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  1. Home
  2. Case-Study

How Web Scraping Australia’s Biggest Retail Website Revealed Critical Product Gaps?

A major Australian retailer with its retail platform that has over 20K listed products and 75K+ SKUs and variants was struggling to identify critical product gaps. The gaps related to inventory, identification of top-selling items, least-selling items, items that competitors sell but are currently unavailable in their inventory, etc. They connected with the Scraping Intelligence team to automate product gap finding activity by deploying a product data extraction solution. This case study highlights how Scraping Intelligence helped the major Australian retailer analyze its biggest competitors' product catalog to identify critical product gaps.

scrape-australian-retail-site-revealed-product-gaps

Project Requirement

Australia's biggest retail website reached out to Scraping Intelligence seeking a competitive analysis solution. They wanted to understand why their largest competitor was outperforming them in certain product categories. The client needed comprehensive data extraction from their competitor's website to analyze product ranges, variants, SKUs, categories, sub-categories, types, brands, and other key product identifiers and differentiators such as pricing strategies and consumer preferences. The goal was to identify specific product gaps in their inventory that were causing customers to shop with competitors. Through data-driven insights, they wanted to reshape and realign their product offerings with the latest trends. Moreover, they wanted it to be a continuous activity.

Client Requirement

The client had attempted manual competitor analysis and later used some tools that extract data, but found it ineffective at such an enterprise scale. The client didn't have the technical know-how to create or handle a complex web scraping system.

The challenges faced included:

  • arrowThe competitors’ sites had thousands of products spread across many categories. Manual analysis would take too much time and effort to manage.
  • arrowAdvanced anti-scraping tools on the target website made normal data collection useless. They blocked IPs after just a few requests. The poorly made scrapers and cheap tools proved to be useless.
  • arrowMany pages on the competitors' sites were JavaScript-heavy (tough to scrape due to dynamic loading).
  • arrowThe inventory, product variants, descriptions, and prices changed frequently as per the latest trends. Single scraping was not enough. It required either real-time or a frequent one.
  • arrowDifferences in how products were described, categorized, and labeled caused problems with standardizing the data for tabulation.
  • arrowThe client was uncertain about the legal and ethical boundaries of competitor data scraping in the Australian market.

Solutions

Scraping Intelligence developed a comprehensive web scraping solution tailored to the client’s specific needs:

  • arrowWe created an advanced scraping system to collect data from competitor websites while handling their IP rotation, random requests, and browser fingerprinting.
  • arrowThe advanced and custom-built scrapers addressed all challenges that the client faced.
  • arrowOur team built custom scrapers designed to handle JavaScript-based content and dynamic elements easily.
  • arrowWe set up a system to schedule scraping at the best times and at regular intervals. In some product categories, the scraping is in real-time.
  • arrowDelivered pricing datasets for different product categories.
  • arrowEnsured all data collection stayed within Australian legal standards and followed ethical scraping rules.

Impact

  • arrowIdentified 200+ high-demand product categories and specific items that were missing from the client’s inventory but were popular on the competitors’ platform.
  • arrowBy introducing the missing products, the client experienced a sales increase of 15% in previously underperforming departments within the first quarter.
  • arrowData-driven pricing adjustments led to a 5% increase in profit margins.
  • arrowExpanded product offerings contributed to a 28% reduction in customer churn and stopped customers from going to competitor platforms.
  • arrowThe data helped optimize stock levels as per the demand and prevented inventory mismanagement issues.

Conclusion

This case study shows how smart use of web scraping can shift a retailer's place in the market. We worked with the Australian client to go through their main competitors' product catalogs and find big inventory gaps that hurt their sales and market share. Using what we discovered, the client expanded their product selection to better meet customer needs. This project proves that ethical web scraping and data-based competitor analysis can deliver useful insights to help Australian retailers gain a competitive advantage.