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How to Make Money Web Scraping

Barbarau — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 08:37:44 +0000

Do you have web scraping skills, or you want to know the prospects of having such a skill? Then come in now and discover the best ways you can make money web scraping.

Before the Internet became accessible to many people around the world, the availability of data is a huge problem – this is no longer the case as the Internet has become one of the largest databases in the world with data in many forms – text, audio, and video. The availability of data on websites on the Internet opens up unique money-making opportunities to programmers that have the skills to collect those data in automated ways as manually collecting huge data can be time-wasting, error-prone, and sometimes not practicable.

Are you a programmer and have skills in web scraping, or you want to take up a career in the field? Then you need to know that regardless of your level of experience and skillsets, there is money to be made provided you have a reasonable skill in it. In this article, you will learn a good number of ways you can make money with your web scraping skills.

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is the technical term used for the process of extracting data publicly available on web pages. Web scraping is carried out using computer programs known as web scrapers. Web scrapers are computer bots that automatically download web pages and parse out required data points to either use them immediately in making a decision or store them in a retrievable database that could be used later. For web scrapers to work, the process of extracting the required data must be predictive and replicable in an automated means.

There are a good number of web scrapers in the market. Some are general web scrapers such as Octoparse and ScrapeStorm. Others are specialized scrapers for special purposes like SEO and website testing. The presence of these tools does not, in any way, make web scraping an unrewarding task. In fact, as you will come to realize, as you continue reading this article, there is a lot of money to be made in web scraping. But first, what are the required skills for web scraping?

What are the Required Skills for Web Scraping?

If you have had a little idea about what web scraping is, you will know that it requires some forms of technical skills except if you want to make use of already-made web scrapers in the market. What are these skills?

Computer Programming Skills

The number one skill required for developing web scrapers is computer programming. Web scrapers are computer programs and written using computer programming languages. While you can potentially use any of the Turing complete programming languages, Python, Node.js, Ruby, C/C++, and PHP are the popular languages for developing web scraping tools.

Each of these languages has libraries that can help you speed up development and develop better scrapers. However, Python seems to be the favorite. It has extensive and easy-to-use support for web scraping with a good number of libraries and frameworks available. Generally, you need to know how to use programming to programmatically retrieve web pages, parse their content, extract required data, and either use them immediately or store them – that’s what web scraping entails. With Python, you can use Requests for sending HTTP requests and Beautifulsoup for parsing out the required data. Depending on the nature of the websites in question, you might need a browser automation tool like Selenium. For a complete framework, Scrapy is a popular web scraping framework. Related,

Evading Anti-scraping Systems

It might interest you to know that websites do not like being scraped. Some dislike scraping because of the too many requests web scrapers send, which eventually adds up to their running cost without any benefit to them.

Others fight web scraping because they paid for the data they publicly display, while others do it to protect the rights of their users in terms of user-generated content. In fact, it is high time you know that most websites cherish their data and wouldn’t hand them over to you easily. Some provide paid APIs to earn from the data. So, your web scraper will most likely get blocked if it does not incorporate techniques to evade detection as a web scraper. Evading anti-scraping systems is out of the scope of this article, but at the basic level, you will need to make use of proxies in other to hide your IP footprint and then rotate IP addresses to avoid exceeding requests limit. You will also need to rotate headers and mimic popular browsers. For some websites, you will need to use Captcha solvers.

Engineering Skills

When I say engineering skills, don’t get scared, not all web scrapers require you to have software engineering knowledge in other to build them. In fact, an overwhelming number of web scrapers do not even require them. However, if you are going to be scraping hundreds of thousands or even millions of web pages, then you will have to plan ahead. Regular web scrapers won’t do the job – likewise, regular database systems. You will need to build your web scraper using a distributed architecture so that you will have scrapers running on many computers/servers. The database system also has to be distributed. There are other things you will need to consider, including exceptions, handling wrong data, avoiding honeypots, and a host of other things.

Ways to Make Money Web Scraping

If you have the skills described above and you can comfortably develop web scrapers to scrape most websites on the Internet, then there are many money-making opportunities available. Below are some of the most popular.

