You need competitor prices. Every morning, you open 15 browser tabs, scroll through product pages, and copy numbers into a spreadsheet.
By the time you're done, the first prices have already changed. You're always behind.
Meanwhile, your competitor updates their prices in real-time. They're not doing it by hand.
Websites are databases with a user interface on top. You can skip the interface.
LAYER 1 - Web scraping turns public websites into structured data feeds.
Web scraping is programmatically fetching web pages and extracting specific data from the HTML. Instead of a human clicking, scrolling, and copying, a script does it - faster, more consistently, and at any scale.
Modern web scraping handles dynamic content (JavaScript-rendered pages), pagination (clicking through 847 pages of results), and rate limiting (not getting blocked). It navigates login walls, handles CAPTCHAs, and adapts when page layouts change.
The goal isn't downloading web pages. It's turning unstructured HTML into structured data: product name, price, SKU, availability - ready to use in your systems.
Web scraping solves a universal problem: how do you get structured data from websites that don't offer an API?
Request a URL. Parse the HTML response. Select the elements containing your data (using CSS selectors or XPath). Extract the text or attributes. Handle pagination and multiple pages. Store the structured results. This pattern works whether you're scraping prices, job postings, or real estate listings.
Pick a website type, choose your scraping approach, and watch what happens. Hint: scrape too fast and you'll get blocked.
Fast and simple for basic sites
Fetches the raw HTML and parses it directly. Works great for sites where all the data is in the initial page load. Fast and lightweight. Breaks when content is loaded dynamically via JavaScript after the page loads.
Full browser without the window
Runs a real browser (Chrome, Firefox) without a visible interface. Executes JavaScript, waits for content to load, handles clicks and scrolls. Sees exactly what a human would see. Slower and more resource-intensive.
Go straight to the data source
Many websites load data from internal APIs. Instead of scraping the HTML, you can often find these API endpoints and call them directly. Returns clean JSON instead of messy HTML. Faster and more reliable when it works.
Your competitor updates their website prices. Without web scraping, you find out when a sales rep mentions it or a customer complains. With this flow, prices are scraped daily, compared against your pricing, and alerts fire when gaps appear - so you can respond before losing deals.
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You set your scraper to maximum speed and hammered the site with 100 requests per second. The site blocked your IP. Now you can't access it at all, and you're explaining to IT why the office internet is on a blacklist.
Instead: Add delays between requests. Rotate IPs if needed. Respect robots.txt. Scrape during off-peak hours. Act like a polite visitor, not a DDoS attack.
Your scraper worked perfectly for three months. Then the website redesigned, changed their CSS classes from 'product-price' to 'pdp__price-amount', and your scraper started returning empty data. You didn't notice for two weeks.
Instead: Monitor for extraction failures. Use multiple selector strategies. Build alerts for unusual patterns (zero results, schema changes). Test against the live site regularly.
You built an elaborate scraper for a website, dealing with pagination, JavaScript rendering, and rate limits. Then you discovered they have a free public API that returns the exact data you need in clean JSON.
Instead: Always check for APIs first. Look in browser dev tools for XHR requests. Check for developer documentation. An API is almost always more reliable than scraping.
You've learned how to extract data from websites. The natural next step is understanding how to clean, transform, and map that extracted data into your systems.