Importance of web scraping in e-commerce and e-marketing

Web scraping, also known as data mining, is the process of collecting large amounts of data from the web and then placing it in databases for future analysis and later use. Web scraping offers insight into price data, market dynamics, prevailing trends, practices employed by your competitors and the challenges they face. This is readily available data if you know how to get it. What many marketers don't know is how useful it can be to them. In this article, we will explain the advantage of Web scraping technique and supply a practical example that can be beneficial for e-commerce businesses and online marketers.


INTRODUCTION
Websites are an ocean of limitless information which anyone and everyone can access. The new trend of technology put us to change the way we're doing our business. The Internet now is the new place for business. Knowing how to use the Internet and the different opportunities that can bring us can be one of the keys to success in e-commerce and e-marketing.
Data crawling or web scraping or data harvesting has been into the existence for as long as the web itself. It is always associated with web content extraction, at the begin it wasn't always served this purpose. Web scraping can be considered as a method of retrieving or extraction content from a website for Web scraping is the method of retrieving or extracting content from a website for the purpose of using it for purposes beyond the control of the website owner.
The first use of web scraping was to create links with test frameworks. Using tools like Selenium, companies like IP-Label have created products that allow web developers and webmasters to monitor website performance on a daily basis (xbyte, 2021). In the early times, extracting web data meant copying the text available on a web page to a local file, manually this approach was extremely inefficient and could not be used for business application. Spreadsheet software like Microsoft excel and google sheets have some basic web scraping capabilities and they were mainly used for extracting HTML tables from webpages (Slideshare, 2021).
In a world of fierce competition, every business tries to exceed itself. The question that probably worries all other entrepreneurs. In an industry where everything is customer-centric, competitor analysis is not a choice but a necessity. Having access to so much data can provide a competitive advantage in the field to which you belong (Samanta, 2021).
Since a huge amount of mixed data is constantly being generated on the web, web scraping is widely recognized as an efficient and powerful technique for collecting big data (Judit, 2001).
This concept of web scraping is not new to most data scientists, but is in fact becoming increasingly well-known due to the mass of data we can find on the internet and new startups that don't want to spend time collecting data where it can be found quickly on the internet.

OVERVIEW OF CONCEPTS
What is Ecommerce?
Ecommerce, also known as electronic commerce or internet commerce, refers to the buying and selling of goods or services using the internet, and the transfer of money and data to execute these transactions (Shopify, 20121

What is Web Scraping?
Web scraping is automatically retrieving (and processing) information from websites (Bosch, 2021). Matthew define web scraping as a process of making a semi-structured document from the internet, usually in the form of web pages like HTML or XHTML, and analyze the document to take certain data from the page to be used for other purpose (Mathew, 2010).

BENEFITS OF WEB SCRAPING
Web scraping has emerged as an important strategy for e-commerce businesses, especially in delivering rich data-based insights.  Then the scraper will either extract all the data on the page or specific data selected by the user before the project is run.
 Ideally, the user will go through the process of selecting the specific data they want from the page. For example, you might want to scrape an Amazon product page for prices and models but are not necessarily interested in product reviews.
 Lastly, the web scraper will output all the data that has been collected into a format that is more useful to the user.

Figure 1: Architecture of web scraping
Most web scrapers will output data to a CSV or Excel spreadsheet, while more advanced scrapers will support other formats such as JSON which can be used for an API. As you can see we have many techniques that can be used but the target is to use a technique that supplies us a correct result in a reasonable time and the best one is web scraping software.

Web scraping software
You have a choice between using an existing software or build your own script. There are many software tools available that can be used to scrape data on internet. Therefore, there are two well-known and popular methods that can be used to scrape data on the web namely the use generic web scraping software and write code.  The problem with most generic web scraping software is that they are very difficult to set up and to use (webharvy, 2021). Based on the challenge of web scraping can face it will be recommended making your algorithm for web scraping.

PRACTICAL EXAMPLE
One of the advantages of web scraping in ecommerce is market analysis. In our practical example, we will show how to get data from Amazon. The section that will interest us will be to obtain the Amazon Best Sellers data in our case we will get the bestselling phone in amazon.
These details can be useful to anyone who wants to start selling or manufacturing phones. Having the big picture of the market will help you improve your business and plan well.

Python
The reason we choose Python it is because it is popular, high-level programming language.
Python can run on many different platforms and has a simple syntax similar to the English language, therefore, it is easy to code.
First of all, the goal of web scraping is to collect web data that would be in HTML format or Json.
Python provides a library called Requests, which is a simple HTML library that allows you to integrate your Python programs with web services.
Once you find the relevant data for your project on the webpage, you can download it for valuable insight. To do this, Python provides another library called BeautifulSoup, which helps you retrieve particular content from a web page, remove HTML tags, and save the information.
The last step in web scraping is to save the collected data in a structured form. With the help of Python Pandas Library, you can store the data in the desired format.

Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is an American multinational technology company based in Seattle, Washington, which focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It is considered one of the Big Five companies in the U.S. In e-commerce amazon is leading in that domain how we can benefit of the huge date which we find on its website which can help us for price comparing or other aspect in e-commerce (Wikipedia, wikipedia, 2021).
The presence of the Internet led to increasing source of information that can be accessed so that information seeking activities become the most common activities performed and became one of the activities that took quite a bit (Adam, 2012). The Internet will be remembered as the first place where we can collect huge amounts of data without spending a lot of energy or money.
Whether in e-commerce or e-marketing, the use of the technique of web scraping will be the key to success as it will provide insight into the targeting market and help decision makers.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author would like to thank Mr. Ricky Muhindo (Ph.D. Computer science candidate at Northcentral university) for his support.