Develop Custom Web Scrapers for Businesses and Researchers

The reason why this one comes first is the ease at which you can make money with it. It might interest you to know that businesses are increasingly seeing the importance of making data-based decisions and the Internet is one of their sources.

Many of them have unique needs and are looking for a developer that could develop a web scraper they can use periodically to scrape. One advantage of this is that if you do a good job, you will be retained as the maintainer of the scraper. Web scrapers stop working when the layout of their target website changes. For this reason, businesses that use custom web scrapers will need to constantly get them updated. You can get gigs from Freelance websites such as Upwork. I have seen a lot of web scraping gigs on Upwork that pay handsomely.

Offer Web Scraping Service

Some clients with an interest in collecting data online are not interested in any form of web scraper. All they are interested in is data, and as such, all that’s required for you to do in other to earn money from such clients is to scrape the data and hand it over to them.

Unlike in the case above, you will have to develop the scraper and then run it until you have scraped all the required data. This is different from just developing a scraper. You can even take this further by starting a data scraping business where your sole aim is to provide businesses with data.

Develop Web Scrapers for Sale

In the first method above, you wait for businesses to come with unique ideas, and then you build scrapers to meet their requirement. In this case, you come up with an idea of web scrapers that businesses will like and then develop them. Take, for instance, Octoparse is a web scraper that people pay to use. It was developed for use by non-technical users.

Another popular web scraper people pay for is ScrapeBox, dubbed the Swiss Army Knife of SEO. There are a good number of them in the market. However, there are still a good number of unimplemented ideas. Think outside the box and develop one that you can sell for money.

Selling Data and Leads

I know you might think this method is the same as offering web scraping service – but no, it is not. This method entails you scraping important data and presenting them in a structured format for buyers. There are a good number of websites that make their money by selling data.

Take, for instance; you can scrape performance data of all footballs in a particular league and sell them to those that need them. You can create a database of online users on social platforms and sell them as lead to businesses. These are just examples; there is a good number of data you can collect free online and sell them for profit.

Scrape Data and Create Application Around it

Let me give you an idea I wanted to implement in the past but had to move on to something else. I wanted to create a football match prediction program that works by scraping the head to head performance of teams and then carrying out some analysis on it to draw a decision.

Many of the soccer prediction sites scrape data in the background. If you’re not the type that has an interest in that, there are other ideas that use data in the background. SEO tools that such as Moz that provide SEO scores for links and Domain do that with the help of web scraping. You could create online directories and business pages by scraping business information online.

Create Web APIs

Another way you can make money through web scraping is by creating web APIs and monetizing them. For those that do not know what APIs are, the term stands for Application Programming Interface. You can scrape data that websites can programmatically access via your paid web APIs.

If you do not want to deal with a huge database, you can simply do the scraping in the background and return the required data as a response. There’s a whole lot of data you can provide via web APIs. But you need to know that programmers are your target audience as they are the only ones that deal with them.

Buy items at Cheaper Prices for Resale

It might interest you to know that you can profit a great deal from deals. A good number of e-commerce stores sell some of their products at discounted prices. Some stores offer clearance sales.

You can use web scraping to monitor the prices of the items and discover discounts that could be of interest to you. You should be able to buy some items you can later sell at higher prices. To make more money, you can even make the price monitoring tool web-based and get others to make use of it, which you can monetize in different ways.

Create Purchase Bots

With skills in web scraping and crawling, you can actually create bots that carry out purchases online. Take, for instance; you can create bots for copping limited-edition sneakers. There’s also a market for ticket scalping. In fact, any product that is in limited supply and there is a high demand for it is a potential product you can create a purchase or check out bot for.

After creating the bot, you can commercialize it and make a lot of money. Sneaker copping bots that work get sold out in no time. However, it is important I stress here that selling bots is competitive – and your bot has to have the required features to beat the competition. Another way to make money from your bot is by using it to buy limited-edition items and reselling them at higher prices.

Teach Novice the Skills of Web Scraping

Another way to make money is by teaching developers or intending developers on how to develop web scrapers. There’s a lot of opportunities in this. You can start a YouTube channel or a blog. You can also write books and sales on Amazon and your own sales channels, such as social media pages.

