Amazon is one of the largest e-commerce platforms across the globe. It has one of the largest customer bases and one of the most versatile and adaptive product portfolios. It definitely gets the advantage of a large amount of data and better operational processes in place due to its standing as one of the largest retailers. Having said that, even you can use Amazon’s data as an advantage to yourself to design a better product and price portfolio. A simple tool for the same is Web Scraping! Let us see why scraping Amazon data could be useful!
Amazon has an exceptional pricing strategy that makes it an undisputed choice for its customers. You can extract information from Amazon either by using its APIs or scraping from it. Although Amazon has a Product Advertising API, it does not give you all the information you need. Thus, scraping data from Amazon might be useful. Let us look at how you can use this data to price your products rights.
Learn more about your products
If you are a manufacturer or a product supplier, Amazon can give you data about your products that you might not have as a standalone entity. Amazon places your products among a plethora of other similar and competing products. This can give you information about your products relative to the market and other competitors’ products. For instance, if you play in the electronics industry, you can learn about the sales, pricing, design and other characteristics of your product with respect to the other products in the same industry. You could get all this data in one place if you start scraping information from Amazon!
Amazon’s product comparison table shows a very customized comparison for the type of product you are looking for. Customers use this information to learn about the competitors, their attributes including product prices and then make a decision of what product to buy. As a manufacturer or a supplier, you can use this information to design your products better or even to price your products differently. You can also learn who your direct competitors are, for a given product.
Learn what your customer feels about your product
Customers can give you a large amount of detailed information on your products. You can learn about their sentiments about your product and thus know more a fair deal about your products’ performance in the market.
Amazon has incorporated a customers’ Questions and Answers section on the products page. This section lets customers ask basic questions about the products and people who have bought/used the product can answer the same. This section enables users to make an informed purchase decision. Additionally, there is a review section which is another rich source of information. Scraping information from Amazon could give you access to this as well!
If you scrape information from Amazon on a product, it makes complete sense to also pull the review section as a few comments can give a detailed review of your product, the pros and cons, the general sentiment of the customers and also some basic information of the customer who is reviewing your product. If you can use a few text analytics techniques like Natural Language Processing or even keyword analysis on this text data, you can use the insights to make amends to the pricing strategy of your products among other things.
Why should you scrape information for pricing from Amazon?
Besides the fact that Amazon is one of the biggest sources of product pricing and competitor performance in your market, there are several other reasons to scrape data from Amazon for pricing. These advantages are more about the logistic convenience of scraping and the infrastructural advantage of the same.
It automates the process and removes the manual dependency. You can now schedule the scraper script to run at your required frequency, mention the scope of scraping and it will collect the desired information for you. This also means more reliable data!
You can set a well-structured pipeline for storing and using data that will serve as your data source for all pricing analytics and beyond. You do not need to store data in localized hardware. Instead, you can incorporate cloud storage for all the large data requirement.
You can get up-to-date information in almost no time! Since most of the process will now be automated, it should not take a lot of time to pull the required data. This means you can design your pricing strategy on the basis of regularly updated information and not outdated pricing analytics.
All these advantages can also be clubbed with the point that pricing a product is not just comparative analysis but also includes other possible routes. For instance, one needs to look at the shelf-life of a product, age of a product in the market, general characteristics and even historical performance of a product given its price points. The price elasticity of a product determines the relationship of its demand at different price points in the past. If your organization has a data-based outlook and has the necessary infrastructure in place, you can club the insights from the scraped data with all the other analyses mentioned above to build a sound pricing framework.
Scraping Information from Amazon
While you could use your script to scrape data from Amazon, it could be a tough act given all the complications. The website discourages scraping in its policy and page-structure.
In addition to that, the ever-evolving and complicated web page structure make scraping information from Amazon difficult. However, there are dedicated service providers that can scrape the necessary information from the required web site.
We at Datahut have helped several enterprises scrape information from Amazon and other e-commerce websites and thus improve their pricing and marketing strategies. We take care of all assumptions, infrastructural and operational processes to design a transparent and simple process of extracting data from Amazon or other sites for you.
Connect with Datahut for your data extraction needs. We love what we do, and extracting data to help you generate leads is one of our specialities.