The Decline of Web Scraping Software: What's Next for Data Collection?

Web scraping is a powerful tool for extracting data from websites, but it is not without its challenges. One of the biggest challenges of web scraping is dealing with IP blocks and other forms of anti-scraping measures implemented by websites.

When a website detects that a large number of requests are coming from a single IP address, it may block that IP to prevent excessive scraping. This can be a major issue for web scrapers, as it can prevent them from accessing the data they need.

There are several ways that websites can implement IP blocks, including:

  1. Blacklisting specific IP addresses: Websites can maintain a list of known scraper IP addresses and block any requests coming from those IPs.
  2. Using CAPTCHAs: Websites can use CAPTCHAs to verify that a request is coming from a human and not a scraper. This can be effective at blocking automated scraping tools, but can also be frustrating for legitimate users.
  3. Rate limiting: Websites can limit the number of requests that can be made from a single IP address within a given time period. This can prevent excessive scraping without blocking legitimate users.
  4. Using security protocols: Websites can use security protocols such as SSL/TLS to encrypt data and prevent scrapers from accessing it.

Dealing with IP blocks and other anti-scraping measures can be a major challenge for web scrapers. Some common ways to overcome these challenges include:

  1. Using proxies: Proxies allow web scrapers to route their requests through multiple IP addresses, making it more difficult for websites to detect and block them.
  2. Using headless browsers: Headless browsers, such as Selenium, allow web scrapers to simulate the behavior of a human user and bypass CAPTCHAs and other anti-scraping measures.

But still this requires fair bit of advanced technical knowledge and most importantly takes time to setup. So what if there is a better way. Yes there is.. the answer is Using cloud-based scraping platforms:

Cloud-based scraping platforms, such as Scraping Solutions, offer advanced features such as automatic IP rotation and support for multiple languages, making it easier to scrape websites without being detected. And most importantly the effort requires from your end is very minimum to setup a web scraping task. You will have dedicated staff to help you so you can carry on with your day to day tasks knowing all the problems are solved for you.

In conclusion, IP blocks and other forms of anti-scraping measures can be a major challenge for web scrapers. By using proxies, headless browsers, and cloud-based scraping platforms, web scrapers can overcome these challenges and continue to gather the data they need.

How To Capture 1000’s Of Leads On Yellow Pages Within A Matter Of Minutes

For any business to thrive, you need sales. If you can sell your products or services, you stay in business. If you can’t sell, you’re out. It’s as simple as that. Having great sales people on your team helps tremendously, but all sales start with one thing…Leads.

You simply can’t make any sales if you can’t get people onto your list of hot leads. All business owners know this. In fact, a survey conducted by Content Marketing Institute in 2016 found that 86% of business owners admit that generating leads is their number one concern. If you’re not yet familiar with the idea of lead generating through targeted prospecting campaigns, read here first.

Running a large-scale prospecting campaign is the best way to generate prospective sales leads in a relatively short time. Depending on your niche, you might turn to Zillow, Craigslist, Amazon or a whole array of other sources.

But if you need to harvest business contact details, then you need Yellowpages. We’re not talking the old phone books you probably still have an old 1990’s version of tucked away in the far reaches of your closet... we’re talking Yellowpages online.

There’s no better place than Yellowpages if you sell to a niche group of businesses as you’re able to extract:

But how do you get started with a prospecting campaign on Yellowpages?  Assuming we completely eliminate the manual (aka dinosaur) method of copy/pasting into an Excel sheet, you’re left with two options, one more solid than the other.

The Old Method: Rotating IP’s
What most beginner prospectors start with when scraping large scale data records like Yellowpages is using multiple, rotating IP addresses.Why?

When scraping through business directories, web servers are able to pinpoint multiple and repetitive requests and subsequently put them on hold temporarily or in some cases, permanently.To get around this, it’s common to use a proxy rotation service which works to change IP address. It’s not a perfect method though because there are still major considerations to keep in mind with rotating proxies such as:

While rotating proxies is a good option for some, it’s important to note that crawling websites without getting blocked is getting harder.

What’s the solution? Read on.

The New Method: Targeted Web Scraping
Web scraping through Scraping Solutions allows you to easily extract information from Yellow Pages in a matter of seconds. And you’re not limited either, our custom scraper is able to gather details from:

So, why web scraping vs rotating proxies?
Web scraping means you’ll never be blacklisted from Yellow Pages while being able to extract thousands of pieces of data. You’ll quickly be able to fill your leads with the harvested data, so you can get back to running your business.

