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Writer's pictureBhagyeshwari Chauhan

How Retailers Can Use Web Scraping to Improve Conversions

Updated: Feb 7, 2021

We all love talking.


We chat about the weather, discuss the inflation rates; complaint about the nanny never making it on time and sometimes we just talk to pass time. But these conversations aren’t idle gossips when done right, they are a gold mine. When you and the local shopkeeper near your house share antics and a hearty laugh; he has scored himself a loyal customer right there. He is already ahead of all those 88% of the businesses out there.


Conversions are the life of any store or business and good ones are rare to come by. The biggest obstacles related to conversions are more often than not related to the products themselves. What are you selling? How much does it cost? Who’s talking about it? Who is selling the same product or something similar? How much are they charging? How can you beat their price or their marketing strategy? All these questions and answers to them are very important if you want to keep your customer not only engaged but also loyal.


Data here are the answers to all your troubles. But the real question is which data is relevant and the most credible? There are hundreds of marketplaces out there, which mean thousands of competitors, lakhs of customers and millions of products to be aware of. Who has the time to track all this data and then understand it? Honestly, no one. And that’s where web scraping comes in.


Here are a few ways web scraping can help you boost your conversions-


1. Product details and prices

Pricing is considered to be one of the most integral aspects of marketing.


Studies show that 61% of the shoppers visit various sites before making a purchase. In fact, a comparison is a major part of the online shopping experience. Comparison shopping engines gather product info including price, descriptions, options, guarantees etc.


While retailers certainly have the option to build their own comparison site, an easier way to go about it would be to gather all the relevant info through web-scraping to simply develop a better and more competitive pricing strategy.


For example, if Amazon wants to know how their products are performing against other online retailers, they can simply do that by monitoring and tracking competitor’s prices and product details.


2. Reviews

Along with price comparison, retailers also take a look at product reviews and ratings to determine which items go where on the shelf.


Yelp, an app based platform which gets crowed sourced reviews, isn’t the only place people talk about your brand and products. For instance, Facebook influences 42 % of online shoppers to find recommendations from friends and family.


A review by the right person review can make or break your business.


Backtracking every single review on social media manually would drive anyone crazy. If your product is on a huge platform like Amazon, there would also be reviews there that you might not be able to track down. There are also a variety of company sites that gather reviews that you may not even know exist. And this is where web scrapping is the most useful. It allows you to capture statically revenant data from social media and other relevant sites without much effort on your part.


3. Real-time data

The world of e-commerce operates at a neck-breaking speed. Products come and go out of the market in no time. Similarly, retails will see huge spikes and dips in their conversions overnight, which will give them real-time info about their shop’s performance.


Real-time data can help you see the areas of your website which are high in traffic but low on conversions. It will also help you determine which internal and external links are getting the most attention or which are broken and need attention.


The benefit of monitoring all user activity is that you know exactly where the conversions are slowing and you can use this updated info to revise your market strategy for the best results.


But to go through this humongous amount of data is only possible through automation and this is where web scraping comes in. You will get a clear picture of what they are talking about and look at and how you rank when compared to your competition and all of this will be at your fingertips in a matter of minutes.


Parting wisdom

The key to using web scraping effectively is to have a tool that can do things real quick.

Products relevance and prices change at a neck-breaking pace and you have to keep up with it.


For any queries regarding how you can generate higher conversions for your business, contact us at Datahut, your big data experts.

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