If you have a young professional as a friend, and casually stop by their new apartment, chances are you will see IKEA – everywhere. Everyone has a picture perfect dream of how they want their living space to feel and look like. But here exactly is this authentic décor, to diversity IKEA minimalism? Decor that isn’t just a copy and paste of modern conformity, but that also doesn’t tear a hole in your pocket?
nousDecor spent countless hours finding goregous interior décor
The nousDECOR team spent a lot of time and energy finding and aggregating the best design pieces from brand name retailers and smaller sellers that offer one-of-a-kind items.
nousDECOR has 3,000 + inspirational décor ideas up on their website from different rooms (bedroom, dining, kids, etc) to different styles (modern, industrial, bohemian). nousDECOR is the first comprehensive destination for community-curated décor ideas and resources with intelligent search and automated recommendations.
And in the world of "information overload", finding exactly what you are looking for in a few minutes is truly remarkable.
To provide this value, nousDECOR had to quickly find out - how to aggregate the right information into a mobile and web application quickly.
Brand name retailers have APIs, boutique stores don't
Getting product information from brand name eCommerce websites was only the beginning for nouseDecor. They also wanted to develop a mobile and web application that showcased one-of-a-kind products to delight users. Smaller websites did not have APIs and this is exactly where web scraping came in.
Heather Gillette, CEO of nousDECOR explains:
Even though we have most of the brand name retailers’ products available to us through APIs, our website is designed to help people pull off gorgeous interior décor on their own. People do not shop from just the brand name stores, they also tend to like one of a kind pieces or handmade items from smaller lesser known boutique stores.
Wanted a powerful web scraping solution to develop a mobile & web app
Some boutique brands don't have an API available, but customers
still wanted to see their products on nousDecor. With web scraping, nousDECOR was able to build the best database of products and help their customers make better purchasing decisions.
Users wanted products that were not available through an API, and now
with a wider selection of items on the website can make better purchasing decisions.
The information we have been able to gather using ParseHub has been instrumental towards our goal of having a truly comprehensive product library for our users. - Heather, CEO of nousDecor
Scraping doesn’t only benefit the end user. Smaller retailers that don’t have a technical team to build an API benefit too. With the help of nouseDECOR boutiques that usually have a small online presence, have a new channel to promote their products.
On the flip side, for some of these smaller retailers, [showing their offerings] helps them generate great awareness and have their products discovered by new customers. - Heather, CEO of nousDecor
Before ParseHub, data collection was an expensive engineering-only task
nousDECOR could have hired an army of freelancers or interns to copy and paste décor ideas from smaller boutique websites that don’t have APIs.
Highlight. Copy. Paste into a database. One, two...three thousand times.
Or the engineering team could have been overloaded with the task of building a separate, custom web scraper for each small boutique website.
In both cases, using a web scraping tool is a cheaper and quicker solution to manual data collection and building in-house scraping solutions.
Heather was excited to find ParseHub, because everyone in the company, even without technical know-how, was able to start collecting data quickly. Now, the engineering team can focus on meeting product development deadlines, instead of maintaining scraping infrastructure in-house.
Web scraping was an engineering-only task before ParseHub so resources were limited and expensive. Product importing was bottlenecked with engineering before I found out about ParseHub. It has been a huge time saver for us because anyone can use the site, technical or not, and build out a scraping mechanism. - Heather, CEO of nousDecor
Bye bye wasting developer resources. Scraping can be easy for the whole team.
With ParseHub, product goals are now shared between everyone on the team. Lastly, Heather added:
It is exciting to know that anyone within our organization can help us reach our product goals affordably and on time. I love what ParseHub makes possible for nousDECOR.
Tutorial: Scrape products from eCommerce website
- Open the ParseHub Desktop application and log-in.
- Enter https://www.etsy.com/market/home_decor into the browser and click New Project and Start project on this URL.
Let's grab some of the home decor pieces from Etsy.com and direct users to go and purchase these items from Etsy and the crafters.
- Click on the first product name to select it.
- Click on the second product name, and then all of the products on the page will be selected and extracted for you.
- Rename the selection products by clicking on the command.
4. Click on the ["plus" button](https://help.parsehub.com/hc/en-us/articles/220053907-Where-is-the-Plus-Button-) next to the command "Begin new entry in **products**" to open the command menu.
5. Choose the [Relative Select](https://help.parsehub.com/hc/en-us/articles/218226157-Relative-Select) command.
6. Click on the name of one of the selected products, and then click on the price below it. Now all of the prices will be selected and extracted.
7. Rename the selection **price**.
Want to get products from all of the pages? Follow this
pagination tutorial.
Are you aggregating data into a mobile or web app? Contact us and I will help you set up your project!
