The Role of Data Scraping in Analyzing ShopeeFood’s Market Trends

Introduction

The food delivery business is rapidly expanding, and ShopeeFood has quickly become one of the biggest platforms for customers and restaurants. Every listing — from menu descriptions to delivery times — has publicly available data that can yield valuable insights.

For sellers and restaurant owners, this data is more than numbers on a screen. It is a direct reflection of customer behavior, competitor strategies, and shifting markets. Manual checks and organizing this public data may be time-consuming and incomplete.

Data scraping provides a faster and wiser way. If businesses could do data scraping successfully, they could take public data on ShopeeFood and automatically gather that data throughout the public data (price tags, nicer menu descriptions, types of promotion, menu coordination), allowing businesses to make faster and faster evidence-based decisions on pricing, promotions, menus, and how their restaurants operate.

In this article, we describe how data scraping for ShopeeFood can bring a competitive advantage to vendors in compliance with ethical and legal frameworks.

How Can You Track Competitive Pricing and Promotions?

In apps like ShopeeFood, you can have competitors right next to you, side by side, in the search. Customers can easily access all the data about the price, delivery time, and promotion for competitors, making it easy for them to compare, so your competitors’ actions are quite literally influencing your sales.

Data scraping allows vendors to get insights into competitors’ positioning and strategies without the time they would have previously taken to check manually. Vendors can scrape ShopeeFood’s listings to gain insights on menu prices, promotions, delivery times, and static coverage areas – allowing the vendor to see how competitors are positioning each aspect of their business, and make the relevant decisions accordingly.

The type of monitoring we described above fits both offensive and defensive strategies. You may see a competitor discount their prices and want to adjust your pricing to protect market share. Similarly, you may see competitors struggling to innovate and launch an exclusive menu item. You will also have access to historical scraping data, which can provide insight into others’ behaviours, i.e., when businesses are running promotions or extending their delivery zones.

In addition, using competitor monitoring alone, you can also be very proactive, especially given your own sales analytics data, and act to avoid missing trends in the first place.

Tracking Competitive Pricing and Promotions

Pricing on ShopeeFood is fluid. Competitors change pricing according to time of day, promotions, or seasonal events. If you scrape daily or weekly, you will have the advantage of detecting these changes immediately.

For example, if your top competitor starts a weekly promoted “Friday Feast” 20% discount, scraping will help you know right away. Without scraping, you may not notice that they had the promotion until you see that you lost customers that evening. With real-time data scraping, you could plan for a Friday smash or another deal on Friday using other promotions. You could also be ready to highlight a premium product to validate the price.

Scraping will also allow you to see how long promotions occur. If you find that competitions are launching short, targeted promotions vs longer campaigns, you will develop the ability to save on discount costs while maximizing your impact.

Analyzing Competitor Menus for Market Gaps

A competitor’s menu can often point to their market strategy. By scraping menus and pulling in the names of dishes, categories, descriptions, etc., you can identify trends or yet-to-be-explored niches.

For example, a bubble tea shop learned through scraping that none of their local competitors served sugar-free versions of popular drinks. They were able to implement options and attract traditional health-conscious customers, but also gain enough reviews to raise their ShopeeFood rating.

Benchmarking Delivery Times and Fees

Delivery time and cost significantly impact customers, and analyzing this data across competitors in your delivery area can identify areas where you fall behind or areas where you have a differentiator to promote.

For example, if you average 15 minutes faster on delivery times to subsets of suburbs, “fastest delivery” would be a great thing to highlight in your promotions. On the other hand, if you are slower in a few key areas, that opens up the opportunity to rationalize staffing, routing, or partnerships to address the gap.

How Can ShopeeFood Data Analysis Reveal Customer Insights?

Everything a customer likes, dislikes, and their online activities can be seen in their digital footprint—good or bad. Something as simple as reviews and repeat orders carries much weight. By scraping ShopeeFood’s public feedback from its customers, you can also scrape order data (where available) and popularity indicators to reveal the elements that create loyalty and drive customers to make a purchase.

