Retail industry and marketing
Retail is the process of selling consumer goods or services to customers little by little through multiple channels of distribution to earn a profit. It is an area where competition is very intense therefore it can be considered part of the marketing spectrum. In this area, the importance of quality, product variety, price, location and way of displaying the product, being reliable and marketing is very important. Marketing, in its simplest form, is when the firm tries to influence demand in order to achieve its goals. Demand in retailing means success and reaching goals then it is a necessity to do marketing correctly.
Competition in retail industry
In this constantly evolving and changing competitive environment, digital transformation is no longer a choice for retail companies, but a necessity. Under these conditions, retail companies need to invest in technology, develop new strategies against changing customer behavior and improve their operational processes in order to stand strong against increasing competition.
The main trends that fundamentally affect competition in the retail sector and direct both retail and neighboring industries can be listed as follows:
- Digital revolution (Competitor Tracking, Competitor Analysis)
- Artificial intelligence
- Omni channel
- Service quality
- Competition with giants
Competitor tracking and competitor analysis in retail industry
Competition analysis is a method where you identify competitors and their products in your industry and research their sales and marketing strategies. Competitor analysis helps you identify opportunities for yourself by gathering what your competitors are doing or not doing right; It allows you to decide and discover how your brand, product or service can differ.
Competitor analysis is traditionally implement in 3 different methods: SWOT, PEST and COMPETITOR ARRAY. However, with the digitalization of retailing, the ways of getting information about your competitors’ sales and marketing strategies have changed. You can collect data such as sales price information, discount rate and product portfolio of your competitors’ e-commerce applications with data scraping (web scraping) and develop your own strategies based on this data.
Web scraping
In today’s competitive world everybody is looking for ways to innovate and make use of new technologies. Web scraping (also called web data extraction or data scraping) provides a solution for those who want to get access to structured web data in an automated fashion. Some of the main use cases of web scraping include price monitoring, price intelligence, news monitoring, lead generation, and market research among many others. Web scraping is useful if the public website you want to get data from doesn’t have an API, or it does but provides only limited access to the data.
How web scraping benefits for competitor analysis ?
Web scraping is a great method that can help you learn about the product portfolio that your competitors provide to their customers, the price policies they apply, the general view of the market and trends. This method is widely used by e-commerce companies, fashion giants and many brands for price tracking, dynamic pricing and minimum price compliance.
Use case
Three fashion giant which have competition in turkey clothing market. LCW, Koton and Defacto provide services to a similar customer profile. We have examined their e-commerce website for same category (Women Pants). Let’s take a look at how the product portfolio and price policies of these three companies are?
1.Let’s determine the product category
You can analyze all categories as well as focus on a specific product range. In our current case, we will proceed by choosing a certain category. First of all, we need to examine the websites of the companies. Let’s choose the category of “Women Pants”, which is one of the most visited categories by female users.
2.Let’s examine the category list detail
We need to determine the data fields that will be useful for our analysis by going into the details of the products listed on the category listing page. In the image below, we see that we can collect some product information (Price, Discount, Product Name, etc.) without going into details page.
3. Let’s determine the data fields we need in the product detail.
Let’s look at the details of the products in the women’s pants category for each company. We must identify the data fields we need on the product detail page so that we can discover common and differentiating details. (Ex: Product name, Price, Discount, Color, Size list, Color List, Product spec etc.)
4.Collecting and consolidation of data
Crawbee gather the data sets you need in a fast and structured way and makes the data ready for use.Thanks to Crawbee, we collected potential competition data that would take days if it was done manually, within hours. You can now focus on completing your analyzes without the complexity of the data collection process.
5.What kind of analysis can we perform on the data we collect ?
For LCW, Koton and Defacto companies, we can perform all of the following analyzes and more.
* Range comparison
* Avarage price comparison
* Discount comparison
* Color list comparison
* Size list comparison
* New product
* Stock quantity comparison
* Shipment options
* Best selling products features
* etc.
If you want to learn more ways to benefit from web scraping and use our web scraping service, you can get support from experts at crawbee.