Wednesday 17 April 2013

Building Product Catalogues Using eBay, Amazon, and Alibaba.com With Web Scraping

The internet has changed the way humans all over the world live their lives. People use the internet for just about anything you can imagine. Many use it for social networking and communicating with friends and    relatives. Others use the internet to provide information or gather information, while other people use it for conducting business in one fashion or another. The internet is integrated into the very fabric of our everyday lives and it is the single best mechanism that we can use to communicate information either for ourselves or our business. Many businesses have excelled at using the internet to grow and expand; however, there are many online businesses that have not yet taken full advantage of the benefits of the internet or the data mining opportunities that exist to help them grow.



The Beginning of Business

Shortly after the internet became what it is, online retail businesses began to spring up and utilize the web for conducting business in many different ways. Brick and mortar businesses found ways to use the internet to enhance their image and provide details about their company. They began to understand that they could develop their brand and market themselves to a much larger number of people than they had traditionally been able to. Along with this, these vast new markets were less expensive to access and much easier to reach out to than it had been with traditional media and marketing techniques prior to the arrival of the internet. Businesses found ways to advertise their products and services quicker and more efficiently to markets that had previously been untapped. Of course, it wasn’t long after this that other businesses that were not brick and mortar establishments saw avenues of opportunity on the internet.

 Rise of the Retailer

Retail sales had long been a location driven enterprise before the internet changed the way business was conducted. Literally overnight, online retail businesses sprang up across the internet when people realized you could provide the same products as brick and mortar retail locations without having the major drawbacks of these types of businesses, such as a poor location or high monthly overhead costs. Online retailers didn’t need to worry about whether they were located in a high traffic area or not and they didn’t need to invest huge sums in marketing to let people know where that location was. Online retailers could literally start their businesses out of their own garages or warehouses and provide an online catalogue for people to shop through. It was also a breakthrough in the shopping experience for consumers who could now look for what they needed and purchase it without having to drive around looking for the best deal or even having to leave the house. It was a revolution in how retail business was conducted.

 Cornering the Market

As online retail grew, it slowly became obvious that rather than a multitude of small, online retail outlets spread across the internet, fewer and larger retail giants began to emerge. These were retailers that actually came up with the concept of having their entire store front location online, but they had a huge brick and mortar setup behind the scenes to support their online brand. It was the best of all business worlds and it has become the model for new big business retail. Rather than paying for a good location and having the associated high overhead accompanying it, these giants would have their location be their online presence, and they would invest their capital and time into promoting that brand and location. They only had to concern themselves with drawing their customers to their online store – one location that was easy to access. Their actual business location or warehouse could be located in any area where rent or property was inexpensive and had a workforce capable of staffing that location. This led to big business establishing itself in locations that never would have been dreamed of prior to the internet. The only casualty in all of this was the smaller, online retailer who was now overshadowed by the big retailer who could provide more products and better prices because of their higher volume. However, it was only a matter of time before this problem began to solve itself.

 Rise of the Retailer Part II

Smaller retailers realized soon enough that they could not compete with Amazon or EBay by selling items out of their garage. That realization forced the next and current step in online retail that has merged small and large retailer together in mutually beneficial relationship. Small retailers understood that rather than beat them, you had to join them, and they began selling and marketing items on their own online retail shops that were actually from the big retail locations. A whole industry grew around the concept of providing products from large vendors through a vast network of small, independent retailers spread all across the web. The big retailers would gain the advantage of having their products and brand sold through a much larger network on the web and the small retailers would have the advantage of a much larger catalogue of products to sell from. However, not all online ecommerce sites caught on to this concept, and there are a multitude of businesses that need help but don’t know how to do it. Here’s how.

 The Calvary Has Arrived

The small online retail store now has a great opportunity if their catalogues are not currently full of products. By utilizing web scraping techniques, smaller retailers can access much larger databases of products and details by mining the data from large retailers such as Amazon, Alibaba.com and EBay. When smaller retailers extract website data from these retail giants, they can augment their online store presence in a big way with less expense in both time and money than ever before. A good web scraping service can be set up to do a majority of the work for you, but you will still have to put some effort in yourself, which is not a bad thing. You dictate the areas to be searched and what items to search for when you set up a data mining project. You can choose what products you want to sell and whether or not to utilize the product descriptions provided by the vendor or customize them to suit your own site. With a little effort on your part, gathering data from big retailers and applying it on your own site can reap large rewards where before you had a small and stagnant web presence.

 The Bottom Line

The future for online retail is perhaps brighter now than it has ever been. With partnerships between huge vendors and small retailers growing, the time has never been better to take your online business presence to the next level. If you have an online retail or ecommerce site, you would be surprised at how much more effective you can make it by enlisting the help of a professional data mining service. With direction and a little effort from you, doors can be opened in places you never expected would be there. You owe it to yourself and to your business.

Source: http://www.loginworks.com/blogs/web-scraping-blogs/139-building-product-catalogues-using-ebay-amazon-and-alibabacom-with-web-scraping-

Note:

Delta Ray is experienced web scraping consultant and writes articles on Yelp Data Scraping, Linkedin Profile Scraping, Yellowpages Data Scraping, eBay Product Scraping, Amazon Product Scraping, Tripadvisor Data Scraping, Linkedin Email Scraping, Screen Scraping Services, Yelp Review Scraping and yellowpages data scraping.

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