Web Scraping: Extracting Price Data for Market Research

Welcome to Web Scraping: Extracting Price Data for Market Research course. This is basically a project based course where you will extensively learn how to do web scraping, extracting and collecting various data from several different websites and save them in a structured format, organised and neat in spreadsheet or perhaps your own database. In addition, this course also comes with two projects where you will be fully guided step by step to perform web scraping, extracting and collecting data from websites efficiently. The first project is to perform web scraping on Amazon marketplace website to extract and collect all data related to price and other product specifications as the data source for conducting market research. Meanwhile, the second project is also similar to the first project, where you will be guided step by step on how to perform web scraping on real estate websites to extract and collect data related to price and other property specifications as the data source for conducting real estate market research. To perform the web scraping, we are going to use the Python programming language alongside several Python libraries for web scraping, for example Beautiful Soup, Scrapy, and Selenium. At the end of the course, you will also learn several different ways to monetise your expertise in web scraping as well as potential business models related to web scraping that you can start.

First of all, before getting into the course and the projects, we need to ask ourselves this question, why should we learn web scraping? well , even though there are many reasons why you should learn this useful technique, the one that is the most important among other reasons is the fact that web scraping enables you to extract and collect data from multiple different websites or sources quickly and efficiently, web scraping even allows you to save all the data in a structured format. Hence, web scraping has always been considered as one of the most powerful tools to conduct market research for many different types of products, starting from daily goods, foods, or even real estate. Lastly, for those of you who might not be very confident with your Python programming skills, there is nothing you should be worried about since this course also comes with a basic Python training session where you will be prepared with all skills and knowledge that you need to master before getting into the actual project.

Things you are going to learn in basic Python training session:

• Different data types in Python (string, integer, float, and boolean)
• Function and parameters in Python
• Requests library in Python
• Beautiful Soup library in Python

Things you are going to learn in the projects:

• Performing web scraping on Amazon website
• Performing web scraping on Zillow website
• Converting and downloading data as CSV file
• Data formatting with JSON
• Automating web scraping with ChatGPT
• Strategies to monetise web scraping and potential business models related to web scraping