Advanced Product Intelligence Scraping Tool with Streamlit Dashboard
Building upon a basic scraping foundation, a more sophisticated web scraping tool has been developed that not only extracts product data from major e-commerce sites but also presents it through an intuitive Streamlit dashboard with comprehensive analytics.
The Streamlit Dashboard
The dashboard interface, branded as “Cyclifies Product Intelligence,” features a simple search bar where users can enter product queries like “electric toothbrush” to trigger the analysis. Once the scraping process completes in the background, the dashboard presents various analytical sections:
Price Statistics
For each platform (Amazon and eBay), the dashboard displays key metrics including:
- Product count
- Minimum price
- Maximum price
- Mean price
- Median price
- Standard deviation
- Price range
For example, a search for electric toothbrushes showed Amazon had 41 products ranging from $5 to $370, with a mean price of approximately $91 and a median of $59.
Competitive Analysis
This section categorizes products by price segments:
- Budget
- Economy
- Mid-range
- Premium
The analysis revealed that Amazon’s budget electric toothbrushes averaged around $85, while eBay’s premium options reached approximately $8,094.
Price Predictions
The tool implements predictive analytics to forecast potential price movements, including model score metrics that help identify products with potential resale value. For the analyzed electric toothbrushes, it identified specific products with favorable predicted price trajectories.
Visual Insights
The dashboard generates multiple visualizations:
- Price distribution graphs showing how product quantities relate to price points
- Platform comparison charts highlighting the differences between Amazon and eBay pricing
- Box plots identifying where most transactions cluster
- Price prediction charts with r-square scores (in this case 0.58) showing actual prices, trends, and predicted future prices
Technical Improvements
The enhanced scraper includes several important technical improvements over the basic version:
Browser Emulation
To avoid being detected as a bot:
- Configurable logins and user agents for different operating systems
- Headers that mimic human browsing patterns
- Random scrolling behavior
- Strategic delays between requests to appear more human-like
Data Processing
The tool now includes:
- Comprehensive error logging at each stage of the process
- Data cleaning to handle invalid entries, missing values, and duplicates
- Price normalization (removing dollar signs, commas, etc.)
- Extraction of additional data points including ratings and shipping information
Analysis Capabilities
Advanced analytical features include:
- Statistical analysis (min, max, mean, median, standard deviation)
- Price range categorization
- Competitive market analysis
- Price prediction using regression models
- Confidence metrics for predictions
Visualization
The tool leverages several Python libraries:
- Matplotlib and Seaborn for creating distribution plots, box plots, and scatter plots
- Interactive visualization capabilities
- Export functionality for HTML and PNG outputs
The resulting system creates an automated product intelligence tool that combines web scraping with data analysis and visualization, all presented through an accessible Streamlit interface.
For those looking to build advanced scrapers for portfolio projects, this approach demonstrates how to go beyond basic functionality to create tools with genuine analytical value.