How to Collect Data from Major US Retail Sites?

US retailers are among the most valuable retailers in the world, with market caps that are astounding. Walmart, Amazon, Costco, and Home Depot all have 300 billion plus market cap. Even Target, Best Buy, eBay, and Kroger Co. are all retailers with multi-billion-dollar market caps. Any new entrant in the retail industry of the USA, or an existing retail player that wants to thrive and scale in the retail industry, has to compete with these giants.

This means if your product assortments, prices, deliveries, and even packaging are not better or at least the same as these giants, then you don’t stand a chance in the American retail landscape.

So, how do you compete with these major US retailers? By knowing them in and out. And for knowing their product listings, prices, delivery prices, promotions, deals, coupon patterns, loyalty programs, refund policies, etc, you need their data. Yes, collecting data from these major retailers’ websites can be the differentiator you need to beat them.

If you are reading this article, it means you have already figured out that you need data from these popular and major US retail sites. You are now probably looking for the best and ethical ways to do it. Right?

This post is all about how to collect data from major US retail sites without any legal repercussions or ethical dilemmas. Continue reading!

Top Ways to Collect Data from Major US Retail Platforms like Walmart, Target, Costco, and More

A. Web Scrapers

Web scrapers are tools or programs designed for data collection in an automated way. These tools are powered by Python or other software frameworks and have features like automated data scraping from the destination websites, IP rotations (to not get blocked by retail websites’ anti-bot trigger mechanisms), dynamic content handling, and human-like CAPTCHA solving capabilities. These web scrapers for retail also have rate limit features. This means that they limit the requests sent to retail websites’ servers so as not to overload them with thousands of requests at once. Rate limit is one of the standard practices of ethical data scraping.

Top US retail sites have inbuilt anti-scraping measures in place, and therefore, low-quality scrapers are unable to scrape their data, and they also bring in IP bans. High-quality web scrapers built by professional data engineers are built to tackle such anti-scraping measures. These scrapers extract retail data at speed, scale, and precision.

B. APIs

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) represent another legitimate and reliable way to collect data from major retail sites through structured endpoints. Web scraping companies like Scraping Intelligence, Web Screen Scraping, X-Byte.io, and Retailgators offer APIs that can scrape major US retailers like eBay, Walmart, Home Depot, etc. The beauty of APIs lies in their stability and reliability. Even when retailers update their websites, APIs maintain consistent data structures.

For instance, Walmart's API lets you access product catalogs, pricing, and inventory data that's regularly updated. Similarly, Amazon's Product API lets you access their vast product categories, sub-categories, product variants, and more. Hire a retail data scraping company that offers APIs with efficient caching mechanisms.

C. Readymade Datasets

Not everyone has the technical expertise to build scrapers or integrate APIs. Also, many businesses that need retail data do not want to go for web scraper development or APIs, as their requirements may be one-time. For such businesses, ready-made retail datasets offer a simple solution to accessing competitive retail intelligence. There are web scraping service providers who directly share with you the latest compiled datasets from the US retail sites. Pre-collected, cleaned, and structured datasets from major US retailers are available for sale.

These datasets are not stale, and top data scraping service providers update such data daily or weekly. This can be purchased as one-time downloads or through subscription services.

However, you may need to buy these datasets separately for each retail platform. Some providers can provide you with the datasets of the top 10 retail chains of the USA in a bundle package, too.

The advantage of ready-made datasets is immediate access without the technical overhead as all this was taken care of by the dataset provider’s data extraction team.

Ethics and Legality of Collecting Data From the USA’s Major Retail Sites

While data is something that every business wants for analysis, and even the US retailers like Walmart, Costco, Kroger, etc, may be keeping a tab on each other’s data for competitive analysis, when it comes to their ‘own data’, everyone is secretive and has terms of service. It means, each of the retail platforms’ websites has some terms and services that will never encourage data scraping or can also have policies that prohibit scraper bots on their websites. Therefore, scraping activities have to be done responsibly and under the guidance of experts who have been in this field for years and know the ethical, technical, and legal way of data scraping.

Retail websites own the data that is there on their platform, and therefore, if you collect it, its usage must be done for research or competitive analysis only. Any misuse of data for illegal activities can cause severe legal troubles for you. Retaining data only for use cases, adhering to terms of service, and practices like rate throttling are considered best for legal/ethical retail data scraping.

Datasets that Can Be Collected from Major US Retailers

From major retailers, several valuable datasets can be ethically collected:

1. Product Information

• Product names, descriptions, and specifications
• Product categories and hierarchies
• Brand information

2. Pricing Data

• Regular prices
• Promotional prices and discounts
• Historical price trends
• Price differentials across retailers

3. Inventory Information

• Stock availability status
• Stock level indicators (when available)

4. Customer Feedback

• Product ratings and reviews
• Review sentiment and topics

5. Product Assortment

• Product range and variety
• New product introductions
• Product discontinuations

6. Promotional Information

• Types of promotions being offered
• Promotional timing and duration
• Seasonal marketing strategies

Conclusion

The collected datasets from retail chains of the USA or top retail platforms can be used for identifying emerging product categories, seasonal products, setting optimal prices based on competitive analysis, analyzing competitor product assortments, monitoring promotional strategies of top US retailers, and detecting shifts in consumer preferences or their pain points based on review scraping.

Retail data is key to strategic decisions for newcomers in the market to survive and thrive in the long term, in parallel with these giants. For existing players, it is the intelligence they need to expedite their progress and improve their consumer base.