If you ever worked in customer service or any position that focuses on Business-to-Client interactions, you might have heard the overused phrase “the customer is always right”. Well, in the heat of the IT revolution, there is a new sheriff in town – digital information. Based on the insights derived from various fields and modern business strategies, companies have all the right tools at their disposal to acquire the most accurate knowledge on all consumer behavior in E-commerce.
By mastering the methods of data acquisition, management, and analysis, businesses in 2024 have a much deeper understanding of how market trends work and what attracts legitimate customers. Paired with advancements in personalized digital marketing, companies have tons of great sources to extract valuable public information.
This article focuses on the best ways to derive insights from customer behavior and use the collected data to its full extent to succeed in E-commerce. Here, we will explore how businesses gather and analyze information that relates to any customer activity: product preferences, purchasing patterns, time spent on pages, and other browsing behavior. Combining good data management on your platform and crucial market intelligence from competitor pages greatly benefits from private connections, which is why most efficient methods of data collection use proxy connections as anonymity solutions.
The Effect of Customer Data in E-Commerce
E-commerce platforms collect vast amounts of data daily from many sources, including customer activity on their platforms, interactions with the brand on social media sites, purchase records, popular shipping destinations and external factors like market trends and seasonal shifts.
By gathering and analyzing this information, businesses can gain valuable insights into how customers behave. Combining that with numerous ways to create efficient and meaningful B2C interactions, these insights help companies make accurate decisions.
To get a better understanding of how to create personalized shopping experiences, improve product recommendations, and design targeted marketing strategies that resonate with specific customer segments, first, let’s split the available knowledge into two categories:
On-site data: covers the information on your platform, posted by you, or generated by actions of visitors and potential customers. This includes tracking user actions on your platform, like time spent on specific product pages, navigation patterns, location-based data, and other valuable data. Tracking and understanding user behavior on your platform is the best way to find out what visitors gravitate towards while visiting the platform and make adjustments to attract and retain customers. The same rules apply to purchasing patterns of recurring visitors, like frequency of purchases, cart abandonment rates, average order value, and repeat customer behavior.
Market Intelligence: Market intelligence involves gathering insights from external sources to understand industry trends, competitor strategies, and customer behavior across the market. The best data collection techniques contribute significantly to this process, such as web scraping, analyzing publicly available sales data, monitoring competitor pricing and reviews, and tracking social media trends. By using web scraping tools to gather product pricing, customer reviews, and popular items from other e-commerce platforms, businesses can identify gaps in their offerings or adjust their strategies to stay competitive. These external data sources help businesses understand broader market trends, customer preferences, and competitor moves, which are critical for making informed decisions and staying ahead in the e-commerce landscape.
Gathering Customer Data
E-commerce businesses use various tools to gather data from other platforms, helping them stay competitive and understand market trends. One common technique is web scraping, where automated tools extract public information like product prices, reviews, or stock availability from competitor websites. This allows businesses to monitor market pricing, popular products, and customer sentiment in real time. Public sales data from platforms that share it can also be analyzed to identify top-selling products and industry trends, helping businesses adjust their inventory and promotions accordingly.
Social media monitoring tools, such as Hootsuite, track mentions of products, brands, or trends across social platforms, offering insights into what customers are talking about and how competitors are performing. Additionally, collecting and analyzing reviews from competitor websites provides a clear view of what customers like or dislike about similar products, guiding companies to improve their offerings or spot opportunities for innovation. Together, these methods give businesses actionable insights for making better decisions in a fast-moving market.
With the right tools for effective data collection, businesses can ensure powerful dynamic pricing strategies, and provide the best possible customer experience – key insights of businesses with a high e-commerce maturity index.
How to Collect Public Data
For fast, efficient, and, most importantly – automatic extraction of public customer data, there are no better tools than web scrapers. Once you choose a target, the software will transform the website’s page into a readable and understandable data set based on the desired parts of knowledge that you want to extract.
Also, when scrapers are used with proxy connections, that’s when they reach their peak efficiency. The biggest problem with web scrapers is a spike in created connection requests, which can get your main IP banned. Proxy servers provide millions of available identities in any location, and a simple setup makes it a staple choice for private browsing sessions.
With the help of web scrapers and proxy connections, you can run multiple instances of the software at the same time to diversify the connection and ensure continuous data extraction from any source. This way, bots can multiply as long as there are intermediary addresses available to service the connection. Also, to avoid blacklisting from too many connection requests, they can be configured to change addresses at predetermined intervals. Combining your on-site knowledge with web scraping efforts is the best way to bring success to your e-commerce platform.