Through Yellow Pages web scraping we can break down multiple extractions including but not limited to:

There you have it. In this article we explored that Yellow pages is an ideal place to start prospecting if you want to increase your business leads in a short amount of time. We learned about the old method that used to work, Rotating IP’s, and why that’s no longer a viable solution for a business that wants to grow. We also learned about the better option, Web Scraping.
Based on this information, if you are the type of business owner that wants to save valuable time, energy, and money, you already know the option that’s best for you.

Contact us today and find out how we can get upwards of 50,000 leads for you from Yellowpages for only $99.

How To Generate Craigslist Leads Quicker

Around since what now seems like the dinosaur days of the internet (aka 1996), Craigslist has been a long loved and consistently used website for businesses and individuals alike. With over 50 billion monthly page views, it's hard to ignore this platform and its marketing potential. Not to mention, it’s absolutely FREE to use.

Originally built as an alternative to traditional local listings, Craigslist has opened the business growth possibilities even in the smallest of towns and cities. Whether you’re a realtor, run a home cleaning business, car dealership, or virtually any other locally run business, you’ve probably dipped your toes into the Craigslist lead-sourcing-pool once or twice before.

Just the “Wanted” section alone can prove to be very lucrative if you can find people looking for the product or service you’re offering. These days, even online entrepreneurs are seeing great results using the platform to market their virtual training, webinars, and consulting services.

If you find yourself in the group mentioned above, you also know by now how tedious the scrolling can be and how tiresome doing multiple searches is. To get more out of Craigslist, try these best practices for effectively sifting through results, and sourcing leads faster.

3 Ways To Filter Craigslist Ads For Leads

1. Start Broad

Typically when searching on Craigslist, so called “Power Users” tend to go a little crazy with the filters. The problem with immediately getting rid of more than one parameter however is that you might just miss a few good gems in the pile.

Let’s say you’re a car dealer scouring local listings for Ford model cars that locals have recently added to the website. You might think to immediately filter out anything older than ‘09, higher than 50km’s, and only automatic. While this seems a smart thing to do, and generally is, it’s important to keep in mind that Craigslist is not like your regular search engine.

This means that if any user posts a rather simple non descriptive ad title for a Ford truck like "truck for sale", you’ll miss it completely, and potentially risk your competitor nabbing a great deal.

Instead, start broad, and first filter by year only. You can then add more filters as you scroll through the ads that pop up.

2. Watch Out For The Wild Cards & Keyboard Cowboys

Since Craigslist is available to anyone with an internet connection, chances are, you’re going to find more than a couple ads that read, well... a little funky. Poor spelling and grammar is inevitable and can mean you might miss a lead. To help mitigate this, you have a couple different options.

We’ll use the example of a home stager searching for “for sale by owner” type leads. For sale by owner situations usually result in homes filled with personal touches like photographs and children's toys, which in the real estate industry can actually hurt the sale of a home (as buyers can’t picture themselves living there). By finding these types of listings, the home stager can approach the lister and approach them with her services to help make their homes more attractive to potential buyers.

The first thing she’d do in this situation would be to do a simple search for terms like “home for sale” or “for sale by owner” or “house for sale” which would yield great results, undoubtedly.

But what about listers that may have misspelled (for any number of reasons), yielding a result like:
“home for sale” being written as “home for sell” or even a slip of a finger resulting in something odd like  “home for sale”

In this case, the stager would not have found these ads and missed an opportunity to approach the seller. To help prevent she’d simply have to add an asterisk in the place of certain letters to show all results that may have resulted from misspellings.

So, “home for s***” would match up with any number of four letter keywords starting with an "s" including “home for sale”

3. Cover All Your Bases In A Combination Search

Using the example of a car dealership again, if you’re trying to get an idea of what your competition in the area is like you may be interested the verbiage they’re using on their ads, monitoring the price of certain vehicles and more. With this information in your hands, you can not only run deals and promotions that draw customers into your dealership over the other guy down the road, but also see what’s working for your competition and whats not working.

Let’s say you’re interested in running a deal on pickup trucks and would like to quickly see what pricing your competition has their vehicles set to this week. How do you make sure to catch all models in one search?

Two things to keep in mind here: pipes, and parentheses.

