Table of Contents
show
The automobile industry is currently gearing up with the widespread adoption of big data-backed business strategies. Although the developments in automobile technology were much slower in the last decade, newer technological advancements like IoT, driver-less cars, and big data have tremendously helped kickstart a disruptive phase for the industry. Companies now get deeper insights on customer sentiments, market fluctuations, competitor activity, and the like, thanks to web crawling technology. The rise of web crawling as a means of data extraction has unlocked a goldmine of insights for companies operating in all domains. Here are some of the common use cases that we’ve encountered from the auto industry on our quest of helping enterprises acquire data from the web.
Scraping car classified listings
The used cars market is bigger than it appears on the surface. Classified sites are where most of the used cars end up for sale. Extracting this data can give a host of information about the used cars market like what models are listed for sale more often, the resale value of different cars, and their demand. This data can be beneficial to both manufacturers and dealers. Advanced analytics can be performed on top of this data to derive actionable insights that can improve the bottom lines of companies in the automobile industry.
Scraping VINs for historical data
Buying used cars can be extremely tricky and intriguing. Cars are costly commodities and making such an investment shouldn’t be on the sole basis of the seller’s description. If your business is into re-selling used cars, you would want to make sure your customers get cars that can be relied upon and have a clean record. VINs can be of use in such a scenario. VIN stands for a vehicle identification number and is a code that is unique to every automobile. This number can be used to get historical data on the car such as:
- Vehicle registration
- Frame/structural damage
- Title information
- Accident indicators (airbag deployment)
- Odometer readings
- Service and repair information
- Lemon history
- Vehicle usage (taxi, rental, lease, etc.)
- Total loss accident history
- Recall information
By extracting VINs from classified sites, resellers can get a clear picture of the vehicles and make informed buying decisions.
Price comparison engines and car data aggregation
Price comparison engines exist for all kinds of products including automobiles. Such sites crawl product details and their price from manufacturer portals by using web crawling. Aggregator sites serve as the first stop for anyone looking to buy a new vehicle nowadays. If you are an automobile data aggregation site, extracting data from a wide range of automobile manufacturer sites may seem like a big roadblock. DaaS services can be a good fit for this requirement and the scale at which these managed solutions provide data can make your price comparison site truly resourceful.
Customer reviews scraping
Every industry is listening closely to the customers these days to identify the current shortcomings of their products and to gather ideas that can be turned into a new feature or an entirely different product. Automobile manufacturers too, are on the lookout for similar information to improve their products. The best source of customer sentiments and feedback for manufacturers is automobile forums and blogs. People share their reviews, criticism, complaints, and anything they feel about the vehicles they use in various places on the web. This insightful data is scattered across the web and would require a reliable web crawling system to gather it for analysis. Since the competition is tightening by each passing day, not listening to your customers can be considered fatal.
Building an app to showcase offers
Automobile websites and apps can make use of web crawling to crawl the latest offers and promotions going on different car manufacturers’ websites to display it to their users. Such an app can be beneficial to users who are looking to buy a new car. The data can be pulled directly from the manufacturers’ or dealers’ websites using advanced web crawling technologies. Services that offer low latency crawls can be used to make sure the data that you display is always fresh.
