Home Business Magazine Online
By Elizabeth Galewski
Rayobyte, the award-winning ethical proxy provider, helps home business owners overcome common challenges and achieve greater success with web scraping technology. Web scrapers are computer programs that can automatically collect information from websites and save it in a database, such as on an Excel spreadsheet.
This technology is valuable because it collects data very quickly from many websites at once. Popular public-facing websites that use this capability include travel aggregators like Expedia and Kayak or the used-book marketplace Bookfinder.com.
Home businesses can benefit from Rayobyte’s web scraping services for many reasons.
Web Scraping Explained
Web scraping, which is also known as screen-scraping or data mining, is the process of extracting data from websites. When search engines like Google crawl the internet for new content, they often use web scrapers.
One of the most important things to remember when trying to collect data from websites is that each will have its own set of rules about how much information it allows users to access. Some websites don’t allow any sort of scraping at all, while others allow limited scraping but require that users provide credit by linking back or citing the source material in some way. Still more allow full access, but only under certain conditions — for example, only after registering for an account.
In order for your web scraping efforts not to get shut down by these restrictions — or worse yet, blocked completely — you’ll need some way around them. That’s where proxies come into play.
Proxies allow businesses to pretend like they are located somewhere else while accessing those protected sites. They hide your IP address so that your activity can’t be traced back to you or anyone else in your company. Acting as middlemen between a user’s computer and a website, they allow businesses to web scrape without fear of being discovered.
Proxies allow for web scraping of any site on the internet, even if it has an “anti-scraping” policy in place. With their assistance, you can gather all sorts of useful information without getting blocked or banned.
How Home Businesses Can Use Web Scraping
Businesses, marketers, and entrepreneurs often use web scraping to save time when collecting information that would otherwise be time-consuming or expensive to obtain. Organizations can use it for both customer-facing and internal functions.
Many e-commerce businesses use web scraping to identify trends in customer purchasing behavior, enabling them to leverage customer preferences to increase sales. For instance, let’s say you have an online store that sells handmade soap. Web scraping can tell you which products sell better than others at different times of the year. With web scraping, this process is automated, so you won’t have to check each product over and over again yourself.
Home businesses also employ web scraping to track competitors’ prices. As a post on Rayobyte’s blog explains: “Many people who run online stores scrape the web for product prices so they can come up with their own prices. This allows you to undersell the competition. For instance, if you scrape the data and find out that the lowest price on the web is $9.99, you can mark your prices at a few cents less and overtake the competition.”
Web scraping also helps businesses analyze how competitors’ prices fluctuate over time. If you sell products on Amazon Marketplace or eBay, then web scraping helps keep those listings up-to-date. According to Neil Emeigh, CEO of Rayobyte, “Amazon even encourages its vendors and sellers to conduct web scraping, since this boosts competitiveness, which keeps the entire ecosystem healthy.”
Web scrapers can also harvest online reviews, which enables businesses to gauge consumer sentiment. Other applications include evaluating competitors’ marketing efforts or verifying that your own advertising campaigns are running.
The best thing about web scrapers, however, is that you don’t need a computer science background or know how to code to use them. All you need to know is what kind of data you would like to harvest.
The Rayobyte Advantage
Not all web scrapers are the same, and Rayobyte’s innovative technology stands above the rest for many reasons.
First and foremost, Rayobyte provides a dependable hosted solution for your web scraper that can easily be scaled up as your business grows. While it’s possible to buy software that would enable you to web scrape right from your own computer, this approach would limit your projects to the amount that software can handle. When the time comes for your business to expand, you will need to buy a new app, which is time-consuming and expensive. With Rayobyte, you simply upgrade to a different package.
In addition, if you use a desktop app, simple technical issues can bring your scraping to a halt. This problem doesn’t occur with Rayobyte, which has vast computing resources to keep your web scraping running smoothly.
Additionally, many organizations that web scrape from their desktops fail to use proxies. Their single IP address acts like a red flag to competitors’ websites, which quickly blocks access. Conversely, Rayobyte offers access to thousands of IP addresses throughout the world. Moreover, Rayobyte can offer proxies of the highest quality — residential proxies sourced from ordinary people’s electronic devices.
Unlike other proxy providers, Rayobyte follows the highest ethical standards when acquiring these proxies. The owners of the IP addresses that Rayobyte uses are fully informed and have chosen to serve as proxies for monetary reward. Rayobyte only uses their devices as proxies when they are more than 50 percent charged and are not otherwise in service at the time. Participants in the program can leave at will.
A Fast, Efficient Path to Success
Web scraping is a powerful tool for home businesses to find customers, increase sales, and make more money. The main advantage of web scraping over other data collection methods is that it’s faster and requires less effort. No manual inputting of information into spreadsheets or databases is required before analysis can take place.
With the help of Rayobyte’s large network of ethical proxies and web scraping tools, a wide variety of home businesses can build valuable analytics that help make strategic decisions.
About the Author:
As featured on the Price of Business radio show, PR News, Communications Intelligence Magazine, and SheVentures, Elizabeth Galewski is a professional writer and media relations expert. In her previous career, she taught English composition at the college level for more than twelve years. She earned her B.A. from Wellesley and her M.A. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as completed doctoral coursework in Rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
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