{"id":7740,"date":"2025-09-15T19:21:40","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T13:51:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stag42s.wpenginepowered.com\/glossary\/scraping\/"},"modified":"2025-09-15T19:21:40","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T13:51:40","slug":"scraping","status":"publish","type":"glossary","link":"https:\/\/www.42signals.com\/glossary\/scraping\/","title":{"rendered":"Scraping (Data\/Price)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Scraping (or Web Scraping) is an automated method of extracting large amounts of public data from websites. A software program (often called a bot or crawler) fetches web pages and parses the HTML code to extract specific information, which is then structured and stored in a database or spreadsheet. In the e-commerce context, scraping is primarily used for: Price Monitoring: Tracking competitor prices across multiple online stores. Product Intelligence: Gathering data on competitors&#8217; product assortments, descriptions, and images. Review Aggregation: Collecting customer reviews and ratings for sentiment analysis. Market Research: Compiling data for trend analysis and new product ideation. While scraping public data is generally legal, it exists in a legal gray area and must be done in compliance with a website&#8217;s Terms of Service and robots.txt file. Aggressive scraping can also overwhelm a site&#8217;s servers. Many businesses therefore rely on specialized third-party data providers that handle the complex technical and legal aspects of scraping, providing clean, reliable data feeds instead of building their own scraping infrastructure from scratch.<\/p>\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading glossary-additional-resources-cls has-text-color has-link-color has-large-font-size wp-elements-6f48ed4e5d202f266732906df97b0cc9\" style=\"color:#2274a5;margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0\">\nAdditional resources:\n<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.42signals.com\/blog\/a-guide-to-ecommerce-scraping\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Guide to Ecommerce Scraping<\/a><br>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.42signals.com\/blog\/ecommerce-website-reviews-scraping-for-product-insights\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ecommerce Website Reviews Scraping for Product Insights<\/a>\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The use of bots (web crawlers) to extract large amounts of data from websites automatically. Often used for competitor price tracking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","class_list":["post-7740","glossary","type-glossary","status-publish","hentry","glossary-category-data-collection-technology"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v22.8 (Yoast SEO v22.8) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Data Scraping: Automatically Extract Website Information<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Data scraping uses bots to extract large amounts of data from websites. 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