Scraping (or Web Scraping) is an automated method of extracting large amounts of public data from websites. A software program (often called a bot or crawler) fetches web pages and parses the HTML code to extract specific information, which is then structured and stored in a database or spreadsheet. In the e-commerce context, scraping is primarily used for: Price Monitoring: Tracking competitor prices across multiple online stores. Product Intelligence: Gathering data on competitors’ product assortments, descriptions, and images. Review Aggregation: Collecting customer reviews and ratings for sentiment analysis. Market Research: Compiling data for trend analysis and new product ideation. While scraping public data is generally legal, it exists in a legal gray area and must be done in compliance with a website’s Terms of Service and robots.txt file. Aggressive scraping can also overwhelm a site’s servers. Many businesses therefore rely on specialized third-party data providers that handle the complex technical and legal aspects of scraping, providing clean, reliable data feeds instead of building their own scraping infrastructure from scratch.
Additional resources:
Guide to Ecommerce Scraping
Ecommerce Website Reviews Scraping for Product Insights
