What Everybody Ought to Know About Web Data Collection

Were Amazon and Walmart involved in some cold war of some sort in January 2017? Or how else would you explain Amazon blocking bots coming from Walmart? The retail giant realized Walmart was playing smart, and boom; they cut off their data supply.

Data harvesting is now a big deal for businesses that want to be miles ahead of their competitors. It is either you leverage your competitor’s data to your advantage, or you’re out of business.

It is beyond surviving in the marketplace. Businesses want to thrive and expand their reach – and possibly leave a mark in the footprints of time. The competition is stifling, and data has become the new oil to gain competitive advantage. This particular holds for e-commerce companies even though other industries can take advantage of it too.

Do you need any statistics to know there is ample data out there? IDC – a research group – reported there will be 163 zettabytes of data created in a year by 2025. If we have so much web data at our disposal, it will make no sense to let it go down the drain without utilizing it. But the volume may make it much of a task to know what is important. With data harvesting, all that can be a thing of the past – you can harvest what you need.

Scraping Web Data for Competitor Analysis

Some companies have been hugely successful because of product differentiation. They were able to fill in the gap where their competitors missed out. Your business may have the best marketing strategies or the best sales team, yet nothing significant to show for it.

But if you harvest data about your market, you can stand out of the crowd and grow your business at the expense of your competitors.

Success in whatever industry you find yourself in depends on how you gather, manage, and use the web data within your reach.

Competitor analysis comes handy for growth – lack of insight into the competition takes you nowhere. And you can’t do a proper competitor analysis without scraping data from your competitor’s website. If you do a good job, you’re on the super highway to crunching your competition—and possibly improve your position in the marketplace.

Web Data: Your Business needs it

Some companies are constantly on the lookout for others in their niche doing something different from the pack. Others will use the reviews of their competitor’s customers to create product differentiation.

Take, for instance, a skincare company which scrapes reviews from their competitor’s website and uses them to create personalized products. By doing so, they have a database of reviews – in millions and also a wide array of beauty products and their ingredients. Their machine learning algorithm uses this data to create creams, cleansers, and toners. If your business is not thinking in this direction, then you have a lot of catching up to do. 

Being a super-duper slicker salesman won’t cut it. The data in your hands will. In a highly competitive niche, you need plenty of your competitors’ data to stay ahead – it is either you harvest it, or you’re left trailing.