Optimizing Marketing Through Web Scraping

Abstract

The objective of this research was to develop an indexed database on electrical appliances marketed in the city of Ibarra, Ecuador, using web scraping in order to optimize the search time of consumers for these products. It is an applied research, where the survey technique was applied to determine the marketers and the products to be considered. The results of the survey led to directing the study in the marketers Todohogar, Almacenes Japon and La Ganga and to the products: televisions, kitchens and refrigerators. The web scraping process contemplated three phases: search and inspection of the web page, data extraction and cleaning and transformation and storage of final data, for which the Python program and the Request and Beautiful Soup libraries were used. The Data Access Object (DAO) design pattern was used to separate the logic layer from data access, and the connection to the MySQL database was defined with the Python programming language using the mysql.connector library. For the automatic and indexed storage of the data extracted and refined from the pages of the marketers, some databases called product table, characteristic table, brand table were built. As a result, there is a web page that makes use of the web scraping program developed to show the user the summarized and updated information of the three products offered by each of the marketers analyzed.