‘’ In 2019, E-Commerce Sales Accounted for 14.1 Percent of All Retail Sales Worldwide (Statista)’’

E-commerce referred to as Electronic commerce indulges in catering to prospect's needs online. The greatest thing about E-commerce is the ability to offer its prospects with a variety of options to choose from. Many brands have opted to start working in the e-commerce sector because it is one of the most efficient and cost-effective manner for a business to run and be maintained.

To start a business, the cost of labourers, machinery, assets, electricity, a physical store is way too much of a burden when compared to a business when opened online. Having an e-commerce business is much easier and a better investment. For instance, when setting up an e-commerce business the basic requirement is to have a website. With the use of a website, you can capture the attention of prospects with the benefits you offer them via your products.

Source: Bintime

As you can see in the image, the website clearly shows what the product is about, how it can help prospects and why you need to invest in such a solution which is exactly why businesses, especially B2B are interested in selling on this platform.

But with such benefits, did you know that the fierce competition this industry holds is enough to overshadow multiple brands? If you take a closer look at the new upcoming brands selling in this industry, they are standing out better than you because they have identified your flaws and have converted that in their solution.

Surprised?

How do you expect to grow when you are catering to one kind of route or method of selling. As technology develops and continues to introduce impactful solutions, the market too changes with the new introduction of trends. Today what your prospects are loving at the moment can fade away in the next 5 years.

Scared?

Don’t be as mentioned above, technology has been developing and with that, it has also introduced solutions which can help you to retain your brand even amongst the tough crowd as well as help you to sell better to your prospects.

The solution as mentioned in the beginning, data scraping.

Data scraping also referred to as web scraping is the process of extracting information online from any source. The process takes less time to retrieve data and immediately saves it in the user's system in the format they would like to see it such as CSV files and much more. 

With data scraping, one can easily conduct this process regularly so that with the data in hand, a user can monitor and apply the solutions in order to improvise and enhance their current selling solution.

The data scraping activity can take place anywhere, even on your competitor's website. Previously if a brand wanted to extract data from a website it would opt for the method of copy-pasting. Since a few data would be huge, this technique would be time-consuming and would also alert the website owner that data is being retrieved from its website since this activity would slow down their website loading speed.

Hence data scraping is considered to be one of the modern solutions to the most important asset for any e-commerce business, capturing quality data.

As you are aware of what data scraping is, now apply this scraping technique to your e-commerce activities. Why would you require data scraping here?

The answers are:

1 . To keep updated about the latest trends

2. Receive market knowledge about the e-commerce industry

3. Get insights on what your prospects are actually looking for

4. Get a closer look at what strategies your competitors are applying

5. Improving your selling strategies with your prospect vision

Data scraping can conduct all the above actions without any hassles as you can see below:

1 . It can scrape through all the market information via any sources or portals

2. It can scrape the trending pages to give you alerts on what is going to be the next big thing

3. It can scrape your competitor's website no matter the huge data it holds give you all the information you require such as lead details, feedback, and pricing patterns

4. It can scrape through any source such as social media accounts, websites, feedback pages to give you information about what your prospect's needs are and what they are expecting from your solution

However, despite providing multiple advantages, there is still a drawback. Conducting data scraping activities for a brand like yours is necessary so that the above-listed factors can be accommodated. But did you know that conducting such an action regularly can be risky? At times it increases your chances of being considered as spam or suspicious activity.

Understanding this, our second solution can be helpful, what we call e-commerce proxy.

The term e-commerce is well aware to you, proxies are what support this industry. Proxies stand between you and the information you want to access. For instance, the reason why your account gets blocked when viewing a restricted website is that the restricted website is able to detect the location of your residing in with the help of your IP address.

When it detects that you are not an authorized user, it blocks your IP address for good. So if you use a proxy server when accessing information, this solution will change your IP address. So when the restricted website owner views the IP address and sees that it's from the users, it allows the information to be viewed. 

In the case of e-commerce, using an e-commerce proxy can help. You can apply this e-commerce proxy to conduct the below essential actions such as:

1 . Speed up your website loading page

2. Enhance your selling activities by incorporating the exact needs of your prospect in your solutions

3. Scraping information about prospects reviews, feedbacks, and recommendations from your competitors, so that you can apply the missing gap in your solution to sell much better

4. Scrape lead information from your competitors so that you can assist them with your solution

There are many different types of e-commerce proxies that you can invest in. Ensure that you choose the one which matches all your requirements.

1. DATA CENTER PROXIES

Data center proxies are widely used to serve the purpose of brand protection conducting market research, sales intelligence, SEO monitoring , e-commerce activities much more. Data center proxies work as a regular proxy, they hide the IP address so that your anonymity is hidden while surfing the internet. What makes them stand out is that they don’t require the need for an ISP (Internet service provider) or an internet connection. When you request to view a website instead of your information, data center proxies will send theirs.

PROS:

1 . Cheaper in cost

2. Provides faster speed in its action

CONS:

1 . Doesn’t hold a reliable position when it comes to securing anonymity 

2. RESIDENTIAL PROXIES

Aims to retrieve data without the fear of being blocked when conducting online data retrieval activities. Whether it is information on e-commerce activities, get any data you want without having the fear of your IP address being subjected to high risk. Residential proxies have IP addresses attached to a physical location. The IP address is provided to users from the ISP itself. When you access information from any location, your ISP will give you an IP address.

PROS:

1. It is a brilliant measure for data harvesting
2. Offers high anonymity

CONS:

1 . Only if the residential proxies are of good quality will the chances of not getting blocked while conducting online activities will stand secure. So a risk will always be there. 

3. WEB SCRAPING/DATA SCRAPING

Web scraping as mentioned in the article is the process of extracting information online through the method of scraping. Say you want to scrape through your competitor's website, you can conduct this action without any hassle. With web scraping all you need to do is click on the website to scrape, conduct the process and the data gets saved in your system. The data can be saved in any format for instance in a CSV file, Excel, JSON and much more. Web scraping, however, is more efficient when it is conducted with the help of any proxy servers. While the scraping happens, proxy servers ensure that 

PROS:

1 . Eliminates the manual work of copy-pasting information into the system

2. Retrieves data quicker

CONS:

1 . Regular scraping can cause the IP to be blocked

2. With the rise in technology, websites are incorporating advanced methods making it difficult to scrape the information.

4. REAL-TIME CRAWLER

Search any sorts of information you want from search engines and e-commerce websites with the help of a real-time crawler. When you send a request to the real-time crawler, it collects all the information required according to your request. Once the information is collected it sends you back the information in a format of an HTML or JSON. All the action taking place is conducted on the same connection being implemented which gives you real-time web scraping solutions. 

PROS:

1 . With a large IP choice and an exceptional IP backup option, the real-time crawler can deliver a 100% success rate in its data retrieval activities.

2. It is a user-friendly application that just requires a URL to get started

CONS:

1 . Requires constant modifications due to frequent website changes with reference to its design or structural form.

5. PREMIUM PROXIES

Premium proxies are great to retrieve information online because it offers a dedicated proxy for a user. With premium proxies, any brand can conduct online activities without the fear of being blocked or their IP addresses being caught as suspicious. Premium proxies offer great speed and have a lot of advantages added to it for instance information can be viewed from any geo locations available, multiple IP addresses are provided, the data and bandwidth speed is great and much more. 

PROS:

1. Speed will never be tapered since the IP addresses provided are dedicated to the users
2. The servers are maintained from trusted brands which assure no crash or shutdown errors.

CONS:

1 . Proxies have a cache system which saves the information. This can cause security issues as anyone can view it.