VILNIUS, Lithuania, Nov. 21, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Oxylabs' new research reveals that during the Black Friday weekends of 2020 and 2021, retail was the industry that scraped ecommerce websites the most. Software development and data collection companies could not even crack the top 10 list.
Oxylabs examined and contrasted two periods: the Black Friday preparatory period 2022 (September 1 - November 5) and the same period of last year. The top five most scraped categories on the biggest marketplaces before Black Friday 2022 were:
- Software Development
- Retail
- Technology, Information, and Internet
- Marketing & Advertising
- Computer Software
The top five most scraped categories during the same period in 2021 were:
- Retail
- Information Technology & Services
- Marketing & Advertising
- Computer Software
- Airlines/Aviation
When comparing the number of data points acquired from key ecommerce marketplaces in 2022, software development businesses, which involve many data collection companies, surpassed retail, showing a fundamental shift in expectations: data about Black Friday is considered more important than providing competitive bargains.
According to the Oxylabs web scraping infrastructure's traffic statistics, online retailers were over 32% more active this year before Black Friday than they were at the same time last year. Despite this fast growth, software development businesses managed to surpass retailers by making almost 3% more requests.
To put it simply, although the industry is called software development, almost all Oxylabs clients are related to web data collection. Since Oxylabs provides infrastructure for web data collection, those who scrape ecommerce websites (from the software development industry) are data collectors. In the Black Friday context, these companies collect various data from the most prominent ecommerce sites and provide structured information to their smaller competitors.
Web scraping and data collection for B2B have attained such a high level of significance that they have surpassed retailers and ecommerce businesses even during traditional "holidays." The situation indicates that the importance of data collected from competitors has already attained the level of complete legitimacy.
This year's Black Friday will occur during the impending recession and economic difficulties. As a result, another explanation for the decrease in retail data collection is that this year's Black Friday will not be as intense, and customers will be more careful with their spending.
Nearly sixty percent of customers in the UK are anticipated to reduce their spending, which is predicted by recent data to result in a decrease in non-essential consumer expenditure of £4.4 billion throughout the last quarter of the year.
According to a study, for anyone planning to cut down on spending during Black Friday, the most prevalent reasons are inflation (61%), the global cost of living crisis (56%), and fear of a recession (36%).
This black Friday might be the turning point not only for consumer priorities, but also for the industry, making web scraping an essential game changer.
About Oxylabs
Established in 2015, Oxylabs is a premium proxy and public web data-acquisition solution provider, enabling companies of all sizes to utilize the power of big data. Constant innovation, an extensive patent portfolio, and a focus on ethics have allowed Oxylabs to become a global leader in the web data acquisition industry and forge close ties with dozens of Fortune Global 500 companies. In 2022, Oxylabs was named the fastest-growing public web data-gathering solutions company in Europe in the Financial Times' FT 1000 list.
For more information, please visit: https://oxylabs.io
Contact Information:
Vytautas Kirjazovas
Head of Communications
press@oxylabs.io
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