The most important thing is doing research to make sure your unique tutorials are needed, and the tutorial you create should meet their requirements. If you’re able to get a sizeable number of audience and you become popular, you might end up becoming an authority, which will give you more access to other money-making opportunities.

Conclusion

Looking at the list above, you will see that if you’re really serious about making money through web scraping, there are many options for you to choose from. However, as a way of concluding this article, I will have to stress here that most of the illegalities associated with web scraping stem from the commercialization of data scraped.

I will advise you to speak to a lawyer and be sure you’re not breaking any rule before going ahead with your chosen method. But on a generalized basis, web scraping is completely legal – it is what you use it for that might make it illegal.

Top 10 Best Web Scraping Cloud Provider

Barbarau — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 08:08:35 +0000

Do you want to make use of a web scraping cloud provider? Then come in now to discover the top cloud-based web scraping services you can use to scrape data from the Internet effortlessly.

When it comes to web scraping, there are 3 main platforms you can use – PC software, cloud-based services, and browser extensions. While each of them has its strengths and weaknesses, the most flexible of them are cloud-based solutions. This is because they are not OS-dependent, and the scraped data is saved in the cloud. The processing power some of these cloud-based solutions provide is unrivaled by most systems.

However, you need to know that with all these advantages comes an increase in pricing. But if you value the flexibility, processing power, and cloud-based storage solution they provide, then you won’t mind paying for the price they are asking as it is completely worth it. This article will be used to discuss the best 10 cloud-based web scraping services in the market. Before that, let take a look at what web scraping is in brief.

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is the process of extracting data from web pages using automation tools known as web scrapers. The process involves sending HTTP requests to download web pages, using a parser to pull out the required data, and then storing the extracted data in a database.

Web Scraping is different from fetching data through the use of APIs as using APIs comes with limitations and sometimes require you to pay some money. Even though web scraping can become illegal depending on the technicalities involved, it is legal on a general note.

Best Web Scraping Cloud Provider

There are many cloud-based web scraping service providers in the market, and as such, choosing the best one can become difficult, especially for newbies. The list below contains the best web scraping cloud providers in the market – you can use the list as a guide to choosing the best for your project, depending on your specific project requirement.

Scrapy Cloud

Pricing:$9 per Scrapy Unit for a month
Free Trials:1-hour crawl time
Data Output Format: CSV, JSON, JSONLines, and XML
Data Retention Period: Starts at 120 days for paid plans

Scrapy Cloud does not provide you a web scraper to you, but it provides you an essential service for web scraping, and that’s a cloud hosting platform for web scrapers and crawlers. With Scrapy Cloud, you do not need to think of servers again as they provide you web scraping optimized servers that can scrape at any scale.

It is a battle-tested cloud platform for running web scrapers and crawlers. It integrates seamlessly with Splash, Crawlera, and Spidermon, many other tools. The best web scraping framework to use in developing a web scraper to host on Scrapy Cloud is Scrapy, the popular web scraping framework for python developers.

Octoparse

Pricing: Starts at $75 per month
Free Trials: 14 days of free trial with limitations
Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON, MySql, SQLServer
Data Retention Period: Not specified

Octoparse is a cloud-based web scraping tool that can help you convert a full website into a structured spreadsheet – with just a few clicks of the mouse. It might interest you to know that you require no coding skills at all to make use of Octoparse as it is a visual scraping tool where you just need to point and click to extract any data. You can use it to scrape from any website as it can deal with AJAX, authentication, and even infinite scrolling. It rotates IP to avoid getting banned, and you can even schedule your scraping task – very important is the fact that your data remains in the cloud. You can even run up to 4 web scrapers at ones.

ParseHub

Pricing: Starts at $149 per month
Free Trials: Desktop app is free
Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON
Data Retention Period: Starts at 14 days

ParseHub is a free web scraping tool that you can use for scraping data from web pages. For their free plan, you need to download a software, and it comes with some limitations. The real deal comes with their paid plans, which as a cloud-based solution that’s is extremely powerful and flexible. One very important feature I like on a personal note is the fact that you can access the scraped data on their servers through their REST API point. It scraped perfectly from JavaScript-heavy websites. It has support for Regular Expression, schedule scraping, and rotation of IPs. Downloaded images and files are saved to DropBox or S3. Data retention varies from 14 days to 30 days.

