Jumia is a Pan-African E-commerce company that is delivers a marketplace, logistic and payment services ecosystem. Just like Amazon, one of its competitors, its forms a system of online purchase and delivery of products. Kenya, is one of the economies significantly influenced by the operations and presence of the E-commerce company, with the domain name jumia.co.ke.
What is Web Scraping? It is extracting data from a website i.e. it is a form of gathering and copying from the web, specific data. Scraping a website consist of; fetching it and extracting from it your desired information in a format more useful to the user. Although web scraping can be done manually, automated tools/ software is used due to their efficiency and speed, and R-Studio software efficiently performs scraping through the rvest library.
In this project, we will automate the extraction of products data from the Kenyan domain Jumia website, and form an efficient and faster way to search and traverse the products data unlike in the website.
A lot of time is spent by users in traversing E-commerce websites while in search of desired products/offers. Advancements have been done to these websites in order to ease this search process, by categorizing their products and personalizing them to users’ needs. In this project, by extracting the Jumia’s Website data and dispensing it in a tabular form, it will efficiently offer an easier and faster way for users to search, filter and interact with products and their prices, hence saving on both internet costs and time spent on these websites. Through use of R-Studio software and programming language , we will create an automated website that extracts products data and delivers it in tabular form for easier accessibility of offers on product’s discounts and prices.
To develop a website dashboard, that offers real time delivery of Jumia’s website product’s data in a way easily accessible to users.
- Extract all products data from the Jumia’s Website home page.
- To create a dashboard that delivers the scraped data for easier traversal and accessibility.
- Deployment of the dashboard, for easier public and remote use.
The data used in analysis was extracted on 7th February, 2024 from the Jumia’s Website, which is an E-commerce website containing listed products prices and discounts. The scraped data and contains 14,724 rows of products with products attributes like;
- Name : Name of the product as listed in the website
- Price: Price of the product as listed in the website
- Discount: Discount of the product as listed in the website
- Category: Category the product is contained in.
After web scraping, data cleaning undertaken to the data were;
- Handling Missing Values: Products listed without listed discounts contained null values, hence the null values were replace with the value
0. - Data Type Conversion: Character type of the
PriceandDiscountcolumns were converted to Numeric type.
After data cleaning, some Exploratory Data Analysis was conducted on the data;
The plot above shows how the discounts are distributed across different categories, with the Top Deal having the highest discounted products.
For more information on the analsis process and source code view the analysis notebook
After anlysis, a shiny dashboard was created and deployed for user interactions. The dashboard containes the scraped data that is displayed in a tabular format and users can easily search, filter and find product discounts and offers at ease.
To view the live dashboard, check this Link
To view the dashboard code, check the link Link