1.Competitor Monitoring
E-commerce markets are growing at noticeable rates. Yet, this digital retail landscape will continue to grow as digital devices integrate into our lives and changed way of purchasing.
The prosper market is effortless to enter, but the competition between retailers will only get tougher and leave very little room for begineners to make headway. How does your retail business survive? You need to watch your competitors. Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese general, once said that “If you know the enemies and yourself, you will never be defeated.” This applies to business as well.
You can get the latest changes on your competitors with web scraping:
- Scrape product information from competitors’ websites, make a timely response to a new product launch and discover a new market strategy.
- Scrape product/service ads. Make insights into their budgets.
- Scrape social media channels. Analyze their audience and discover potential customers.
- Predict the fashion trend and stay competitive.
2.Pricing Optimization
One of the biggest challenges for any business is pricing. Web scraping is extremely helpful for such purpose. The problem with optimization is that we can’t balance the point where we increase the profit while not losing customers.
Don’t forget that customers are willing to pay more for a product with more value. As for retail business, it is significant to improve your service where your competitors are missing. Here is how web scraping comes into play:
- Scrape customer information, and find out how you can bring up their satisfaction by fine-tuning your market strategies.
- Next, make a dynamic pricing strategy. The market is not static, and your pricing should keep up with the changes to maximize the profit. Web scraping enables you to keep tabs on changes in market price and promotion events in a timely manner.
3.Lead Generation
Lead generation is not easy, but it’s not rocket science either. Of course, you can purchase as many name lists as possible. Warning! They are not quality leads. Choosing lead generation tools common behaviour, that allow you to search for companies and emails. In spite of the accuracy concerns, they are rather expensive with limited quotes. After all, it is not a sustainable solution to get quality leads in the long run. Here is the trick! You can extract leads’ contact information online from millions of websites within a short time span.
- Set your target persona: education, company, job title, etc.
- Find relevant websites on your business: physicians on health care providers; restaurants from Yellowbook.com.
4.Investment Decisions
Web scraping/harvesting isn’t a far concept to the investment world. In piont of fact, from time to time, hedge funds leverage the web scraping technique to extract alternative data to escape the risk of flops. It helps to detect unexpected risks and potential investment opportunities.
Investment decisions are complicated, as it demands a series of the process before a sound decision can be made from setting up a hypothetical thesis, experimenting, to researching. The most operetive way to test an investment thesis is through historical data analysis. It allows you to get insights into the root cause of past failures or successes, traps you should have avoided, and future investment return you might gain.
As a means, web scraping provide historical data more effectively, of which you can feed such data into some machine learning database for model training. As a result, investment firms, using big data, improves the accuracy of the analysis result for better decision making.