Webscraper.io Cloud Scraper

Pricing: Starts at $50 per month
Free Trials: Browser extensions are completely free
Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON
Data Retention Period: Starts at 30 days

Do you want to build a database that would be beneficial to your business? Then Webscraper.io Cloud Scraper, the automatic data extraction tool, can help you with that. It comes from the developers of Webscraper.io, a free extension based web scraper. Cloud Scraper is paid and can handle dynamic website scraping and JavaScript execution. It has its own parser that enables the post-processing of data. Its requests are routed through a pool with thousands of IP addresses – and rotated efficiently. Also important is the fact that you can manage your scrapers through their API and schedule your scraping tasks.

Dexi

Pricing: Starts at $199 per month
Free Trials: Yes
Data Output Format: CSV
Data Retention Period: Not specified

Dexi is one of the best web-based web scrapers in the market. Just like the others above, it is cloud-based and requires no installation as it is accessible from your browser. Dexi supports any website you have interested in scraping its data and comes with a deduplication system that removed any form of duplicates from the scraped data. One competitive advantage Dexi has over many of the scrapers discussed in this article is that it supports a good number of add-ons that extend the functions of Dexi and ease the work of its users. Dexi robots have what it takes to build the database you require.

Diffbot

Pricing: Starts at $299 per month
Free Trials: 14 days with limitations
Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON
Data Retention Period: Not specified

Diffbot makes use of Artificial Intelligence to retrieve and clean structured data from web pages. Diffbot is a cloud-based web scraping solution that can help you automatically extract any given piece of data from any website you can think of. Its system is scalable, and you can scrape any amount of information you need provided you can pay for it. With their AI Web Extraction technology, you do not need to write rules for different websites, and the system can get that done automatically. Diffbot is developer-friendly as it has clients and APIs meant for developers to use.

Import.io

Pricing: Starts at $50 per month
Free Trials: Yes, 1000 URLs per month
Data Output Format: CSV, Excel
Data Retention Period: Not specified

Get insights from data scraped for you from web pages without the infrastructures to do with the help of import.io cloud-based platform. Import.io will help you handle all the difficult tasks, including setup, monitoring, and maintenance, to make sure the quality of data scraped is at par with requirements regardless of if you know how to code or not. As a programmer, you are in good company as Import.io has some developer-centric features, which include API integration and complex data extraction. The team behind Import.io also offers on-site training if required.

Mozenda

Pricing: Starts at $250 per month
Free Trials: 30 days with some limitations
Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON
Data Retention Period: Not specified

Mozenda is another cloud-based web scraping service provider with a scalable architecture that you can use to scrape millions of web pages without any form of problems – thanks to their over 10 years’ experience in the business of web scraping. Mozenda is trusted by a good number of Fortune 500 companies. With the Mozenda web scraping stack, you do not need to write codes or get anyone to do that for you as it has what it takes to scrape any kind of data available online. Interestingly, you can try it out for free for 30 days with some limitations. Just like many of the scrapers above, Mozenda will retain your data for a specific period of time on their server – and you can access it using their API.

Apify

Pricing: Starts at $49 per month
Free Trials:Yes, a one-month trial with limitations
Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON
Data Retention Period: Starts at 14 days

Apify is a cloud-based web scraping solution provider with tools such as actors which are nothing but web scrapers you can use to scrape specific data from specific websites. Aside from the web scrapers they provide, they also provide a database system specifically designed and optimized for web scraping. Apify also sells proxies that can help you evade IP tracking and the limitations that come with it. The API actors (web scrapers) are efficient and scalable.

80legs

Pricing: Starts at $29 per month
Free Trials: 10,000 URL crawling
Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON
Data Retention Period: Not specified

80legs provides web scraping services to individuals and businesses. They allow their users to run their crawlers on their platform or make use of their Giant Web Crawl, which you can use to scrape data from any website of your choice by providing its specifications regarding the HTML codes and keywords. With Giant Web Crawl, you can scrape millions of pages. Currently, it has been used to scrape over 15 million domains in the US and the EU region alone. It is very fast, reliable, and easy to use.

