunch of web scraping problems. All you need to do is find the right people for the job, put them on your payroll, and you are good to go. They will provide all the data you need.

Advantages

· Takes all the stress and work away from you

· You can have access to as much data as you want

Disadvantages

· It is expensive to build and maintain

· It might take a while to find experienced programmers

2. Purchase data

Yes! Buying data online is a thing. You don’t have to bother about anti-scraping bots or learning how to code. You can’t just buy clean data of what you need from a data/information broker.

Advantages

· Doesn’t require any coding experience

· Very easy, you don’t have to do any work

Disadvantages

· The data you get might be inaccurate

· You can’t get frequent data updates

3. Use Web scraping tools

With a web scraping tool, you can scrape the web yourself by using a software. There is no need for you to write any code. In fact, you don’t need any technical skills at all. The tool is designed to tackle any web scraping problem.

Advantages

· Doesn’t require any coding experience

· You can get frequent data updates

· You can be sure of getting accurate data

Disadvantages

· Sometimes the pricing plans are expensive for small businesses

· You need to learn how to use the tool

Best Practices and Benefits

With all the web scraping solutions, using a web scraping tool happens to be the best web scraping solution for many reasons. You spend a little amount of money to get data yourself without writing any code. The merits outnumber the demerits – it is the way to go for small and medium businesses.

But before you go on to use any tool, you should know the top web scraping tools, their features, and pricing.

1. Octoparse

Octoparse is a cloud-based web crawler that helps you scrape data from the web without writing any code. It has a friendly user interface, and it is equipped to deal with any anti-scraping barriers. Scraped data can be downloaded in different formats, and with API connections, you can get frequent data updates in your database.

Pricing:

· Free plan

· Standard plan: $75 per month, when billed annually; $89 per month when billed monthly.

· Professional plan: $209 per month when billed annually; $249 per month when billed monthly

· Enterprise plan: Contact Octoparse for a quote.

2. Parsehub

Parsehub is another cloud-based web scraping tool for data mining. It leverages machine learning technology to read, analyze, and transform web documents into relevant data. You can access your data via API, CSV/Excel, Google Sheet, or Tableau.

Pricing:

· Free plan:

· Standard plan: $149 per month

· Professional plan: $499 per month

· Enterprise: Contact Parsehub for price.

3. import.io

import.io is a SaaS web data integration software. It provides a very friendly user interface for users to customize and design workflows for scraping data. It allows you to set the time you want for scraping, and you can download your data in different formats.

Pricing:

· Free plan

· Essential plan: $299 per month

· Professional plan: $1,999 per year

· Enterprise plan: $4,999 per year

· Premium plan: $9,999 per year

4. Mozenda

This is one of the oldest web scraping tools in the market with a very good reputation. It is a web-based scraper that not only scrapes data from web pages but also Excel, Word, and PDF. Unlike most web scraping tools, it has a free trial plan that lasts 30 days.

Pricing:

· Free plan

· Professional plan: $99 per month

· Enterprise plan: $450 per year

5. Content Grabber

Content Grabber is another web scraping tool that can be used to extract data from pretty much any website. It has a typical point and click user interface that is great for non-programmers.

Pricing:

· Free plan

· Professional plan: $149 per month

· Premium plan $299 per month

Note: Each of the pricing plans has its features, you should check the pricing plan page of your web scraping service provider to know the perks of each plan.

Conclusion

The skills you lack shouldn’t be the reason you are not web scraping. A low budget shouldn’t be a reason either. Web scraping tools have fixed these pain points by allowing you to extract data easily. With a tool like Octoparse, you have the best web scraping solution because you get a lot of cool features at a very decent price.

So, stop thinking if you can scrape the web. Take that step today and start using Octoparse for all your web scraping tasks.

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Ashley

I am a digital marketing leader for global inbound marketing in Octoparse, graduated from the University of Washington and with years of experience in the big data industry.
I like sharing my thoughts and ideas about data extraction, processing and visualization.

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