Octoparse Customer Stories

Officecab

Ecommerce

Fukuoka, Japan

With Octoparse, we decide what data we want and how we want it. I just need to set things up then let it run on the Cloud 24/7...I need a lot of data, like millions of data lines. If I were to hire someone collecting this data manually, it would cost millions of yen.

 CAB@Nakamura,

Founder of Officecab

600x

1000x

More data

Faster

It takes roughly 10 sec to capture 100 pieces of data with Octoparse whereas it took up to 1 week when working with freelancers.

The same amount of money spent on 10,000 data lines has a much better return when invested in Octoparse, which is now getting over 6,000,000 lines in just one crawl.

Nakamura has been running his own business in Japan for 22 years now. He mainly sells game cards, such as Pokemon trade cards to foreign countries on eBay. Being Japanese himself has gained him an easy entrance into the market. However, eBay is a highly competitive marketplace and he soon realizes that he needs to adopt a data-driven approach so to outcompete the other sellers and make more sales.

The customer needs data for product research and price analysis. In the early times, when data volume was not that big, Nakamura tried hiring freelancers who would go and collect the data manually. Yet there were major turnaround issues and the cost was extremely high.

As his business expands to include more products, Nakamura needs a lot more data for his analysis and also a much smarter, efficient, and cost-effective way to collect data at scale.

"I used to hire freelancers that gather data manually before using Octoparse," recalled Nakamura, a successful Japanese seller on eBay. "Things did get done but the process was so long and painful."

Communication was a bummer. “For example, they had no idea that 'フシギダネ' and 'Bulbasaur (name of a pocket monster)' point to the same thing. To get me the data I need, they have to know not only English and Japanese, but also pokemon well enough. Otherwise, all the efforts could be wasted if they've missed out on the details," says Nakamura.

Octoparse turns out to be Nakamura's go-to tool for automatic data acquisition. "With Octoparse, we decide what data we want and how we want it. I just need to set things up then let it run on the Cloud 24/7, all by itself. I need a large amount of data, over six million of data lines. If I were to hire someone collecting this data manually, it would cost millions of yen", says the customer.  

Octoparse also enables Nakamura to build a database of historical sales data which would otherwise have slipped away. "I am constantly fetching sales data from eBay which will be deleted in a few months," says Nakamura. "I may not need the data right away but I am sure it would help me with my analysis in substantial ways in the near future."

Lucky for Nakamura, web scraping is not as well-known in Japan as he thought, which has gained himself an edge over all the local competitors.  

“Some data is cleaned periodically, like sales records on eBay. Months later, they vanish. I use Octoparse to collect them though I am not in need of them right away. Because what I am doing, I got millions of data for analysis and learned more about the trade card business.”

“The fresh data we are gathering now would still be helpful years later. This is what we want and this is no way to be done by manual work. Without Octoparse, we won’t be able to do this kind of research and get ourselves the database we own now.”

“Web scraping is not popular in Japan, which gains us an edge in terms of information access. People just won’t pay for data that is not for present use.”

“They (data providers) can’t get what I want if messages are not well conveyed. If they are picking out the wrong datalines, all efforts could go totally in vain. With Octoparse, I am in full control of the data I am getting. I just need to set things up then let it run on the Cloud 24/7, all by itself.”

“Although I can write Python scripts to get free data, I believe Octoparse is more efficient.”

“Until now, I have gathered a huge amount of data, approximately 6 million lines from a set of stores. That is exactly what we got with Octoparse. Otherwise, manual work could cost a lot more.”

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