E-Commerce Websites Scraping Basics

Scraping for the longest time serves as one of the main tools for providing businesses with the needed market insights. Without this process, staying ahead of the trends or simply on the edge of the modern market will be encredibly hard. Let’s look at the main components behind the scraping of the e-com platforms.

What Does Scraping of E-Commerce Sites Mean?

In general, web scraping refers to the process of automated data extraction from the targeted sites. Depending on the requirements of your project, you can target different kinds of data and materials to gather the exact type of valuable insights that you need. 

Usually, this process includes fetching, parsing and finally organizing the content collected from the site. In terms of e-commerce portals, the information contained on these sites carries a significant value, so collection of even the partition of it can bring solid benefits to different kinds of businesses. 

Basically, having access to e-commerce portal information on hand, businesses can score products, track price dynamics, track the current market trends, and study the look for the actions. Data like this can easily lead to comprehensive market analysis to provide an overall strong brand and business plan over long periods of time.

How to Scrape E-Commerce Websites?

E-commerce sites are complicated in their structure, so it is especially important to get all of the information placement and understand what exact spots of the sites need to be targeted for data collection. In most cases, e-com platforms have an extensive structure with lots of available parameters, sections, details and results for your searches.

To scrape ecommerce website, you basically have two main options. In the first case, you can approach the data collection manually and try to gather all needed information by hand. In the second option, you can simply resort to the existing tools for automated data collection, like scrapers, parsers, etc. Let’s look at these two methods in more detail to understand which one is more useful for your exact case.

Manual Scraping

Manual scraping basically describes the process of direct inspection and collection with hands. This approach can be useful when you need to collect some specific information or just gather only several pieces of the info.

In any case, such scraping will require you to spend a solid amount of labor hours. Keep in mind that this process is also not protected from human errors, so in the end you should resort to an option of this kind only for very specific cases where automated collection will take more time or simply will be more hustle. 

Automated Scraping

Regular automated collection of the data, on the other hand, can bring you lots of benefits if you are willing to spend just a bit more time compared to manual scraping. 

With tools designed specifically for the automated harvesting of the data, you can collect almost any needed amount of information from any needed site. These tools are capable of fully automatically navigating, parsing, crawling and extracting specific data to later present it to you in a comfortable-to-use format. 

The combination of these tools is especially useful for all tasks related to more large-scale or repetitive projects that require processing of large amounts of data in one run. For example with such tools, you are also able to collect information from several sites and sources in parallel. 

What To Consider Before Starting the Scraping?

Both automated and manual scraping involve lots of steps to secure the results efficiently and according to current legal policies. Here is the overview of the basic pipeline of the mediocre scraping project. 

First comes the consideration of the current legal policies regarding targeted platforms and risks related to this part. You should take time to review all of the parts in terms of the services of needed platforms that can regulate the data collection process. Then it is best to take into account possible legal actions in terms of the copywriting and other parts of the product description that can fall under regulations. Pay additional time to make sure that you are not violating the laws in terms of the collection of personal data, because this can backfire on you heavily. 

Then you need to make it clear about the types of data you want to gather. Check the site you are targeting and determine what type of products or site sections you need to scrape. For example, if you want to collect images or videos, the approach to the tool selection will change. Also, you need to determine how often you will need to repeat the process to get all the latest updates for the project. 

At this point, you also need to determine what type of tools you will use for the web scraping ecommerce sites. They can differ in many ways and forms, so we will look at them in detail in the next paragraph.

Before starting the scraping itself, you need to remember to stay respectful towards the targeted site. Rate your limits to not overcharge the site capacities. Also try to use strong user agents to avoid additional anti-bot systems attention. 

After the web scraping for e-commerce, you also need to develop the right approach towards the data storage and usage. It is best to save all of the data in one structured format so it is always ready to be used. Additionally, make sure that the data that you are using is stored and used according to the local laws.

In the end, you can think about maintaining a constant and repetitive scraping procedure. This way, you can have all of the needed data under your hands.

Additionally, we can talk about the type of data that you can find and collect on e-com sites. For example, you can easily access and gather names, descriptions, prices, reviews and other text information on product pages. Additionally, you can collect more heavy content from pages, for example, photos or videos from reviews. But ultimately, this option will depend on the quality of your scraper. Same way, from the quality of your scraping solution depending on the quality of the data that covers the seller details, shipment options, stock amounts and info about special or seasonal deals. 

Options for E-commerce Websites Scraping 

When choosing the tools for the scraping, you need to take lots of the parameters into consideration. Let’s look at the main point when choosing a scraping tool and see how to extract products from website pages.