Use your pipe “|” between models like this:
Toyota|Ford|Nissan|Chevrolet

And your parentheses to catch all possible variations of “truck” your competition may be using such as (Truck)(Pickup)(Pickup Truck)

Put the two sections together and you end up with a formula to search along these lines:
Toyota|Ford|Nissan|Chevrolet(Truck)(Pickup)(Pickup Truck)

This casts a big enough net so that you can see all ads falling under Toyota Truck, Toyota Pickup, Toyota Pickup Truck etc etc.

Craigslist Automation: Harvest Data The Smart Way

Collecting data on Craigslist is fairly simple once you’ve mastered a few tricks like the four above, but if you’re sitting there thinking “This is great, but it just means MORE work for me doesn’t it?”

We certainly agree with you there and while using these tips is much more effective than sifting through page after page of listings, it’s still a big time buster. Oh, there’s also those fussy Google Recaptchas you have to solve.

So how can you harvest data the smart way, without the trouble of manual effort?

By using a dedicated craigslist scraping service like Craiglist Pro, you’re able to significantly speed up the process and get to closing your leads faster. Instead of doing multiple searches, a scraper service can quickly pull all your desired data in a matter of minutes.

Start 100% Free Trial, No Credit Card Needed

Our clients consistently receive 8 cent leads without any manual effort by using Craigslist Pro which is also able to solve Google Recaptcha, instead of wasting lot of your time manually. It’s as simple as picking the search URL's you’re after, uploading to our portal - and receiving the phone numbers & emails of the ads you need either weekly or daily according to your preference!

Stop wasting your time with Craigslist lead generation, see the scraping tool in action and grab your trial version right here.

Amazon Best Sellers Extractor

Main purpose of this program is to collect top selling products on Amazon using Amazon Best Sellers Rank available on Amazon website(s). This program supports all amazon sub sites specific to different countries.

You can also use this program to monitor prices & stock levels of a given list of products, as well as to extract any products from a generic Amazon search.

Please note that we do not perform any automation, scripts, robots or web crawlers that violates terms or conditions of amazon.com through this product. Therefore, the software shown on this video no longer works nor available for purchase. We do not encourage any kind of automation to scrape amazon.com as against Amazon terms and conditions.

Please try our Amazon Pro cloud product where all data are generated through our cloud worker network using 100% white hat techniques with a guaranteed delivery time of a couple of hours.

Ebay Data Extractor (With Shopify Import Add On)

Main purpose of this scraper is to collect eBay product listings information, Quantity sold for each item and directly import top selling products (based on sold quantity) into your Shopify Store.

Please note that we do not perform any automation, scripts, robots or web crawlers that violates terms or conditions of eBay.com through this product. Therefore, the software shown on this video no longer works nor available for purchase. We do not encourage any kind of automation to scrape eBay.com as against eBay terms and conditions.

Please try our eBay Pro cloud product where all data is generated through our cloud worker network using 100% white hat techniques with a guaranteed delivery time of a couple of hours.

Ebay Extractor (With Amazon Product Matching)

Main purpose of this program is to collect eBay product listings information, Quantity sold for each item and also find the matching product from Amazon website for drop shipping or arbitrage opportunities.

Please note that we do not perform any automation, scripts, robots or web crawlers that violates terms or conditions of ebay.com or amazon.com through this product. Therefore, the software shown on this video no longer works nor available for purchase. We do not encourage any kind of automation to scrape eBay.com or Amazon.com as against their terms and conditions.

Please try our eBay to Amazon Pro cloud product where all data is generated through our cloud worker network using 100% white hat techniques with a guaranteed delivery time of a couple of hours.

Indeed Jobs Data Extractor With Email Extraction

An application that collect job listings from indeed.com or any of the other indeed country specific sub sites.

This tool is a really useful for anyone who wants to generate HR related leads. We also have an option to collect Job decision makers work email address based on their LinkedIn profile.

Please note that we do not perform any automation, scripts, robots or web crawlers that violates terms or conditions of Indeed.com through this product. We do not encourage any kind of automation to scrape Indeed.com as it's against Indeed terms and conditions.

All data is generated through our cloud worker network using 100% white hat techniques.

How To Generate Leads From Zillow On Auto-Pilot

Whether you’re a broker or agent, you’ve probably used Zillow quite a few times by now as you search for new, amazing properties. These days, however, great listings are getting harder and harder to come by as more of your competitors use the exact same methods as you do. So, how do the successful real estate agents do it? How do they always seem to get their hands on the latest, greatest listings on Zillow before anyone else?

