Free White Paper: Alternative Data Defines Competition in the US & UK Ecommerce Sectors

Ecommerce companies are data-hungry business endeavors. From inventory management to carefully managed pricing strategies, most of what these businesses do rely on access to accurate and timely data.

In the past, a majority of the data came from internal sources and some external providers. Nowadays, however, the tide is turning towards the automated acquisition of alternative data, primarily through the usage of web scraping.

Oxylabs, in cooperation with Censuswide, decided to investigate how ecommerce companies are employing the above-mentioned technologies in their daily operations. Alternative data markets, while already worth over 2 billion US dollars, are still emerging with web scraping following the developments in tandem.

This report queried Directors of Engineering, CTOs, VPs of Engineering, Chief Data Officers, Heads of Business Intelligence, and Heads of Data & Analytics across the US and UK’s ecommerce industry and will shed some light on the current and future challenges of the sector.

Our survey has reached out to 508 UK and 501 US-based senior data decision makers and queried them on the usage of alternative data and web scraping within the industry. We have covered questions such as:

• What methods do companies use to acquire data? 

• What data collection method has created the greatest impact on revenue?

• What methods do they plan on investing the most in the next 12 months?

• How many companies use web scraping as one of their data collection methods?

• How have budgets for data departments changed over the past 12 months?