The first thing to make your mind about is ease of use. Ultimately, it is best to have a more intuitive and not intimidating arsenal for any of your tasks or projects. 

The same goes for the tool versatility. It is highly important to choose the options that can guarantee easy scalability or simply the ability to work with different sources and types of data.  

Then you need to look at the exact core that you want to use for the scraping. Depending on this parameter, different tools can show different performance, so it is best to choose the scraping engine based on the required load of the project. Same goes for the scalability overall, because the engine can affect this parameter too. 

The last but not least parameter comes down to tool documentation and community support. With widely used and popular options, you will always be able to find the needed help and support. With less adapted market options, any solutions will be way harder to spot. 

Now that you know what to look for, we can look at the available options for you. Basically, you have three main paths for scraping: automated, manual and custom solutions. We have already talked about the automated and manual options, so let’s retract the main points.

Manual ecommerce web scraping will be good only for smallest-scale projects that require the collection of a specific time of information and do not entitle any repetitive data collection. With this method, you need to spend a lot of time gathering any significant amount of the information for analysis. 

Automated collection with market-available pre-made options is a most popular path that can help you to cover most of the requirements of the project. For different price points, you can get access to the tool that will be able to automatically collect the targeted data. With this option, you can also easily scale any of the projects and find tools that are adapted for the majority of the project requirements.

If flexibility of the pre-made options is not enough for you, you can try to use a new option that we did not discuss before—custom solutions on Python or Ruby scraping libraries. These two languages have lots of ways and paths to build your own scraper solution to meet all of the needed requirements. This way you can also easily scale the project, adapt it to different platforms and types of data, and enable automated web scraping e-commerce websites repeatedly.

Keep in mind that almost any of these methods will require you to use some kind of proxy. The bigger the project you are working with, the bigger the pool, and the higher the quality of the proxies overall will be required. Without the right servers powering your scraping, you will face blocks and restrictions almost instantly. So proxy serves as the main fuel for successful scraping of any kind. For example, large-scale projects can easily benefit even from the basic residential proxies, let alone more sophisticated rotating or static options.

Top Tricks to Use When Scraping E-Commerce Websites 

Ecommerce data scraping is tricky in many ways, so you need to keep in mind lots of project parameters and determine the best options needed. Overall, and specifically if we are speaking about the e-commerce platforms, you need to consider and calculate all of the legal risks and your options in this regard. So, how to scrape products from e-commerce with the right attitude?

To start, you need to be familiar with the terms of service of the targeted websites. This means all of the current site policies should be clear and transparent to you. Additional attention needs to be paid to the parts that can regulate rules for the automated data collection or simply automated interaction with the site. 

You can use the potential of your scraping solution to meet the requirements of the site. For example, you can limit your response rate to not overload sites. Also pay attention to the dynamic content on the targeted pages. Some sites can have adoptional regulations in this field. 

Once you have collected all of the needed information, you need to properly store it in order to have a useful database. So first of all, you need to clean collected data from any irrelevant information. Then you also need to store it in a comfortable file format that will be applicable with the time. 

Python and Ruby can also help you to analyze and visualize the harvested information. Search for tools designed specifically for working with scraped massive amounts of data. 

Conclusion

Scraping for a long time has become a significant, if not the main, source of valuable information for different kinds of businesses. This technique can help to easily gather all of the main insights of the market and power up company growth. 

Scraping ecommerce websites overall is a tricky task that requires careful planning and execution. In terms of e-commerce platforms, you can face many different challenges and obstacles, especially in terms of the legal actions. 

But even with all these problems on the way, data harvesting helps to put all of the best practices into action and secure company advantage in such an actively changing market.

- Frequently Asked Questions

- Is it Legal to Harvest Data From E-Commerce Websites?

For the most part, scraping even the most popular websites is completely legal. But ultimately, it is wise to make yourself familiar with the terms of service and any special rules of the site that cover automated access to data. 

- Does Amazon Allow Any Type of Data Collection?

Amazon is a tricky site to work with in terms of scraping. For the most part, it will be legal to scrape data from publicly accessible parts of the site. For example, you can collect product tireless, handles, and other parameters from product pages. 

- What is the Main Obstacle When Scraping Sites With Proxies?

The biggest problems accrue when scraping without proxies. With a proxy, the only major problem that you can face is a block of your server, but this can be easily solved. If you choose a trustworthy provider like PrivateProxy, you can easily ask for the change of the failed server to a new, clean one.