Before retail businesses go for e-Commerce big data extraction, it is imperative that they realize how big data works and to what extent it can help their business. The benefits of structured traditional data fabrics are many but it's entirely upon the business to make sure that they reap (at least a majority of)  these benefits.

To start off, we suggest you develop a big data strategy. In simple words, it is a plan, specially curated for your business to help improve the way you acquire, control, store, and analyze big data. Treat it as a business asset and prepare to be amazed by how easily you can understand your consumers!

E-commerce big data is acquired through consumer reviews, store ratings, and seller ratings from huge eCommerce giants like Amazon, Target, Google, eBay, etc. When retail businesses use this data to create a  better shopping experience for their customers, web scraping services come into the picture.

How does a retail business utilize big data for consumer insights?

Before we move into the specifics of big data utilization for consumer insights, let's take you through what sort of information is required by retail businesses.

Consider a compilation of all the reviews on marketplaces like Amazon.com, Ebay.com, etc about a certain product. These reviews will help a retail business find out the specifications that their target consumers desire.

If 'durable' and 'strong' are the most common keywords, the retailers may understand that their product should be of the utmost best quality as it would bring in more business.

Basically, with these data threads, we can derive the following insights –

1. The consumer preferences and trends – basically predicting what sort of product the consumers are looking for.

2. It also helps retailers in learning more about the consumer's attitude towards the products, such as which feature of the product they value most.

Hence, web scraping is a process that extracts this data from websites to bring you top-notch insights on consumer preferences.

Now, we're sure some retail businesses are DIY-ing this process. While doing it yourself isn't impossible or unheard of, it'll still take up a huge chunk of your time and effort.

Why Choose Data Services?

Just thinking about the enormous amount of data flowing in from different sources can make you feel a little overwhelmed. So, when it comes to web scraping, we wouldn't suggest doing it yourself.

To support our recommendation above, we've compiled a list of reasons why a web scraping provider is your best bet.

Creating Multiple Web-crawlers Effectively, Without Coding.

A long-drawn process – Collecting data, data storing, analyzing it, searching for and sharing data, transferring and visualizing information, maintaining information privacy, and updating data sources are some steps that go into acquiring big data.

It's a long, exhausting process, and dedicating to it the required time and effort may not always yield proportionate results. A web scraping provider will create multiple web crawlers and bring you ready-to-use data.

No time for new tricks – Learning software and web crawling techniques may not be possible for you (or fruitful for your retail business) and hence, passing on instructions to an expert in this field would be your best bet. Don't sweat it when you can just get it.

Getting Data Effectively, Without Manual Work.

If your scraping agent is unavailable or has suddenly quit, there is enough reason to panic. But, with a web scraping tool, you are rid of these worries. Avoid the limitations of manual work and mine big data with efficient web crawlers.

Update the Latest Information at a Certain Frequency.

Old data is insignificant data and accurate, aggregated data is hard to find. To acquire the same, there are several expert websites waiting to provide you with the latest, most relevant data at the required frequency.

The Most Cost-effective way to Gather a Large Volume of Data.

Save your time and money by letting professionals take over. One-time or continuous data analysis, all types of web data extraction can be customized to meet your needs. Once done, execute changes to boost your retail business.

How to use web Scraping Tools

Octoparse is the perfect platform to find all possible review information across most main online marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, Target, etc. It helps you ingest huge data points and reach useful insights to boost your retail business.

To make things easier, Octoparse lets you decide how to go about doing your own web scraping.

Use Octoparse Pre-built Crawlers Directly – 

Open any website (Amazon, Google Maps) in the built-in browser and start scraping the content by dragging your cursor across the page. Just let Octoparse handle the latent struggles for you.

Customize Your own Crawlers with Octoparse –

With its point-and-click interface, Octoparse's pre-built automated crawlers allow you to scrape without any coding. Just surf through your targeted dynamic websites and get unlimited insights on present trends.

Schedule your web data extraction with faster scraping speed by using the Octoparse Cloud service. With its anonymous IP rotation, Octoparse prevents you from being tracked and monitored.

It's a wrap.

Once upon a time, web scraping was a holistic concept.

But over the years, it has grown into a much sought-after, useful tool that plays a significant role in boosting retail business. So, analyze the data, take appropriate decisions and study success patterns, and we're positive you'll make it.