One word: automation.

Before we get into that…

Why Zillow?

Zillow (and Trulia for that matter) are essentially the Google and Bing of real estate. Before these sites came to fruition, a shopper would first have to contact a realtor who would then provide listings in their desired area. Zillow flips this process upside down providing users on-demand access to real estate.

Out With The Old

You can check on Google right now, you’ll find hundreds if not thousands of resources and blog posts that outline ways to get you new leads. Most of them however involve tedious, manual work like sifting through pages and pages of listings just to extract the few that you’re interested in.  It’s always important and necessary to make sure your Zillow profile is up to date, but these days, great agents don’t wait for a lead to fall into their lap, they make use of technology to automatically filter and manage the right leads.

In With The New

Did you know that right now there are approximately 67 million homes on Zillow updated by users? That’s A LOT to search through just for a few leads! Sure, you can spend hours upon hours per day going through each page, but wouldn’t you rather prefer a method that does filters out potential leads on autopilot?

Yes? We thought so.

Wouldn’t you love to spend less time searching for leads, yet acquiring the exact same or even more than you were before? Zillow Pro by Scraping Solutions is the number 1 was to generate leads from Zillow without any monthly fees and with our new SMS, Email & Direct Mail Sending options it's even easier to contact the leads you generate.

With pricing packages starting from only $49 for 10,000 leads and a no obligation free trial why not watch our introduction video and sign up for your free trial!

 

 

5 Effective Ways To Get The Best Deal Out Of Your Supplier

Working with a trusted supplier has many benefits for you as a business owner, but even though you may have already established a good relationship, have you ever thought of renegotiating your prices? This can be a tough thing to do for many people, but keeping your costs down is always going to be the best way to improve your bottom line. In order to get the most out of renegotiation, you need to go in prepared. These tips will help give you the best hand and make it easier for you to score lower prices! (more…)

How To Automate Your Shopify Order Placement Process

As an e-commerce entrepreneur, you wear many hats.
We get it, money can be tight when you’re growing your business. Whether it be managing the books, handling your store's social media, customer service, and of course product management… you’ve got a lot on your plate.

This is why delegating work wherever possible will free up your time doing menial tasks and instead allow you to focus on what matters. One area you can work on improving is your order placement process which as you know is a tedious process, even with all the available plugins out there.

Let’s talk about outsourcing vs. automation

To solve your problem of order placements, you may have tried or thought of trying outsourcing. While effective outsourcing (hiring a dedicated individual to take over a task) may give you back your time - have you ever thought about whether it’s really worth the money? In many cases, you can get away with outsourcing overseas where a lower rate will afford you a part-time or even full-time employee. But think about the overall, ongoing costs, can your business really afford this constant cash flow?

In the beginning, it’s also a matter of not knowing whether you’ll see an ROI.

Automation, on the other hand, allows you to plug a few parameters into a tool like Shopified App or Oberlo and have your products picked, imported, and orders placed for you.

If you run a dropshipping store, you’re probably familiar with Aliexpress, and you’re also probably familiar with the annoying captcha that is essential to the order process. It’s easy to understand why they do it of course, to ensure you’re a human and not a robot, but this can really put a pause in your business - especially if you need to process hundreds of orders. Even with the help of an outsourced employee, this can easily take hours, which can put a big dent in your bottom line.

So what’s the solution, how do I really automate my Shopify orders?

You need a tool that not only allows you to place specific parameters on your orders but also automatically solve those annoying captchas! Scraping Solutions can build you your very own tool for less than $500 (yes, a one time cost!) that does all of the above. Save your time and your money, contact us with your exact Shopify specifications and we’ll build a tool to match.

What about automating cancelled orders?

It’s unavoidable, at some point a customer will change their mind or realise they’ve ordered the wrong size or colour. Whatever the case, you have received the money, but cannot deliver.

Even though Shopify provides you with email notifications whenever an order is cancelled, you still have to sift through thousands of unwanted emails in your inbox in order to get to the cancellation messages. This is not only a waste of time for you, it can cause a decline in your customer satisfaction rates if you fail to cancel an order within a reasonable time frame. Instead of this manual checking day in and day out, we offer solutions that automatically scan for emails with certain keywords, extract content and then we put into an easy to read spreadsheet for you. This way you can get to processing cancellations quicker and keep your customers happy.