Conclusion

Looking at the above, you can see that there are a good number of options to choose from. However, if you consider your budget, your specific use case, and the features that differentiate them, you will get to know that only a few of them might work for your use case, depending on how specialized your use case is. Else, choosing any of the web scraping cloud providers above should work for you if you need a solution for a general scraping task.

Blazing SEO Review

Barbarau — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 07:38:18 +0000

Is your business in need of the best proxy server that makes it rank highly in SEO and optimize its website’s domain internet traffic? Do you wonder which the best proxy for that is? Worry not because Blazing SEO is right at your disposal when it comes to SEO optimizations, limitless threads, and data scraping tools.

Blazing SEO Review

Discover Blazing SEO, which offers some of the fastest SEO proxies. Are you wondering why Blazing SEO is instrumental to Search engines? First, you could integrate a web scraping tool with a proxy server allowing you to rank highly in search engines because tons of data would flow in your website.

Backlinks are other items that generate a high search engine ranking. You could use Blazing SEO proxies to create multiple anonymous websites that you can refer to in your site with backlinks. It would also be fun navigating your competitors' sites when you are browsing anonymously. That’s not all, please read ahead for much more!

Feature of Blazing SEO

Instant delivery

Once you create an account and pay for the Blazing SEO services, you automatically connect to their servers. That is not all, because you access blazing SEO service at gigabyte speed of unlimited bandwidth.

Three protocols supported

With blazing SEO, you will enjoy linking to other websites using SOCKS, HTTP, and HTTPS. While HTTP is the most common website language, you will get advanced fast and data secure languages like SOCKS and HTTPS.

I4 countries to choose from

You can access Blazing SEO from the USA, Netherlands, Poland, France, Spain, India, Italy, Germany, UK, Japan, Vietnam, Australia, Brazil, and Canada.

Replacement of IP proxies

Blazing SEO has a sustainable warrant of IP proxies within thirty days.

Authentication

For Blazing SEO's protection of your data, you need to input your correct username, password, or IP authorization code.

Trial and refund.

There are free two testing days of Blazing SEO. Once you test and decide to buy the package, your money is not refunded.

Payment method

Your main billing option in Blazing SEO is PayPal. You have to link your PayPal account when you register with Blazing SEO. Also, they accept other credit cards like VISA, MasterCard, American Express, and other cards.

Their Affordable Pricing

Not only do you get reasonable Blazing SEO's IPS' pricing, but also you get these proxies’ hampers with deals with any level of your business. Whether you are a starter, a personal-based business, a corporate unit, or a large-sized enterprise, Blazing SEO has exceptional proxies IPs for you.

However, these proxies vary with the country. For example, In the USA, you should have a budget not exceeding eleven dollars for rotating proxies. In Germany or Brazil, the price goes up to thirteen dollars per month of rotating proxies. However, let’s dive into the type of proxies and their values.

Ø Dedicated Proxies

Dedicated proxies are what we call private proxies where you use them by yourself. Compared to other companies where the dedicated proxies hit the two-dollar mark per proxy, Blazing SEO offers affordable proxies as low as $1.3 per proxy

Ø Semi-dedicated

Per the proxy's categories, it would help if you realized that semi-dedicated proxies are the cheapest option valuing less than a dollar at any business level. That is because they are shared.

Ø Rotating IP Proxies

The rotating IP (IPs on multiple pots) have flexible values. But you expect them to be costlier than the dedicated and semi-dedicated proxies because rotating IP changes to a new address at any time. Therefore, Blazing SEO adds more cost to cover the new IPs you are given. In this case, the starter and the personal package pass two dollars per IP while the discounted corporate values at $1.90.

Other types of proxies in Blazing SEO are Shopify and sneakers. Shopify deals with proxies that route data from any online shopping site. For the sneaker proxies, they allow you to buy limited goods maximally without getting noticed. Meanwhile, check out proxy pricing to get a thorough understanding of these proxies.

Blazing SEO Test

We had a remarkable experience with Blazing SEO, and we find it highly recommendable. It offers cheaper proxies that are speedy. While we had only purchased a single package for IPv4 proxies, we checked and found that even other packages are more affordable than most private proxy providers.

