Use A Shopping API For Web Scraping Important Data

For those selling goods online, it is hard to gauge consumer reaction in the same way you can in a physical store. Online sellers rely on eCommerce sites to provide data on consumer sentiment, price, sales, and more. Collecting data through online shopping APIs, application programming interfaces that allow two applications to interact, gives online sellers a better sense of how they compare to the competition. Additionally, consumers use online shopping to find the best deals and high-quality goods. Therefore, developing a shopping API that combines price data for different items and brands would fill a need within the marketplace.

If you know the basics of shopping APIs, then use the table of contents to read ahead about Scraping Robot’s tools that will help you build an API suited to your needs.

Table of Contents

What is an Online Shopping API?

An online shopping API, or application programming interface, allows two different programs to interact at once. For example, when you buy clothing online, you interact with the brand’s eCommerce API of choice, which alerts them of your order. It saves organizations time and money because instead of building an online shopping interface from scratch, they can use a pre-built interface that is intuitive for buyers and sellers alike.

Collecting data from APIs (big data networks like Home Depot, Target, Safeway API online shopping, Shopping.com API, and other big-box retail interfaces) helps you understand your audience, how your prices compare, what consumers think, and how to move forward in your industry.

Collecting Shopping API Data

One of the easiest ways to collect online data from a shopping API is web scraping. Web scraping is the automatic extraction of online data from a web page. Once the data is extracted with a scraping tool, it is formatted in a way that is easy to download and share. Here is more information on how to scrape popular shopping sites for data. Scraping Robot offers different scraping modules built for different online data sources.

Google shopping API

Google has multiple APIs (Google shopping express API, Google shopping content API, Google shopping search API, Google shopping list API) built for payment, product search, and more related. Scraping Google shopping is great for price data. Their homepage has a section titled “recent price drops,” which can be scraped to ensure you find the best deals at the right time. This is useful for both consumers and sellers because it makes you aware of the best deals or drop in demand for a specific product. The trending page is also easily scraped for data regarding the popularity of different items at any given time. This information is useful for those trying to identify a need in the market for a new business and to gain insight into the future desires of consumers.

There are also pages for each category that can be scraped for industry-specific data such as kitchen and dining, home decor, electronics, and more.

Amazon shopping API

Amazon is an online shopping giant, full of reviews, recommended items, and pre-used items. Similar to other online APIs, there are trending product pages, pages determined by product category, and recommendations based on past purchases.

Understanding price averages through scraping Amazon API shopping is beneficial to finding an advantageous price point. Because lots of people turn to Amazon before other online shopping sites, there is tons and tons of data to collect.

Amazon is home to tons of reviews for products, films, etc. Scraping these reviews provides essential consumer insights. In order to reap the full benefits, scrape both your reviews and those of your competition. By analyzing the competition, you can easily discover what advantages you have over them based on customer comments. This makes it easier to come up with compelling ad campaigns or product developments that will attract new customers looking for solutions.

eBay shopping API

eBay is home to tons of items from all categories. It is the perfect place to shop for old cameras, cookbooks, and mostly anything niche you can think of. For this same reason, it is great for collecting data no matter your industry. You can scrape average price information for each product based on different sellers, you can scrape consumer reviews, and also can discover what it takes for your own items to make the trending products page.

Unlike other eCommerce sites, eBay has tons of vintage or specialty items that are hard to find elsewhere. This makes it a particularly important resource for those reselling items or looking for things currently not in production. Instead of being restricted to one brand’s API, you can scrape for many different goods at once.

Benefits of Shopping Cart API Integration

All the useful data found on online shopping sites must be integrated somewhere. Similar to travel sites that congregate flight price information, there is also a need for sites that congregate shopping information for consumers to easily parse through and compare prices. Here are the benefits of integrating your API data for your brand or organization.

Price comparison

Price is a big determining factor for many consumers. Being able to easily compare prices of different brands and products side-by-side helps consumers make the right decisions.

For sellers, finding the perfect price point is a mix of considering costs and what the market can handle. Scraping price data from various online shopping sites provides pricing insights that can be used to determine the ideal price range for your product or service.

Being able to combine data scraped from different sites into the same analysis program allows you to save time and energy that would otherwise be spent trying to combine all the data manually.

Tech opportunities

For those seeking new opportunities in tech, creating a shopping API that extracts data from various brand websites can fill a niche for consumers looking to easily compare prices and quality amongst their options. In order to do this, you must have an API that can easily combine data from many sources.

An API driven strategy makes it easy to combine your own sales data with that of other online brands. While this article focuses on shopping, there are many ways to apply API insights into any industry given the variety of publicly available online data. Instead of doing your own analysis and comparing it to separate competitor analysis, you can simultaneously compare data from many sites with less manual analysis on your end.

Consumer trust

Shopping cart APIs ensure that consumer payment data is secure. Using a recognizable shopping interface builds consumer trust in your brand and payment process. Using a verified payment API legitimizes your online store, which is something that can be hard to determine in a virtual shopping space, therefore helping consumers feel safe and more likely to recommend your brand to others.

Additionally, the data extracted via other online APIs allows you to predict consumer needs and find them the best deals. Giving consumers useful sales information to recommend products they might love and opportunities for discounts is another way to gain trust among consumers as using data to help provide a better consumer experience.

Scraping Robot API

Instead of building your own API from scratch, Scraping Robot’s API makes it easy for you to input data scraped from online directly into your analysis program of choice. This process makes it easy for you to combine data from all the online sources mentioned in this article without having to perform separate analysis for each site. Combining all the data saves you time and money and provides you with accurate results.

How to get a price from any shopping cart API

With Scraping Robot’s API, you get more than just our useful products, you also get access to our team’s knowledge and security. For developers, you can efficiently input data from a shopping API into your own API program. The security of our API ensures secure, accurate data collection. Our proxies keep the data collection speed fast. If this sounds like the right path for your organization, check out our API overview for more information.

Conclusion

Scraping a shopping API gives your organization access to valuable insights regarding price, reviews, and development. Online shopping sites like Amazon and eBay are home to tons of useful data that can be easily extracted with a web scraping tool. With this data, you can better understand consumers, find the perfect price point, or even build an API that directs multiple online data points to a different site full of congregate data. With Scraping Robot’s API, you can easily input scraped data into your API of choice, making it easier to display price data and user reviews on your own organizational website.

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Hannah Benson