Scraping web data from various online sources is a retailer’s key to visibility and success in today’s market.
From setting the most attractive prices for their products to spotting impending challenges to the supply chain, web scraping helps retailers optimize operational efficiencies all-around by providing a deeper understanding of the market, as well as the different market players situated within it.
Furthermore, with the major retailers and department stores now matching the offers of the e-commerce platforms (as well as one another) in-store, real-time analysis based on web scraping is coming into play more and more each day, and we can see that everything is now truly occurring in real-time everywhere we turn.
Retail Visibility with Web Data
One company in particular, Retail Shake, an experienced SaaS provider, designed a comprehensive, unique and intuitive competitive intelligence tool dedicated for retail professionals using public web data to address this growing need.
Retail Shake’s solution provides retailers and brands a 360° view of their competitive market and environment. Retailers know easily which products are sold by their competitors and they can follow the opposing marketing strategies, from discovery to sale.
Retail Shake’s tool uses web data to help its retail customers perform complex actions such as:
- Price Monitoring: Lining up the pricing of competing products against their own, allowing for the deployment of successful dynamic pricing models.
- Product Comparison: Comparing the messaging and positioning of similar products, providing insight to optimize external marketing materials
- Competitor Benchmarking: Determining where competing market players appear in search or popularity, presenting the ability to identify gaps or opportunities in SERP strategies.
- Consumer Sentiment: Monitoring consumer behavior and reviews, as well as that of competitors, allowing for improvements to the product as well as marketing strategies.
- Discover Inventory: Identifying new merchandising and product opportunities to take advantage of by tracking competitor stock across different online retail categories.
“Today, with e-commerce penetration at an all time high, retailers need to optimize their marketing materials in real-time, meaning extremely fast, with the market in order to stay competitive within the rapidly changing landscape,” said Djoehana.
What Djoehana means is that it’s no longer possible to manually monitor the market anymore. It takes too much time, and is therefore inaccurate, especially with all the different variations of products and sellers out there.
To demonstrate the importance of web data, Djoehana gave a customer example of a large home improvement retail corporation in France. He said that the retailer changes the prices of its products everyday using the data and insights provided by Retail Shake.
Djoehana said that if the customer did not have access to this web data, the business would be effectively flying “blind” while setting prices for their products in-store as well as online.
While it may seem insignificant, an out-of-date pricing model could possibly have a company lose out on millions in revenue or drop customers to their competitors due to a lack of speed or information that would have been able to improve their decision-making.
“Our customers now see web data like utilities and critical infrastructure,” said Retail Shake founder Irwan Djoehana. “It’s like energy, it’s like water. It just needs to be reliable, and that the flow never stops.”
Web Data Collection
Retail Shake uses Bright Data’s network to run its web data collection programs through, which “act like a thousand different customers” that view what a real user would see when visiting a webpage to collect competitive web data for its clients and help them understand how attractive their offerings appear online.
“Retail Shake was created to help retailers automate this process,” said Djoehana. “Make it simpler to follow and faster, in order to gain a leg up on the competitors that have not yet embraced public web data strategies and tools.”
Basically, Retail Shake customers designate the data or web data that they need, and the Retail Shake platform then delivers the tailored ready-to-use insights to the customer in their preferred format.
“While on the subject of data, public web data is becoming an increasingly important part of the decision-making process and much more for our customers — as well as in companies in general — and we find ourselves delivering more and more web data as time moves forward,” said Djoehana.
The Retail Shake founder said that it plans to become one of the leaders in France and in Europe for data projects dedicated to marketing and competitive intelligence.
“To accomplish that, we need to be constantly up to date in order to guarantee the quality of our data, including public web data,” Djoehana said. “So, to make sure the flow of data never stops, we use Bright Data’s network. It allows us to see what a real user sees, and it helps our data collection tools to perform at a higher level.
“The partnership with Bright Data has helped us respond effectively to the daily needs of our customers and we regularly call on Bright Data whenever we encounter collection difficulties on the target sites in order to keep to our commitments with our customers,” he said.
Data Like Water
Organizational and operational success can be closely correlated with a capability to effectively perform real-time web data collection and analysis, and for retailers the importance of these strategies are increased due to the saturation of competition online as well as in-store.
Partnered with the Bright Data network, Retail Shake is intrinsically making it easier for retailers to locate, use and analyze web data from multiple sources, providing convenience to the retail industry by serving as the important connection between retailers and the data they need to drive their strategies forward.