The dashboard

The navigation panel is pretty easy to use, even for the first-timers, because the first thing you see after sign up or sign in is the dashboard. All options are at your disposal on the dashboard to get started. Since we wanted to carry out our first test using a Windows PC, we had to download a proxy tester for windows, which is a breeze. There is also an alternative to download a proxy tester for mac.

After downloading the proxy tester set up, the next thing to perform is authorizing the proxies before checking. In our case, authorization only applies to semi-dedicated and dedicated proxies since rotate proxies use IP auth. The whole authorization process takes around 40 minutes, with each IP taking 0.4 to 0.8 speeds in a second to complete. We found this reasonable and super-fast because after checking, all proxy IPs were working.

The speed performance

Dedicated proxies are very fast and only usable by you. They accommodate only one user, and that's why the speed does not buffer at all. Not to mention, you are the only person who can ban your IPs. So, the mileage and lifespan of dedicated proxies are incredibly impressive. Although they are a little expensive than semi-dedicated proxies, you'll enjoy one of the fastest speeds. In fact, dedicated proxies are ideal for social marketing because you don't have to worry about someone else banning the accounts.

While semi-dedicated proxies are also fast, you cannot compare them to dedicated proxies because they are shared between a maximum of three users. So, you might have to be patient with the speed limits and bear the risk of IPs banning.

All in all, we realized that using proxies has a lot of benefits to offer to both individuals and businesses. They improve security by protecting sensitive information from hackers and cyber thieves. With these proxies, you'll enjoy your privacy as you remain anonymous while on the internet.

You can also bypass restrictions like accessing Facebook, ESPN, and YouTube while at work. On top of that, web scraping is made possible with proxies. Hence, buying multiple dedicated proxies is worthwhile. The paybacks are endless.

The Pros

There are quantity discounts that rate as low as $0.60 per every IP your buy monthly
Offers a reliable and speedy internet connection of Igb/s
Friendlier prices with some affordable monthly offers of about $90
24/7/365 support and assistance from experts
Quality hardware for all servers
Exceptional performance guarantees with Blazing SEO's Solid State Drive
Unmetered bandwidth
Flexible with multiple threads
Secure IP authentication protocols
Compatible with HTTPS, HTTP, and SOCKS

The Pros

You pay with limited billing services like PayPal.
The threat of Spammed IPS due to its affordable buying of the proxies
Limited to only fourteen countries

Their Dedicated Server

If you reside in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, you will likely enjoy the Blazing SEO Dedicated servers’ hotspots. Not only do these servers function in the four locations but they serve the entire country and across borders with gigabyte speed internet transmission. That is because of their in-house quality hardware.

When connecting to Blazing SEO server, you get unlimited browsing time, zero restrictions of threads, and personalized server configuration. You get to enjoy fast gigabyte internet access with a subsidized free Terabytes monthly. The dedicated server will also enable your website to ranks high on Search engines because of keywords, title, or backlink optimization.

Their Service

If you have any queries or information you like to ask about the Blazing SEO proxies, you can ask through the Blazing SEO support team. Just scroll down the bottom page of the Blazing SEO homepage and find a customer support link. If your proxies are not working or need them to get fixed right away, the support team will fix it immediately. Still, you find more details of Blazing SEO like FAQs here.

Conclusions

We know by now you have realized that Blazing SEO proxy is one of the most efficient proxies' servers in the world. Just access their website and open an account now.

Try the test first, like how we did, and you will be happy with Blazing SEO speed, response, dashboard usage, and customer support. Please do not forget to rate the Blazing SEO and review the pros and cons for you to make a sound purchase decision.

Shopify Scraper 101: How to Scrape Shopify Store Data with Python

Barbarau — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 08:33:33 +0000

Are you looking forward to scraping product data or any other information from a Shopify store? Then stay enough on this page to discover the best Shopify scraping bots in the market and learn how to create custom ones.

Shopify has made it easy for businesses to set up a storefront online and accept payment with minimal effort and hassle. Currently, it has been reported that over 500,000 online stores are powered by Shopify and have driven more than 40 billion worth of sales.

