Optimizing Web Data Scraping for the Rental Car Industry: Efficient Tools and Techniques

Today, everything we do is based on data analysis. From buying the latest car model to finding a breakthrough in the industry to supercharge business profits, it is crucial to understand the data and gain insights from it. The collected data can uncover secrets that could potentially refine marketing and business strategies to take advantage of opportunities.

Imagine spending hours in front of your screen just to find the data that reveals industry trends or what’s in the minds of customers. You must have done that if you wanted to soar your business. However, it is a tedious and time-consuming process when done manually.

Data Scraping is an automatic way to extract data from websites to gather relevant information that can be later used for data analysis. This can be beneficial for rental car companies that want to know what type of car is in demand in the market.

For instance, one of the automotive car rental companies, VIP Gateway, used to extract rental car data from different competitor’s websites, including NAME.com, but manually. Let’s learn how web scraping tools helped our client overcome the cons of manually extracting data and saved their time and resources.

Need for Web Data Extraction Services

Regardless of industry, every company requires web data scraping services to stay ahead of the competition and scale its business in this economy. From dynamically adjusting service/product prices to finding trends to understand customer preferences, data scraping tools are specialized tools designed to accurately and quickly extract data from a webpage.

The car rental company extracted car rental data from competitor websites, one of which was NAME.com. This is a leading online platform in the United Kingdom that transforms how consumers discover and lease vehicles. It supports a wide range of filters, like Make & Model, Monthly Budget, Lease Duration and Type, Fuel Type, Body Type, Transmission, Color Preferences, and Features & Specifications, which allow customers to find their perfect vehicle conveniently.

The comprehensive set of filters, sub-filters, and sub-selections made it difficult for the client to extract the data manually. Each combination of filters provided different data, and if there is a large dataset included, then each result page needs to be visited manually to collect the data.

Also, nowadays, websites use JavaScript and AJAX for dynamic content loading. The data is only visible when specific filters are selected, so it is not immediately visible in the web source.

Hence, the client wished for a custom-built web data scraping tool that would efficiently extract data and take into account the different filter combinations.

Objectives of the Web Data Scraping Services

The car rental company partnered with Relu Consultancy, a competent web scraping company, to help them automate this process. Hence, they set out a list of specific guidelines that helped our team to tailor the solution to meet the client’s needs and requirements. Here’s what the car rental company expected from the customized data extraction tool:

1. Simplified Data Extraction
   ‍The client requested a web scraping tool that didn’t rely on any external APIs or paid tools. They wanted a custom-coding tool, built from scratch.
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2. Navigate Complex Filters
   ‍The web scraper tool should be robust enough to navigate NAME.com's intricate filter system and mimic the user's behavior of selecting filters to get relevant results.
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3. Quick Results
   ‍Even though the data that needed to be traversed was voluminous, the client still wanted to get results quickly.
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4. User–Friendly and Intuitive Interface
   ‍The client also wished for a web data scraping tool with a user-friendly web interface. Instead of using complicated code scripts, the tool should be accessed by anyone with a single click.

Our Solution to Meet Client’s Expectations

As a leading web data scraping company, here’s how our solution helped VIP Gateway to highly relevant industry trends:

1. We delivered the data extraction tool in the form of a webpage with pre-filled tables of filter values.
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2. There was a button associated with every filter set to initiate the search as quickly as possible.
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3. We designed the tool to replicate the manual filter selection process in the backend, and only the scraped website data was represented in Excel on the front end.
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4. The separate buttons allowed the users to scrap data from the present day to the past 30 days.
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The final Excel sheet provided extensive information about the vehicles that fell under the selected filter set. It comprised details like make, model, trim model derivative, finance type, and pricing for the first, second, and third positions and providers of the vehicles for the top three positions.

This streamlined the process of accessing vital data and transformed the manual and hectic web scraping process into an efficient data extraction process. Our customized solution helped the client handle the complexities of multi-level, multi-filter data scraping and simplified the labor-intensive process of manually extracting data from websites.

Benefits of Web Scraping

Web scraping offers ample advantages to businesses like car rentals, food services, and eCommerce websites, to name a few. These include:

1. Efficient Data Extraction and Aggregation
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   Web scraping tools help you extract and collect data from various platforms. These large datasets can be proven wealthy for the progress of your business.
   
   Data aggregation also helps prepare comprehensive datasets to perform various data analytics activities and make effective business decisions.
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2. Market Research and Competitor Analysis
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   With the help of scraped data, all market researchers can identify current market trends and different consumer preferences.
   
   Competitor analysis provides you with complete information regarding rival strategies and all kinds of product-related data in real-time. This information helps you build effective business tactics and ease the decision-making process.
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3. Low Maintenance and Quick Results
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   ‍Web scraping tools require less maintenance, and they can help you plan your budget accordingly without having to ever cross the threshold compared to manually extracting data.
   
   Besides, they can quickly analyze the data and provide results instantly, as compared to the manual process, which could have taken hours to complete.
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4. High Accuracy and Reduced Errors
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   ‍Simple errors in data scraping can cause significant errors and affect the output of the entire process. Hence, it is best to ensure that data scraping is done seamlessly and effectively.
   
   The web scraping tools make the process quick but accurate as well, preserving the important information, like sales prices, and others.

Conclusion

Web scraping is important for organizations to make data-driven decisions in real time. Today’s world is all about making the right decisions at the right time to make the best of what time and opportunity have to offer to a business.

Are you looking for the best data scraping tools for your rental car business?
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A leading web scraping company, Relu Consultancy, can provide data-driven solutions to numerous businesses. We offer myriad services when it comes to web extraction services, from custom API development and no-code automation to recruitment data optimization, and other data-driven solutions.

Grow and innovate your business by partnering with Relu Consultancy for all kinds of web data scraping solutions.

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