Product Intelligence: Web Scraping And Data-Driven Design
Table of Contents
1. What is Product Intelligence?
2. How to Collect Product Intelligence Data
3. Benefits of Scraping Product Results API
4. Product Match Analysis and Scraping Robot
With the ubiquity of online retailers, there is more data than ever available online related to products. This can range from product description and price data to review data. The collection of this information, product intelligence, provides your organization with valuable insights that help you differentiate your product, appeal to consumer values, and edge out the competition. Web scraping, the automatic extraction of data from a web page, is the best way to access this data. Using Scraping Robot’s scraping tools, you can perform product analysis that yields valuable insights to help your organization grow.
If you know the basics of product intelligence, use the table of contents to learn more about how scraping for product insights helps your organization achieve its goals.
What is Product Intelligence?
Product intelligence is the collection of data related to product details, price, and more with the goal of improving your product or expanding your product database. Examples of useful data include
- Price
- Product details (size, materials, etc.)
- Reviews
- Stock availability
- Competitor prices
Once collected, this data is analyzed to provide insights in both product development and marketing. Insights can help you build a better product by creating design improvements, adjusting price, and incorporating consumer opinion. Product intelligence data can be used in marketing to define your target audience and their values, making outreach easier.
How to Collect Product Intelligence Data
Intelligence data can be collected manually, yet this takes lots of time, labor, and money. Because so much of this data is available online, web scraping is the best way to approach extracting product match data from web pages.
Web Scraping
Web scraping is the automatic extraction of data from websites. A web scraping tool extracts data from a given URL and outputs the web page as data that can be easily downloaded and shared. This is more efficient than manual data collection because it takes less time, people, and money and is more easily shared amongst your team. Scraping gives you more time to use insights from analysis to make data driven decisions than traditional data collection.
Scraping Robot’s API is built for a variety of web pages and other online retailers.
Benefits of Scraping Product Results API
While web scraping definitely saves you time and money (check out Scraping Robot’s prices), there are many more organizational benefits to reap. Here are just a few.
Build a better product
As product development is the goal of product intelligence, the main benefit of web scraping is that it enables you to build a better product. Scraping product data such as price and product details allows your organization to reflect on the design and material used in production as well as the production process itself. Scraping can be used to analyze any part of the production and sales process for a product.
If you own a furniture business and are looking to improve your lamps, then scraping product details of lamps that are popular on online retails sites (Amazon, Wayfair, eBay) will give you a sense of what materials, features, and design aesthetic is likely to connect with your consumer base. Scraping product reviews is another important step in understanding where product design and consumer values intersect. For example, using recycled wood or materials to create a lamp can appeal to consumers’ desire for more eco-friendly home goods while also incorporating design techniques that were positively received in less eco-friendly options.
Discover consumer values
Consumer values go deeper than looking for eco-conscious products, sometimes even deeper than the product itself. Organizations can incorporate consumer values into the production process and advertising. Scraping consumers reviews and social media for sentiment data makes it easy to understand, find your target audience, and then appeal to them.
An example of this is the popular one-to-one business model, popularized by Toms Shoes, which donates a product to a person in need with each purchase therefore appealing to consumers’ sense of charity. This model works best for products such as shoes, glasses, backpacks, or other items regularly asked for by charities. Consumer values aren’t limited to the product design alone, but can extend into the business model of your organization and the values it projects through marketing campaigns.
Keep up with the competition
With online retail being especially competitive, staying updated on the competition is more essential than ever. Competitor analysis includes collecting product data, price data, and reviewing data on competitors and then analyzing that data in order to understand how your product/organization is similar or different. Through recognizing these differences, you will improve at marketing your product in relation to the competition by highlighting features or benefits unique to your product design or process.
When developing new products, creating solutions to problems highlighted by your competition’s customer reviews is a great way to differentiate your product and appeal to your competitor’s target audience in hopes of winning them over. Through a combination of creating a product true to your organizational values and being aware of your competitor’s flaws, your product will appeal to a wider audience.
Product Match Analysis and Scraping Robot
Product matching is the process of deeply understanding your products in order to differentiate them for consumers. Here are ways you can approach this process with web scraping.
Product details
Scraping product details is the main way to understand how to product match in a way that informs and benefits consumers. A popular example of product matching is within the world of computers. Since each model varies slightly in storage space, speed, dimensions, and software, it is essential that the organization’s website makes those differences clear in order to decrease consumer confusion and purchase the wrong model.
Scraping product details makes it easy for organizations to see the differences between models so that the consumer understands exactly what they are getting. This is especially important online since the loss of face-to-face interaction can make it harder to communicate with consumers as they navigate your website. Putting important product data front and center in the description makes it easier for consumers to buy online and avoids common mistakes and questions that take up valuable time for both consumer and company to solve.
Social media
Scraping social media mentions for your organization or similar products is another way to improve your product matching through consumer comments. While online reviews tend to be more formal, mentions of social media sites are also important to your reputation. Online, consumers may vent frustrations, ask questions, or spread love for brands they rely upon. With this extra data, you can discover what confusions or questions consumers are expressing online. You can then clear up these common confusions in your product description on your own site. By addressing these concerns at the source, you’ll win over consumers and also build a reputation as a brand that anticipates consumer response and cares about the experience of customers.
Conclusion
Understanding your products and how consumers use them in their daily lives is the main goal of product intelligence. Through collection price, product, and sentiment data, you can address common user problems during the sales process and better appeal to consumer values in marketing. Web scraping tools, which automatically extract data from webpages, are the perfect way to collect price intelligence data. With web scraping, you will save time and money while generating valuable insights that help you with price matching, marketing, consumer outreach, and other organizational tasks.
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