A Complete Guide on Offering Web Scraping Services

Web scraping could unlock the invaluable insights for all types of businesses. So, a lot of companies hire somebody to handle their web data scraping projects. In case, you’re interested in providing this service, X-Byte Enterprise Crawling is the right place for you! We’ve made a complete guide here about how to provide web scraping services to your clients.

Before getting started, let’s revise a few basics.

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping is the term used to collect data from websites using the internet. Mainly it is done using automated bots or tools.

Clients interested in the data scraping services will usually have the objective in mind to have all the names, addresses, phone numbers, and email IDs for all contacts on the directory. Then, a scraping tool will crawl the website to scrape that data and spread it to the required format like Excel, XML, JSON, etc.

Why People Scrape Data?

There are a lot of reasons why people, as well as businesses, scrape or extract data from any website. Let’s go through some general use cases:

• Scraping lead data from directories: Either specific contact data or company data to occupy CRMs. For instance, scraping platforms like Yellow Pages or Yelp.
• Market Research: Scraping pricing and other data on the products from vehicles or dealership sites, e-commerce websites, travel or trips sites or property data from the real estate websites.
• Create aggregators which gather classified ads, blog posts, or jobs
• Extract data from the old website for moving the content to new websites, where transfer or API are not accessible
• Scrape comments and reviews to do sentiment analysis
• Scrape cryptocurrency or stock rates frequently
• Scrape data from websites for different research objectives

How to Scrape Data from the Web?

Different ways are there of scraping data:

Custom Web Scrapers

They are usually created by programmers in different languages. People generally use libraries like Beautiful Soup, Scrapy, and Selenium for building them.

Pros:

• Tailor-made and highly customized as per your requirements
• If you employ somebody to create it, very little investment of time at your part

Cons:

• Hard to maintain if you don’t have programming knowledge
• If you hire somebody, you have to contact as well as pay them every time a problem arises or changes required
• Every website needs that a completely new scraper built for that

Web Scraping Software

A lot of software companies are there which offer software, which allows you to extract data without any knowledge of programming. A few examples consist of Diffbot, Portia, Import.io, and our software at X-Byte Enterprise Crawling.

Pros:

• Pricing may start off very low, having some providers giving a free version
• Support is available for setting up the scraping projects
• Users can maintain their projects without the need to contact the developer
• Users can set up the web scrapers having little or no mechanical knowledge
• You may use a similar piece of software for scraping different websites rather than creating new scraper for every new website you need to scrape.

Cons:

• In a few cases, you need to become more technical while using more advanced features.
• Some scraping software could not deal with more complex websites.
• You need to devote more time to discover how to utilize the software. In a few cases, it can be very easy according to the software.

How Much Do People Generally Charge for Web Scraping Services?

The costing for web scraping depends on online freelancers providing as much low prices at $10/website! Though, scraping companies charge higher prices.

We have done an experiment for web scraping service pricing.

We have contacted many scraping companies having a quote request for a weekly scraping of 12000 products on Amazon in different four categories for scraping title, brand, description, pricing, ASIN, ratings, number of reviews, "Sold by" name, as well as URL.

Here are some quotes that we have received:

• $800 for initial setup as well as $9000 - $9500 USD every year for managed services (supposing the middle ground of $5000, it is $415/month for maintenance)
• $199 initial setup, $149/month for monthly maintenance as well as $5 for every 10000 records every month (assuming that 12000 records every week.
• $249 initial setup and $200/month for maintenance
• $649 for initial setup as well as data for the first 10,000 lines. After that, every additional record gets charged at $0.005 per line. At 48,000 products every month, it is about $240/month for maintenance

X-Byte Enterprise Crawling provides a free plan if you have one-time scraping requirements, moreover, we could set up as well as run the whole scraping job. Contact us and get a quote!

What Questions We Need to Ask to a Potential Client?

To recognize the difficulty of a data scraping project, usually, we ask:

• Which website they want to scrape?
• On that website, which particular elements they are interested in?
• Roughly how many pages will they need to get scrapped?
• Which format they would like the data to get extracted to as well as in which format they need data?

Wrapping Up

Web scraping is an extremely in-demand skill which you can discover very easily. It is a wonderful opportunity for consultants, agencies, as well as freelancers for adding web scraping in their services line-up.

Visit US: www.xbyte.io