The number of companies, which use web crawler, is growing rapidly due to the current competitive market conditions. As a result, the number of companies that offer this service is growing day by day. Since the purpose of web crawler varies on a case to case basis, here is a more detailed explanation of how it Price2Spy works.
How does Web crawl / scrape work?
Of course, if you’ve never used it before, web crawling / scraping tools can seem intimidating and too difficult to understand, but if you have the right help, everything will go smoothly. There are many services that can help you perform this, and one of them being Price2Spy. Price2Spy has an easy-to-use interface. Most of the technical aspect is also done by the Price2Spy team. Moreover, scraping is complex (JS-stuffed), big (business directories), location-sensitive, and bot-aware. CAPTCHA-protected websites is not a difficult task for Price2Spy. Some of the key technical strengths that distinguish Price2Spy Scraper from other scrapers are the following:
- The service allows to crawl and scrape websites having a very complex page navigation structure, JavaScript menu and paging implementation or strong anti-bot protection (sites that do not want to be crawled) – for example, Amazon
- Capturing multiple product variations shown on the same product page
- Crawling / scraping websites in any language / any country / any size
- Crawling / scraping entire website / only specific product categories/brands
- Crawling / scraping websites which are location-sensitive (showing different results depending on visitor’s IP / ZIP code). For example, Amazon will show different results if you’re international vs. US visitor
- Capturing data fields which are not shown on the product page itself (for example: fields shown on the category page, shown before reaching the product page)
- Crawling / scraping big (more than 1 000 000 product pages) or small (less than 1000 product pages) sites and etc.
Use Cases of competitors’ products
With so much information available on the Internet, it is crucial to be able to differentiate which data is important for your business, and which is not. Besides providing accurate information, it is also important that it is up to date. While the Price2Spy team was performing crawl and scrapes for different clients, it came to the conclusion that the scraping process can be roughly grouped into use cases for online retailers and for brands/distributors.
For Online Retailers :
- When it comes to online retailers’ web crawling / scraping process, firstly, perform in order to completely capture the competitor’s assortment. The output of this process can be used as a data source for adding new products to the retailer’s own store in order to become more competitive.
The second way it’s use is when capturing details in the competitor’s assortment, it requires product matching. With this, retailers will get two important types of information: which products have been added to the competitor’s website, and which ones have been excluded. When retailers have this information in front of them, they’re able to create a better, more precise and competitive offer for their customers. Also, an important thing to point out is the fact that this process has to be repetitive. In other words, it is necessary to do it in cycles in order to capture the right information.
For Brands / Distributors :
- Brands and distributors use web crawling / scraping to find out which new products were released by their competitors, just like retailers do.
- Yet, another way in which they can use this tool is to capture the product reviews from retail websites. They do this in order to determine consumer sentiment towards the product (or service). By doing so, they become more aware, which are the aspects that the customers are satisfied with, and where there is still some space for improvement.
Conclusion
If you also need to gather data from a retailer or competitor site in one go, or you need a detailed overview of your competitor’s assortment, along with full pricing/product description, ratings and reviews, category and brand information and etc., just send us a list of the websites you want to scrape, and list the information you expect to get, and we’ll be happy to help you out with this task.