Do you need an API for extracting data from the internet? In this article, we will analyze three automated scraping APIs for e-commerce.
To start with, what does e-commerce mean? Electronic commerce is the exchange of products and services as well as the sending of money and data through an electronic network, most commonly the internet. In fact, these commercial dealings can be either B2B (business-to-business), B2C (business-to-consumer), C2C (consumer-to-consumer), or C2B (consumer-to-business).
Online shopping has grown significantly over the past 20 years thanks in large part to the widespread usage of e-commerce platforms like Amazon and eBay. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, e-commerce represented 5% of all retail sales in 2011. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, it has increased to almost 16% of retail sales.
Furthermore, online shops use data available on the internet to take advantage of price monitoring, social media, or customer information. An online service called a scraping API enables the automatic extraction of data from websites. Although scrapers are employed for a wide range of tasks, they are typically utilized to gather data that would otherwise be too laborious or time-consuming to gather manually. Additionally, a crawler is a software that travels through and crawls websites, whereas a scraper is an API that enables automated data extraction.
Each site scraping tool that is available online has to be thoroughly examined. For this type of tool, there is a wide range of costs, attributes, and platforms. In this article, we want to show you three automated scraping APIs available for e-commerce:
1. Codery
The Codery API crawls a website and extracts all of its structured data. You only need to provide the URL and they will take care of the rest. In the form of an auto-filling spreadsheet, extract specific data from any webpage.
Using Codery, with a single request, the scale search engine crawls pages. To manage all types of websites, use a real browser to scrape and handle all of the javascript that runs on the page.
2. ScrapingBee
The second API to present is known as ScrapingBee. This web scraping tool focuses on extracting the data you need, and not dealing with concurrent headless browsers that will eat up all your RAM and CPU. Furthermore, it allows you to render Javascript with a simple parameter so you can scrape every website, even Single Page Applications using React, AngularJS, Vue.js, or any other libraries.
3. Page2API
Page2API is a versatile API that offers you a variety of facilities and features. Firstly, you can scrape web pages and convert HTML into a well-organized JSON structure. Moreover, you can launch long-running scraping sessions in the background and receive the obtained data via a webhook (callback URL). Page2API presents a custom scenario, where you can build a set of instructions that will wait for specific elements, execute javascript, handle pagination, and much more. For hard-to-scrape websites, they offer the possibility to use Premium (Residential) Proxies, located in 138 countries around the world.
Also published on Medium.