Joining the e-commerce industry is as exciting as it is frightening. While your business will have a much wider reach, attracting audiences worldwide, it will also face fierce competition.
With anywhere between 12 and 24 million e-commerce sites currently online, and many more launched every day, it can be a challenge to stand out from the crowd.
The only way to succeed is by staying ahead of the trends and keeping a close eye on the competition – something you can only do with a reliable scraper API.
If you want to gain a competitive edge, learn about some of 2022’s biggest trends in the e-commerce industry and find out how scraper API can help you stay ahead of them.
Key goals of e-commerce in 2022
The e-commerce industry is ever-changing. Trends that were all the rage just a few months ago are all but forgotten today. Experiences that the consumers were adamant about are now nothing more than distractions.
However, the key goals of e-commerce in 2022 have remained essentially the same as in the years prior. If you want to establish yourself as a leader in your niche, you need to dedicate time and effort into:
Expanding your market reach
As an e-commerce store owner, you have no choice but to keep working on expanding your market reach. It will help you establish a better reputation, inspire trust and loyalty among consumers, boost sales, and ensure a consistent revenue stream;
Attracting customers
Without new customers, your business will stagnate. You need to understand your target audiences and develop products and services that appeal to their interests, solve their problems, and meet their needs;
Understanding the competitors
E-commerce is a vast industry, set to only keep on expanding over the coming years. It’s expected to reach a compound annual growth rate of 14.7% from 2020 to 2027, so you’ll face exceptionally fierce competition. To outperform the competitors, you need to understand them, predict their next moves, and outmaneuver them.
Web scraping as a reliable solution
To achieve any of the three main goals of e-commerce – expanding market reach, attracting audiences, and understanding competitors – you need data.
You need to collect information on the past and current market changes, consumer demands, competitor performance, and more. Doing so manually is a time-consuming, expensive process that leaves too much room for human error.
But how to crawl a website without getting blocked automatically?
Web scraping is the process of harvesting data that’s freely available online – on web pages, forums, social media platforms, and more. Scraper API is an automated tool that can seamlessly extract data from any source, export it to your preferred software, and prepare it for accurate analysis.
Scraping allows you to gather valuable insights that can help you improve the performance of your e-commerce store, analyze your audiences, and surpass your competitors.
Scraping use cases in e-commerce
Web scraping is an indispensable process in the e-commerce industry. It simplifies data harvesting and has an array of use cases to make your job easier.
Price monitoring
Although many consumers wouldn’t mind paying more for a higher quality of products and services, the price is still a critical factor they always consider.
If your prices are too low, your target audience will be skeptical of doing business with you since lower cost usually means lower quality. If they’re too high, your audience might not be able to afford to buy from you. Therefore, you need to monitor your competitors’ pricing and stay in roughly the same range.
Scraper API can help you harvest all relevant pricing data that enables you to determine the ultimate cost of your products/services.
Competitor analysis
The only way to beat the competitors is to understand what they’re doing. With scraper API, you can collect data on their SEO strategies, learn more about their product and service categories, monitor their reviews, explore their customer sentiments, and even gauge their ad spending.
The better you understand the competitors, the easier it will be for you to develop strategies to outperform them.
Lead generation
As mentioned, if you want to attract audiences, you need to offer products and services tailored just for them.
Scraper API enables you to harvest data on consumer spending, likes and dislikes, interests, pain points, complaints, etc. You can use the information to assess their buying habits and customize solutions that meet their needs perfectly.
Feedback tracking
Your reputation is perhaps your most important asset as an e-commerce store owner. It can take years to build up your reputation, but it can take just a few minutes to destroy it.
That’s why it’s critical to track customer feedback wherever it comes from. Your customers might talk about your brand on public forums, Facebook groups, Reddit threads, and more without you even realizing it.
To stay in charge of your reputation, you can use scraper API to track all brand mentions and address them professionally.
Conclusion
Scraper API offers an array of benefits for businesses in the e-commerce industry. Simply put, data extraction and harvesting give you the information you need to gain a competitive edge.