If you want to extract product details like prices, descriptions, keywords, prices, and more from the Shopify store, you can use Google Sheets with the IMPORTXML formula. To use this formula, you don't need any solid technical knowledge. However, to gather large-scale data, you may need help using this formula, making it impractical to complete the task.
Let's explore the options and drawbacks of scraping ecommerce product data from stores like Shopify using Google Sheets. Further, we will explore options to scrape Shopify store data using Google Sheets with ecommerce products for your requirements without hassle.
How to use IMPORTXML Formula in Google Sheets?
The IMPORTXML function imports data from various sources in multiple formats like RSS, HTML, XML, ATOM XML, TSV, etc. Here is how you can use it:
There are two arguments in the IMPORTXML formula:
- It has an XPath of elements with data.
- Web Page URL to scrape data.
You can use XPath( XML Path Language ) for element and attribute navigation in the XML document. Additionally, you will see how to discover XPath for product name, description, price, and other page elements.
Check out how to apply the IMPORTXML formula to extract Shopify store data to Google Sheets.
What are the Steps to Scrape Shopify Store Data to Google Sheets?
We took the below page from the Shopify store to scrape the data to Google Sheets using Shopify product data scraper:
Start by Shopify store data scraping with product names:
- Create a new Google Sheet file.
- Name the column in the sheet and paste the page link in the second row of the column.
Choose the product name, right-click to visit the menu bar, and hit the Inspect button to get the XPath for the product name:
Text and tags with highlights in color in the Chrome dev tool. Go to the menu with right-click and tap the Copy > Copy XPath option:
Paste that to the corresponding Google Sheet cell:
Then apply the below formula, and click Enter key.
Choose corresponding Google Sheet cells for the required data fields to feed in the formula. Here, we have selected A2 for the URL and B2 for the XML path:
This way, we have scraped the Shopify product title in Google Sheets:
After importing the product title into Google Sheets, we can scrape product reviews and prices using the same process. Please repeat the above three steps to get each data field. Check the below image to see what we got.
What Is (Imported Content is Blank) Issue? And Why Does it Occur?
While trying to scrape photo links similar to other data, we may experience this issue. You may also see it as (you can't parse Imported XML content):
-Issue-And-Why-Does-it-Occur.jpg)
The main reason behind this issue is the wrong XPath. To avoid it, please choose data elements with more accuracy and then copy the XPath. Are you still facing the same issue? There may be dynamic content on the source page. And it is impossible to import the data from dynamic websites using the Google Sheet formula.
The dynamic content on the source website may contain product variation drop-downs, pagination, multiple photos, see more sections, and other UI interactions. You can disable Java for the source page to detect dynamic content elements. To scrape Shopify store data from dynamic pages, we turned off JavaScript for the targeted page and couldn't see the image.
Due to this, we couldn't retrieve that URL. Therefore we have stuck on the significant drawback of extracting ecommerce platforms using the IMPORTXML formula.
What are the Drawbacks of Using the IMPORTXML Formula?
The disability to scrape dynamic data from source pages that load the content using API or Java is the biggest drawback of the import XML formula.
Static web scrapers and Google Sheets can only extract web data if they see the content on the initial pages but not after the first request.
You may experience other drawbacks while scraping Shopify Store data using the IMPORTXML formula in Google Sheets.
- It is challenging to find the correct XPath query.
- You can't use Sheets and the IMPORTXML formula to scrape data at scale. If you try, it will fail.
- If the source data has password protection, it will not scrape it.
You will need time to clean up the data and make the appropriate file format before importing it to the online store.
More Ways to Scrape Ecommerce Stores, like Shopify to Google Sheets
You must use a robust data scraping solution to extract large-scale data from dynamic e-commerce websites. For such cases, you can consider our ecommerce data scraping services.
We use robust data scraping to get accurate data and manual actions to customize it to fulfill customer requirements.
Here is what you get:
- Shopify store data scraping to get required product data. ( Please mention your requirements in the order form available on our platform in the Google Sheets)
- Extraction of dynamic data with multiple product photos, paginations, and product variations
- Extraction of data behind the password wall if you provide login credentials.
- The facility of cleaning scraped data to prepare the format you can import to stores like Magento, Shopify, PrestaShop, WooCommerce, etc. You can also upload that data to ERP systems. Only mention the data formats; our team will customize the data accordingly.
Check out the example of scraped data using our Shopify data scraping services below. Further, you can observe that our team extracts the product data with photos and Alt tags.
We have formatted the same data to import on Shopify. We added the Shopify import template column in the file and the scraped data in these columns. You can see the product descriptions as HTML tags.
Conclusion
Using the above guide, you can Scrape and import the Shopify Store data to Google Sheets using the IMPORTXML formula—contact Product Data Scrape to learn more about our e-commerce data collection services.
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