The goal here is not to know the best-selling dishes. The goal is to understand why they are very sellable, qualitatively or quantitatively. It is about understanding what aspects of service customers valued. And if, as a business, we explored improved offerings and delivered the change, what would that look like for customers?

Once you note these tracked points over time, you could adjust menus, service standards, and promotions, as customer expectations may have changed over time.

Mining Reviews and Ratings for Actionable Feedback

ShopeeFood reviews are raw client opinions—often far more uninhibited than feedback left in your store. Scraping this data allows you to pull thousands of unique reviews into recognizable shapes. If a large number of reviews mention “great packaging” about a specific dish across many reviews, you can duplicate your respective package style for the entire menu.

If multiple customers grumble about portion size via customer reviews, you can proactively amend this before ratings decline even more from repurposing the same bad portion! Sentiment analysis on your scraped reviews can show the overall trend in satisfaction levels to help you identify any anecdotal issues sooner rather than later.

Detecting Emerging Food Trends Early

Trends often begin small – a few restaurants providing flavor or style – and then spread to the mainstream. By regularly scraping menus and popular item lists, you can catch the early signs of these trends.

One example of this is a cafe that started to notice more mentions of “Korean cheese corn dogs” in competitor menus and reviews. After introducing the item before it took off, they had the first-mover advantage in their delivery zone and saw a 25% increase in orders over the month that followed.

Understanding Ordering Patterns and Preferences

Ordering timing, spending behavior, and promotional Allen behavior are strong behavioral indicators. Scraping order count (if available) or popularity tags can identify these details.

If you see an increase in late-night orders, you might want to look into a new “Midnight Munchie” offer. Suppose you see that customers are responding more to “Free Delivery” deals than to percentage discount offers. In that case, you can customize your offers based on consumer responsiveness to get the most ROI out of the campaign without sacrificing too much on your bottom line.

How Can Data Scraping Drive Smarter Pricing Decisions on ShopeeFood?

Pricing is a feedback loop; set it too high and you lose customers, too low, you lose profit. ShopeeFood’s openly visible marketplace makes competitors’ prices front and center, so you must make price decisions at speed, based on data.

To implement differentiation pricing models, you need to scrape data constantly. Getting competitor pricing intelligence keeps your decision-making process agile. You can decide to match or undercut competitor prices, or you could adjust your prices based on how customers respond over time in terms of sales and visitation.

Implementing Dynamic Pricing Adjustments

Dynamic pricing allows you to adjust prices based on market conditions. Scraping competitor prices daily or hourly in peak times means you can optimize your price.
For instance, if competitors raised prices during high-demand lunch hours, you could either keep your prices slightly lower to attract budget customers or increase your prices if margins are high enough and you won’t lose competitiveness.

Measuring Promotion Effectiveness

Scraping gives you insights into how your competitors are promoting, what discount levels, how long, and how often they’re doing it. When viewed in conjunction with your sales data, you will be able to see what type of promotion drives customer behavior, versus discounting your profit margins.

Calculating Price Elasticity

Comparing scraped price data with your order volumes over time can give you a price elasticity estimate — the sensitivity of customers to price changes. From there, you can experiment better, raising prices on items in demand, lowering prices on items with low volume.

How Can Data Scraping Improve Operational Efficiency?

Operational efficiency is crucial in food delivery: delays or mistakes affect both ratings and repeat orders. Scraping ShopeeFood data around the delivery time, service area, and volume of orders could reveal an operational advantage (or disadvantage) you might miss internally.

By looking at it against your own measures, you can find focus areas for improvements such as optimizing rider routes, improving kitchen prep, and stock management.

Improving demand forecast and inventory management system

Scraping the historical orders, it can help inform periods of higher demand for certain dishes and seasonal items. It helps to ensure you buy the right ingredients, at the right time, with the least amount of spoilage, and availability when your menu items are selling.

Streamlining Delivery Routes and Staffing

Scraping delivery times across routes reveals bottlenecks. Some neighborhoods are slower due to traffic or rider allocation. Now you can rethink your driver scheduling, customer delivery windows, and/or open satellite kitchens to support the demand in high-volume areas.

