Scraping Supplier Product Details & Images

[SparksCW]

I have a new supplier and I want to list all of their products, there is 3334 items in total + variations.

They can't offer a feed or export so it'll be a case of manually adding them.

However their site is quite well laid out with:

Title
SKU
Short Description
Long Description
Images

Some of the products have variations which would need to be listed as separate products rather than actual variations (same description etc etc just different SKU and price).

Now I could sit there and add them all in house which would take my staff and I weeks, but I'm wondering if it's possible to "scrape" the site for the relevant information, add it to a spread sheet that matches my Magento feed then we can just go through the spreadsheet to add all the prices. Then upload, assign the categories and we're live.

Is this possible and if so where do I look for this type of service/software? Or is there a better way?

 

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[devine]

Listing all products is a bad idea.

 

[SparksCW]

Listing all products is a bad idea.

Why?

There's two elements to it.

They send direct to customers so listing all products on eBay/Amazon is a no brainer provided it doesn't take me 4 weeks to add the products. The margins are there, if it sells it's easy to manage. If it doesn't sell then it's not a major issue (provided it doesn't take me 4 weeks to add the products!)

And then there's the products that I actually need to add value to my site (just under 1000 probably) which is the core reason for taking this supplier on.

Ultimately if it's not do-able then I'll only focus on the products that we actually need.

 

[devine]

Why?

There's two elements to it.

They send direct to customers so listing all products on eBay/Amazon is a no brainer provided it doesn't take me 4 weeks to add the products. The margins are there, if it sells it's easy to manage. If it doesn't sell then it's not a major issue (provided it doesn't take me 4 weeks to add the products!)

And then there's the products that I actually need to add value to my site (just under 1000 probably) which is the core reason for taking this supplier on.

Ultimately if it's not do-able then I'll only focus on the products that we actually need.

Because it makes you lose more profit than it makes for you. Every position that doesn't sell good enough is a waste of space - it harms sales of other products.

List only best products that has at least a considerable amount of sales (your supplier has to provide you with stats), products of best quality, with best photography.
Your sales will increase.

 

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[SparksCW]

Because it makes you lose more profit than it makes for you. Every position that doesn't sell good enough is a waste of space - it harms sales of other products.

List only best products that has at least a considerable amount of sales (your supplier has to provide you with stats), products of best quality, with best photography.
Your sales will increase.

I agree on the website side of things, we're very specific and all categories are manually ordered so the right products show in the right order.

But does this really matter for eBay/Amazon?

We'd only be listing certain products on the website, with everything else on third party. Just curious if the same still applies to eBay etc.

 

[devine]

I agree on the website side of things, we're very specific and all categories are manually ordered so the right products show in the right order.

But does this really matter for eBay/Amazon?

We'd only be listing certain products on the website, with everything else on third party. Just curious if the same still applies to eBay etc.

Yes, the only difference is that you can test things out on amazon/ebay before unlisting due to difference between how your items are found on amazon/ebay and on your actual website. But not with all 3k items.

Stop wasting time on this thread and this concern and select best products.

 

[SparksCW]

Yes, the only difference is that you can test things out on amazon/ebay before unlisting due to difference between how your items are found on amazon/ebay and on your actual website. But not with all 3k items.

Stop wasting time on this thread and this concern and select best products.

Already on it. Thanks

 

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[New]

Hey!

Probably devine is right, but if you still decide that you want to scrape all that data (or in the future decide to do so), there's this tool called Parsehub.

If you learn to use it it's extremely powerful, you can select elements to scra[pe, and then "relative select", for example if you scrape names, you can link the SKU + Price to every name. I use this tool for scraping eBay listings.

Cheers

 

[Bananas]

Because it makes you lose more profit than it makes for you. Every position that doesn't sell good enough is a waste of space - it harms sales of other products.

List only best products that has at least a considerable amount of sales (your supplier has to provide you with stats), products of best quality, with best photography.
Your sales will increase.

This is so true. This year, I worked to dump half my product line, which doubled my sales. For some reason, I had it in my mind to go wide all these years, it should have been narrow.