Tech & Gadgets

Scraping Lessons For E-commerce Data Scientists

By Mashum Mollah

3 Mins Read

Published on: 01 September 2022

Last Updated on: 11 November 2024

E-commerce Data Scientists

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E-commerce data scientists are frontiers in strategically harvesting, analyzing, and implementing data.

Data scientists create and execute data scrapers to gather and implement e-commerce intelligence competently for strategic marketing and sales reinforcement.

Intelligence from data scraping informs important business strategies, including customer buying behavior predictions, dynamic pricing, and content creation.

Understanding Data Scraping From a Data Scientist’s Angle

As the world shifts to big data and every e-commerce business realize the importance of information, data scientists ought to learn strategic scraping methods.

Web scraping is the only time-proven and scientifically sound way to garner intelligence.

As a data scientist behind an e-commerce business, you must study the nuts and bolts of strategic data scraping. You must learn the tricks of harvesting competitive intelligence and leveraging data to your e-commerce business’ advantage.

Data Scraping

1. Quality Data Is a Game-Changer

Quality and accurate data harvested in real-time is a game-changer for e-commerce operators. Remember, indispensable e-commerce marketing and growth decisions rely on the data scraped from competitors’ websites.

Basing business decisions on erratic and invalid information can be catastrophic to the growth of an e-commerce business. Keep note of data harvesting processes that don’t evaluate risks, such as IP cloaking, which leads to erroneous and outdated data harvesting.

Use scrapers with data quality monitoring features to harvest usable and accurate information that gives your company a competitive advantage.

Note: A scraping spider tool with an integrated quality monitoring system can return site changes, data validation, and volume inconsistency errors. Work with ISP proxy providers to optimize data gathering and first-grade analysis.

2. Learn Tricks to Bypass Anti-Bot Measures

Bot-generated traffic accounts for more than 40% of all internet traffic, with 27% being from bad bots.

To counter activities by bad bots, most e-commerce operators have invested in high-end and sophisticated anti-bot measures. Although website helpers and crawler bots aren’t blocked, websites with anti-bot efforts may confuse them for bad bots if they send too many requests.

As a data scientist, find out how bad bots attack websites. Know the impact they may have on e-commerce sites. Also, learn how websites use anti-bot mechanisms to ban IPs and filter out non-human-like behaviors.

Note: Research the importance of proxies in evading IP banning and cloaking obstacles and develop crawling code combining all these capabilities.

3. Emphasize the Efficiency of Crawling Bots

As a data scientist, inventing and applying algorithms and models is your core duty.

In other words, you’re responsible for creating spiders and web crawlers that can efficiently mine quality and accurate data. Your position requires you to be masterful at using modern technology and tools to analyze data to discover trends and patterns.

Data isn’t valuable until one can interpret it accordingly to derive opportunities and solutions.

To succeed in your endeavors, know which algorithms and models to add to data scraping bots to improve efficiency and reliability.

Note: Test your social media and search engine spiders to confirm their efficiency before unleashing them on the target websites. You don’t want to develop and implement crawlers that can’t harvest quality data. Doing so affects a company’s competitive edge and wastes resources and time.

4. Make Your Crawling Tools Scalable

As you develop data crawling tools, you’ll realize that the e-commerce sector is growing. It’s costly and time-consuming to build a crawling tool.

On an ethical and monetary basis, you can’t be making a web crawler every few months. Therefore, write a data scraping tool with superior data harvesting capabilities and excellent scalability.

Build your crawling bot per speed, ensuring it can send the highest achievable daily limits without getting flagged.

For efficiency and scalability purposes, avoid adding multiple multi-use components to a single crawling tool. It’s better to build separate crawling tools for every e-commerce scraping purpose.

Note: Build a product discovery and product extraction spider, each with maximum outputs, rather than combining the two features, only for production to suffer.

Conclusion

As the brain behind creating and implementing algorithms and models that facilitate data mining and storing in an e-commerce setting, data scientists must be exceptionally good at what they do.

They’re required to develop efficient and scalable crawling tools and quality monitoring systems to optimize quality and accurate data mining.

Learn the essence and profitability of using proxies to counter anti-bot measures, and you’ll be gathering actionable data in no time.

Additionals:

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Mashum Mollah

Mashum Mollah is a tech entrepreneur by profession and passionate blogger by heart. He is on a mission to help small businesses grow online. He shares his journey, insights and experiences in this blog. If you are an entrepreneur, digital marketing professional, or simply an info-holic, then this blog is for you. Follow him on Instagram, Twitter & LinkedIn

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