How Can Scraped ShoppeFood Data Deliver Deeper Market Insights?

Data scraping offers more than tactical functions and competitive preparedness—it can uncover macro-level trends that can inform long-term planning and development decisions. For example, it can help an organization understand bestseller lists, search trends, and regional differences to find opportunities for growth, fresh menu ideas, marketing ideas, etc.

Spotting High-Growth Product Categories

Scraping the bestseller sections will show you which dishes are continually emerging. If poke bowls appear in numerous best-seller lists in different city markets, you will want to consider them for your menu or test them.

Adapting to Regional Tastes

Scraping can show you what locals are utilizing or enjoying the most. For example, spicy seafood could be popular in the coastal regions. Milk tea is more popular in cities. If you curate your offerings by region, you will be improving your local relevance and popularity.

How Do You Start Scraping Data from ShopeeFood Effectively?

There’s no need for extensive investment in technology to get started with scraping.. If you have identified your scraping goals (monitoring competitors pricing, reviewing competitor sentiment, generating demand forecasts, etc.), next you will want to choose your tools (easy/simple data extractions can utilize python libraries like BeautifulSoup or Scrapey, etc). If websites are changing content dynamically, you will need to utilize a tool like Selenium.

Decide on how often you will be scraping, so you get a fresh dataset but that fits within your costs/resources, and save the data to some structured database. You can then use filtering and cleaning tools to remove duplicates, and errors, then use visualization tools like Tableau or Power BI to visualize the data and generate insights.

If you have identified that scraping is what you need but don’t have a technical team, you can also outsource scraping duties to professional scraping services. However, if you are using a scraping service make sure they are compliant with standard ethical and legal best practices.

What Ethical and Legal Rules Should You Follow When Scraping?

Scraping can be an effective method for obtaining competitive information, but ethical considerations must be made. ShopeeFood’s terms of service and guidelines, along with privacy regulations such as GDPR, create strong and defined limitations on data collection. Always check the restrictions of a platform and any available robots.txt file to ensure you understand what data is permitted for scraping. While scraping, be sure not to overload the servers; keep the requests to a reasonable level during off hours.

Never scrape personally identifiable information (PII) that you do not have consent for; stick to public data that is not personally concerning and also relevant to your business strategy. Using responsible scraping techniques will not only help ensure your scraping is legitimate. However, it will also help to maintain a good relationship with the platform you are continuing to gather information from, while leveraging data-driven insights without penalties/censorship, and damage to your reputation.

How Can You Overcome The Challenges and Limitations in Data Scraping

Scrapers are robust, but they are not perfect; sites frequently update their structure. Structural alterations can break scrapers entirely. Furthermore, scraping is complicated by anti-scraping measures: CAPTCHA, IP blockages, dynamic content, and so forth.

Scrapers should be designed to be adaptive, monitoring changes in the structure of the site and correlating the data being scraped with other forms of intelligence to verify its accuracy.

What Is The Future of Data Scraping in the ShopeeFood Market Analysis

The subsequent development in scraping is AI and ML, which will allow predictive analytics that can predict demand, discover micro-trends, and automate menu changes. At this timeframe, regulatory scrutiny will increase, so ethically and/or leveraging access via API will be paramount. Those businesses that can scrap and think ahead will win ShopeeFood in the coming years.

Conclusion

Data scraping has transitioned from a niche technological skill to a key competitive advantage tool kit, especially in competitive delivery markets like ShopeeFood. It uncovers competitor plans, customer wants, and other business activities and trends, not simply your competitors, but the market is engaging in. When used strategically, it can elevate pricing, menu planning, promotional strategies, and operational efficiencies.

If you make the case for it in an ethical way, you may gain a longer-lasting competitive advantage. At X-byte, we collect, filter, interpret, and present your online data for you as actionable market intelligence while guaranteeing you are being 100% legal and ethical. In a fast-paced industry, having the right data partner can make all the difference between growth and stagnation. The future belongs to those businesses making decisions using the correct data – which starts today.