More than 40 per cent of UK retail and e-commerce organisations have struggled to find the most efficient tools or tech stack for data acquisition over the past 12 months to help them rapidly analyse data in real-time resulting in actionable business insights, according to a white paper by proxy and web scraping solution service provider Oxylabs.

Thirty nine per cent of respondents in the company’s survey were found struggling to find reliable partners to outsource their web scraping activities to and 40 per cent found it challenging to ensure the quality of the data they were collecting, the white paper, titled ‘The Growing Importance of External Data in the Retail and E-Commerce Industry’, said.

The UK retail and e-commerce sector has experienced an unprecedented rate of growth throughout the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to early 2021. Online retail sales hit a 13-year high in 2020, with an increase of 36 per cent year on year–the highest rate seen since 2007.

More than 40 per cent of UK retail and e-commerce organisations have struggled to find the most efficient tools or tech stack for data acquisition over the past 12 months to help them rapidly analyse data in real-time resulting in actionable business insights, according to a white paper by proxy and web scraping solution service provider Oxylabs.

Over a third (36 per cent) of respondents found managing and processing large datasets to be a challenge. Yet, for retail and e-commerce businesses it is increasingly critical that they have access to data in real-time as pricing intelligence strategies are completely reliant on minimal delays in data delivery and integration, the company said in a press release.

Slightly more than half of the respondents said they want to collect and utilise more external data, such as web scraped data from competitors’ websites, marketplaces, etc. Half of respondents said they wanted to collect more real-time data to make faster business decisions.

The findings showcase the challenges of web scraping as data needs to be collected from numerous sources, and in real-time.

With the boom in online retail and e-commerce set to continue as we progress into 2022, UK retailers and e-commerce businesses are now placing more value than ever before on new, external sources of market data and dynamic pricing information, the company added.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DS)