Idea Validation: Ecommerce product API
I have been working as a freelancer for the last 4 years as a backend engineer. Over the time I have gotten a lot of requests for developing data extraction system for ecommerce products (amazon, newegg, bestbuy, etc) mainly for drop shipping, price monitoring.
So I wanted to validate the idea of developing an API service that scrapes a certain product in real time and generates a feed, possibly in JSON with general info like name, price, image, availability, etc. Is this a feasible idea to pursue?
Possible competitor I have found are scraping-bot.io, priceapi.com, scrapinghub 's and diffbot's product api.
This is hard to judge for an outsider.
It's obviously B2B, and you can only receive meaningful feedback if you ask a prospective customer ... which means you need to be asking enterprise/other-businesses.
As in ... if you ask random outsiders (ie. myself) who don't know your market, you'll likely get potentially-invalid feedback.
On the flip side of the coin, this is only something that's viable if you have some inside knowledge of the industry/market-segment. Maybe it is a great opportunity, but random outsiders won't be able to tell you.
Hope this helps.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of what type of customer would need that solution.
If you think the idea has merit, then maybe you can do the following:
Build a landing page with some messaging about the product you're building (i.e. coming soon). Make sure you have an opt-in so people can sign-up, and entice the opt-in by offering to provide some free info that you believe they'd find helpful.
Find prospects by determining taking your past clients who you've built something similar for, and find other businesses in the same category.
Email them, with some info, direct them to your landing page, and see how many sign-ups you can get over a month or two.
That could give you a good initial indication of the level of interest.
Outside of that, if you're looking to build something you think people may need, one way of doing that could be to use Google Trends to see what types of things people are searching for.
Find the items that have the highest search volume, and then see if there are products or solutions that address them. If there isn't something good available, it could be something worthwhile to build, capitalizing on the current "pain point".
For example, I know there's a lot of "noise" about Google Core Web Vitals, and website owners want to make sure their sites have good scores, but not sure how to reliably get it addressed. Current problem that needs a solution.
Personally speaking, I've been dealing with the above, plus:
A. Loss of traffic due to Google's May 2020 update, and I'm not sure exactly what to do to get the traffic back. Trying to decipher information in Google Search Console to find lowest hanging fruit, but it's kinda overwhelming.
B. I may want to find all sites running WooCommerce, that are selling physical products (some of which have multiple variations), so I can market one of my software plugins to them. Not sure if there's a solution out there that can give me that info, but something that is top of mind.
Again, I'm just pointing out the above are just "problems" that may not have available solutions. So, if you're looking to direct your talents somewhere, it might be a good idea to identify current problems that you may be able to fix via some SaaS or something similar that people can subscribe to.
Hope the info helps.
Why don't you ask/sell to your previous clients? Assuming, there is a market, what are your thoughts on differentiation (price, accuracy, coverage).
I asked a few of them, got positive response from them but they are not likely to buy a monthly subscription. Most of the people I worked with requires one time solution with code hosted on their server (typical freelancing jobs).
If they are not your early customers, you would need to find who else could be your early customers. Get customers first (before building) with strong signals like:
Once you have talked to a few prospective customers, you will have your answer to build or iterate to a different idea.
Yes exactly, compliment doesn't count as validation. Thank you for the suggestion, will try to connect with some possible customers or people working in similar field.
It can be a good product if marketed properly.
Any suggestions how can I market it to the right audience?
Do it, it sounds interesting.
It is definately interesting. But my concern is finding customers to pay for. Will someone be willing to pay for such a service? How do I find them?
It's a good indication that there's a market for your product if there are already competitors in your space. Spocket.co also has one for Alipay called Aliscraper, so I think that there is definitely a market for it.