Unlike in the past, most stores are moving their businesses online. Not only physical products are sold using the Shopify e-commerce platform. Digital products, membership, courses, rentals, and many more. With many products listed on Shopify sites, the platform has become a hub for marketers doing competitive research. As a marketer, you can carry out competitive analysis, discover new products, monitor your competitor’s pricing and how they change over time, and many more. Aside from product data, there are other textual data that can be scraped. If you have an interest in scraping any website that is based on Shopify, then you are on the right page. In this article, you are going to learn about the best web scrapers you can use to scrape data from Shopify websites. If you have coding skills, we will also be showing you how to scrape Shopify sites easily. Before going into that proper, let take a look at an overview of scraping Shopify.

Shopify Scraping – an Overview

Unlike some e-commerce stores that have been built from the ground up and have control over their sites, stores hosted on Shopify has little control over their site backend. Most of the heavy lifting is done by Shopify. One thing you will come to discover about Shopify sites is that all of the sites are similar, and as such, the process of scraping them is the same.

Interestingly, even though Shopify has an anti-bot system, it can be argued to be one of the weakest in the market in terms of keeping bots away. If you plan to scrape a Shopify site, you will meet minimal blocks than when scraping other sites. If you ask me, I will tell you Shopify is scraping friendly. This is because it has a public API that you can query and retrieve information about all of the products listed on a particular site. Every Shopify site has a products.json file, and you can access it via this URL – "https://www.exampleshop.com/products.json".

https://www.exampleshop.com/products.json

Replace the exampleshop.com with the URL of your target site, and you will get the details of all the products, including that of each variant of a product. Because the information is presented in JSON and formatted, you will most likely not need to send additional web requests if what you are looking for is just product data.

While many store owners complain about this, Shopify has not done anything to prevent this. The interesting part is that no authentication is required, and there’s nothing you can do as a store owner to prevent this. It is important you know that even though Shopify allowed automated access, site owners frown at it. Shopify even has systems that block bot traffic, but the system is not effective enough.

How to Scrape Shopify Sites Using Python and Requests

If you have coding skills, then this section has been written for you. You can use any programming language to code a Shopify scraper. We can’t possibly demonstrate how to do that using all of the languages in one article, and as such, we will be doing that using Python. Python was chosen because of its simplicity, readability, and the fact that the bot developer's community is in love with it. As stated earlier, Shopify makes it easy to access product information from Shopify stores via the products.json file, which every Shopify store has. With this, we do not have to go through the stress of downloading the HTML of product pages and then parsing out required data.

All data you require about a product is present in the file, and you get everything returned to you at a go. For this reason, you will most likely not have to deal with anti-bot systems since you will only be making a single request. However, if the data you require is not present in the products.json, then you will need to access the pages.

Let me demonstrate to you how easy it is to scrape product details from Shopify stores by developing a simple product list scraper using Python and Requests. All we do is send a web request to the full list URL path with the products.json, and it is returned.

You can then parse out the required data and display it on the screen. Below is the code; you can test run it using any Shopify store. It is a simple scraper that assumes all is OK and as such, exceptions won’t be handled.

import requests

class ShopifyScraper:

def __init__(self, root_domain):
self.domain_url = root_domain
self.product_list_url = self.domain_url + "/products.json"
self.product_list = []
def get_products(self):

self.fetch_products = requests.get(self.product_list_url)

        products = self.fetch_products.json()["products"]

for iin products:
            title = i["title"]
            slug = i["handle"]
publish_date = i["published_at"]
updated_date = i["updated_at"]
            vendor = i["vendor"]
product_type = i["product_type"]
            tags = i["tags"]
full_url = self.domain_url + "/products/" + slug

            details = [title, full_url, publish_date, updated_date, vendor, product_type, tags]
self.product_list.append(details)

def print_products(self):

for product in self.product_list:
print(product)

x = ShopifyScraper("https://shopnicekicks.com")
x.get_products()
x.print_products()

Best Shopify Scrapers in the Market

The above guide is for programmers. If you do not have a coding skill but want to scrape data from a Shopify site, then there are many options available to you. There are already made scrapers you can use to extract data without understanding a line of code.

