4 Benefits of Collecting Auction Data With Web Scraping

Since 2012, the Internet has doubled in size and data is growing exponentially. The other day, my neighbor told me he’d been planning to move out but was having a difficult time getting the total list of available houses up for auctions in the area. I asked him, “have you tried going online to collect data on houses up for auction?” His response was that going through auction sites and real-estate platforms one after the other to search for the right house was too tedious and time-consuming. If only he could find a way to collect all the data at once into a single file. Well, all he had to do was say something! Whether you’re a real estate agent, a neighbor looking for a new property, or someone looking for antique artworks, web scraping offers the most efficient means to crawl auction sites and collect data.

In this article, we’ll explore all the peculiarities of using web scraping to collect auction data. But first, let’s delve into what online auction data is all about. In case you already have enough knowledge of how online auction works, feel free to use the table of contents below to skip to the part that most interests you.

Table of Contents

What Is Online Auction Data?

Everything is becoming digital in the modern world. Online auction is one of the innovations that makes life easier and makes auction accessible to anyone with a device and Internet connection. You don’t have to attend physical auctions with a moderator holding a bell. An E-auction is conducted on the Internet only. There are sites dedicated to conducting auctions, and these sites help people list items they want to auction out for people to bid on. And that means more usable data.

The item up for auction is listed on the site at a predetermined base price, then interested buyers bid on it. And as auctions work, the highest bidder gets the prize (or item), which is usually given at a discounted cost. The cost of the product increases at a fixed rate each time a bidder places their own price. There are different online auction sites like eBid, Bonanza, eBay, Webstore, etc. These sites consist of bulk data like listings, bidding information, item prices, and more. These datasets are what make up online auction data. But how do you extract such huge amounts of auction data from its site? Simple. Web scraping.

Web Scraping and Auction Data

Like I said earlier, the internet has expanded very rapidly over the past decade. So much data has been generated and is being generated that the knowledge of how to access and manage “Big Data” is now a survival skill in business. Data increases in size every day and this recurring increase has made it almost impossible for you and me to manually collect bulk data on the Internet. So, like my neighbor, you need a way to harvest data in large amounts from the web. Here’s where web scraping comes in. 

Web scraping, which is also known as web extraction, web crawling, or web harvesting, involves obtaining data from one or more websites with the use of bots known as “spiders” or “crawlers”. These bots crawl through the source code of a select web page and highlight data according to some preset parameters. Then an extractor collects these data into an easy to use file format like a CSV file. If you have the resources, you can build your own scraping system. However, there are web scraping services that make life easier for you by providing the scraping infrastructure. All you have to do is provide details on the type of data you need.

With web scraping, you get full control over your ability to collect and analyze auction data. You can collect the entire auction house data or you can collect specific product datasets like car auction data. You can collect past auction data and current base prices of listed items. You can collect seller data and so much more, all with the simple solution of web scraping. Let’s take a deeper look at some of the benefits of using web scraping to collect auction data.

Benefits of Data Scraping Auction Prices

Web scraping benefits the process of an online auction in so many ways. When you hear the word auction, you think of buyers, sellers, bids, cost, high cost, and higher costs. Auctions engage nearly every industry. Are you into Real Estate auctions? Or looking to buy antiques? Here’s how you can use web scraping to collect online auction data and make your life easier.

1. Market Research: Any business person knows you must conduct market research before making an investment in any property. By utilizing a web scraping bot, you can have access to vital auction data which gives you an idea of the types of products (houses, cars, or artworks) that you are likely to find at an auction. Once you know what you can find at an auction and what you cannot, it becomes easier to manage your expectations and bring them closer to reality. For example, you’d be hard-pressed to find a Lamborghini at an auction. A Prius, on the other hand, is more likely to be found at an auction. Using web scraping to collect data from multiple auction sites and comparing these datasets will tell you what you can and cannot find at auction.
2. Accuracy: There is a large amount of data on online auction sites, and it will be tedious to try and extract it on your own. With web scraping, you can pinpoint the right auction platforms with the product that best matches your needs. You don’t have to guess or do trial-and-error to find trustworthy auction sites. You can collect reviews from users of different platforms to find the one with the most favorable reviews. That way, you can accurately select the best platform and avoid scams. Also, you can scrape seller data to find sellers that are close to your location so as to avoid the high cost of shipping your purchase down to your location.
3. Price monitoring: While it’s unlikely that you’ll find the exact same products on multiple auction sites, similar products do exist. Especially when it comes to house auctions. The structure and construction style might be different, but a 2-bedroom house remains a 2-bedroom house. With web scraping, you can collect auction house data on similar products and compare base prices. Of course, it being an auction, the base price is definitely not the final price but it is indicative of how high the price is expected to get. Web scraping can extract data like auction house sales data for past sales. By checking the sales data for past similar products, you can get a reasonable idea of how high the price will get. That way, you can predict the products that you’re likely to win instead of spreading yourself thin on several options. Cars also fall under this situation. You can collect car auction data for similar car brands to check the price range for past sales. This will give you an idea of how much to budget before you start bidding at all.
4. Helps you budget: One of the worst things you could do when it comes to auctions is to go in without a budget. If you don’t have a budget, you’ll end up buying things you don’t need at the expense of things you do need. With web scraping, you can build a reasonable budget strategy by collecting data on past sales as we mentioned above. Historical auction data will tell you what to expect in terms of price. Then you can budget for each item you want to bid for accordingly. There is so much historical auction data you can extract from bidding sites, like the sold price of closed auctions, description retail price, etc.

Using Scraping Robot to Collect Auction House Data

To implement web scraping for auction data, you can either write a program and spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of manpower and valuable resources. Or you can use a web scraping service like Scraping Robot.

At Scraping Robot, we make it as easy as possible for you to collect data from anywhere on the web. To get started, just send a message to us detailing what you want and we’ll get started creating a custom scraping solution for you. Our custom scraping solutions are tailored to fit your exact data needs so you can easily collect any and all types of auction data imaginable.

Our scraping service uses APIs and multiple proxies to allow you to collect data from multiple web pages in real-time–giving you the power to access information quickly, efficiently, and effectively as possible.

Conclusion

Online auctions are a new type of marketplace on the block and you need data to compete effectively. With Scraping Robot, you can easily collect auction data and use it to inform your auction strategy. To get started, just send us a message and you’re good to go.

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Saheed Opeyemi