Product data—whether from e-commerce sites, auto listings, or product reviews—offers a treasure trove of insights that can give your business an immense competitive edge in your market. Getting access to this data in a structured format can unleash new potential for not only business intelligence teams, but also their counterparts in marketing, sales, and management that rely on accurate data to make mission-critical business decisions.

At Zyte , we have a unique view on how this data is used - we extract data from 9 billion web pages per month and can see firsthand how the world’s most innovative companies are using product data extracted from the web to develop new business capabilities for themselves and their customers. Whether you’re a hedge fund manager, start-up, or an e-commerce giant, here are a few inspiring new uses for web scraped product data:

• Dynamic pricing and revenue optimization
• Competitor monitoring
• Product trend monitoring
• Investment decision making
• Brand and MAP compliance

Dynamic price monitoring and revenue optimization

To make profitable pricing decisions, having access to a timely, reliable source of high-quality data is crucial. By scraping pricing data, business intelligence teams are empowered to confidently position products and services. Conveniently, this data can be integrated directly into product management systems. Automated data collection leaves little scope for human error and enables an organization to monitor the whole market, and always stay a step ahead. Real-time product pricing intelligence to stay on top of price changes has already proved to be so effective that it has become a must practice for top-performing retail organizations.

Competitor monitoring

Using product data to track your competitors is as old as the internet itself. However, we are increasingly seeing companies completely redefining the scale and scope of their competitor monitoring capabilities through the use of big data, large scale web data extraction, and sophisticated machine learning technologies. Businesses are aware of the huge opportunities to generate actionable competitor insights by scraping product data and data teams have proliferated to meet the rising need. Powerful data extraction solutions enable companies to implement dynamic pricing and not miss market opportunities.

Product trend monitoring

Whether it’s a long, slow shift or a trend cycle as rapid as those in fashion or technology, those who can see the farthest ahead - and most accurately - into future trends emerge on top. The scale and multidimensional aspect of product data make it perfect for web scraping, and once integrated into product management systems, product data enables companies to see farther, predict more accurately, and drive revenue growth. Web scraped data empowering clothing makers to optimize their products, prices, trends, fashions, and inventories to more accurately respond to seasonal and cyclical changes. This means high affinity with consumers, high revenue, and bringing the right product to market at the right time.

Investment decision making

Hedge funds and account managers are increasingly incorporating alternative data streams into their decision making processes, hoping to gain an information edge over the market and generate alpha. As a result, the demand for product data continues to surge, with a majority of institutional investors increasing the amount of web scraped data they consume. Given its predictive utility, it’s not hard to see why product data is of huge interest to them. Today, web scraped big data, aided by artificial intelligence and machine learning allows firms to predict revenue momentum, stock prices, company valuations and identify risks and opportunities for investment and this is just the beginning!

Brand and Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) compliance

Access to accurate reliable product data empowers businesses to monitor every aspect of their omnichannel strategy. It’s akin to being a fly on the wall of every authorized merchant, re-seller, and retail location selling a particular product, enabling quick turnaround on merchandising audits and MAP violations. In the past, this required constant vigilance and a lot of sunk time - today, software can automate these headaches.

Real-time pricing through continuously scraping your own product data is not only the fastest and most effective way to maintain compliance across resellers and retailers but perhaps one of the only methods of truly enforcing consistent compliance in real-time. Web product data allows companies to keep a check on the supply chain and immediately notify legal teams about compliance violations.

As the market continues to grow, harnessing the power of web product data has become even more imperative for companies to ensure future growth. Intrigued by these use cases? Download our whitepaper for an in-depth analysis. If you need product data extracted from the web talk to our solution architects today!

Plus we have a unified data schema for product data, download now and see how you can turn unstructured product pages into valuable insights!