These tools are known as Shopify scrapers. While some of them are specialized scrapers, some are generic. Let me introduce you to some of the best Shopify scraping tools you can use to effortlessly scrape product data from Shopify.

eScraper

Pricing: Starts at $59for 5000 rows
Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON
Supported Platform: Web

eScraper does the heavy lifting for you. They do not hand over a scraper for you. You can see them as a Shopify data scraping service that you can contact to help you scrape product listing from any Shopify store.

All that’s required from you is to fill a form providing details of your requirement. They would contact you with samples, after which you get the full data sent to your email. An important feature of eScraper you will is that you can opt-in for schedule scraping, and they will do just that as planned.

eScraper is a paid service you will want to use, especially if you do not want to deal with the hassle of using a tool directly. It has support for data adjustment, scraping dynamic websites, and many others. Their pricing is based on number of rows and can be regarded as cheap.

ScrapeStorm

Pricing: Starts at $49.99 per month
Free Trials: Starter plan is free – comes with limitations
Data Output Format: TXT, CSV, Excel, JSON, MySQL, Google Sheets, etc.
Supported Platforms: Desktop

ScrapeStorm is one of the best web scraping tools in the market. Itis one of the best Shopify scrapers out there. It is a paid tool developed by an ex-Google crawler team, and as such, you can be sure you’re dealing with a solid scraper. This tool can be used for scraping all websites, including modern websites that are Ajaxified and JavaScript-heavy.

ScrapeStorm is one of the most advanced scrapers out there. However, on the surface, it is easy to use. One thing you will come to like about Scrape is that it makes use of Artificial Intelligence to automatically detects important data points for scraping.

ShopScraper

Pricing: Free
Free Trials: Free – comes with advanced features at a cost
Data Output Format: CSV
Supported Platforms: Google Chrome

ShopScraper is a Chrome extension you can download for free and use, provided you are not interested in using its advanced features. This tool is a specialized scraper developed only for scraping product details from Shopify stores. With ShopScraper, you are just a click away from exporting data of products of a Shopify store into a CSV you can use.

This Shopify scraper has been downloaded by over 2000 and has garnered an impressive star rating even though the number of users that rated it is far below the number of users. But as at the time this article was written, it is rated 5 stars.

With this tool, you cannot only export all fields, but you can also choose a few products to scrape or a collection. This tool is easy to use, light, and fast.

Octoparse

Pricing: Starts at $75 per month
Free Trials: 14 days of free trial with limitations
Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON, MySQL, SQLServer
Supported Platform: Cloud, Desktop

Octoparseis a web scraping tool that you can use to scrape all kinds of websites, including e-commerce stores. Octoparse is built for the modern web, and as such, even if the Shopify store is Ajaxified, Octoparse has got you covered.

Octoparse is a visual scraping tool that requires no coding skill. All you need to do is make use of the point and click interface to train it. Interestingly, it has templates you can use to improve your workflow. While Octoparse has a free plan you can use, the power of this tool is unleashed when you subscribe to a paid plan.

Also important is the fact that you can export scraped data in many formats. The Octoparse scraping software is perfect for scraping Shopify sites. You can either make use of their desktop application or the cloud-based scraper. Octoparse offers intending customers a 14 days free trial.

ParseHub

Pricing: Free
Free Trials: Free – advance features come at an extra cost
Data Output Format: Excel, JSON,
Supported Platform: Cloud, Desktop

ParseHub is another free tool you can use to scrape product listing from Shopify sites. ParseHubhas a cloud-based solution, but using that will require you to make payment.

If you do not want to spend money, then you will have to download the desktop application and install it before using it. Just like Octoparse, ParseHub is a general scraping tool as it is not specifically made from Shopify sites. ParseHub also does not require you to know how to code as it provides you with a point and clicks interface for training it.

Conclusion

Every site developed using the Shopify e-commerce platform spends largely on it for functionality. Interestingly, as stated earlier, Shopify exposes product details for each site in a JSON format and, as such, makes it easy to be scraped. However, not everyone is a coder, and as such, some web scrapers are available that you can use to scrape product data – recommendations have been made in the article.

Source: https://www.bestproxyreviews.com/shopify-scraper/

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