No Coding Required: How Web Scraping Tools Are Making Data Extraction Accessible

Octoparse
6 min readAug 21

Originally published as https://reurl.cc/8jEO17

The same question keeps coming back — is web scraping easy?

The answer to that question is a resounding YES! Web scraping is easy! Anyone without any knowledge of coding can scrape data if they are given the right tool. There’s no reason you can’t scrape the data you need because of programming. There are various tools, such as Octoparse, designed to help non-programmers scrape websites for wanted data.

What is Web Scraping

Web scraping is simply the process of obtaining data from a website. You can program it manually or use a web scraping tool to automate it.

With all that said, our main question is still left unanswered — is web scraping easy? Don’t worry! You will get answers soon.

Web Scraping Use Cases

The data obtained from websites can be used for various purposes. Here are some common ways that people apply web scraping in their business and study.

Monitoring Competitors

Data monitoring plays an essential role in the e-commerce industry. It can be used to monitor competitors, track product prices, understand customers’ sentiments, get a general overview of the market, etc. For retailers that what to sell online, it can help them to find the best products to sell, locate the ideal platforms to launch their businesses, and modify their strategies.

Information Congregation

Any information aggregators need a large amount of data as the foundation. Whether you want to create a real estate website, sports website, job aggregator, or maybe a news website, you would need to collect data from a variety of websites. To this extent, web scraping can be a very valuable tool.

By employing a powerful web scraping method, you can scrape thousands of rows of data from multiple sites and transmit it into structured formals, regardless of the complex website structures.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is a helpful way to understand how consumers perceive the products or services they purchased, what they need, and what they care about most. Businesses can use it to improve their products, services, and overall

Octoparse

Web scraping at a large scale without coding. Start simple, for free. www.octoparse.com