The Internet is your database now: introducing Versable AI’s web scraping module.
When I first started Versable, our biggest focus was enhancing data quality for our customers: to make it clean, compliant, and search optimized. I soon realized that data enhancements are only as good as actually having data to enhance.
Very quickly, I saw the real issue wasn’t that companies lacked data. It was that their data was incomplete, scattered, or stuck somewhere they couldn’t easily access. The auto parts industry doesn’t suffer from data scarcity. It suffers from data fragmentation. The information you need is usually sitting somewhere – in your own internal database, in a supplier’s website, on a competitor’s listing, or buried in a PDF catalog that hasn’t been touched in years.
The aftermarket’s data problem is not just about quality; it’s about access.
The frustrating part is that everyone knows the data exists. The problem has always been accessing it in a scalable way and turning it into something structured and usable.
I remember a conversation early on at Versable when I was reviewing a customer’s listing quality. There was a long tail of SKUs generating zero sales. Not because demand wasn’t there, but because the listings were missing every key attribute: no specs, no dimensions, no meaningful descriptions. I asked why those fields were empty.
They said, almost casually, “The supplier didn’t send us anything.”
Out of curiosity, I went to the supplier’s website. Every attribute was there. The problem wasn’t that the information didn’t exist. It was that there was no process to reliably capture it, standardize it, and bring it into their catalog.
Your catalog team is too valuable to be manually hunting down data on the web.
One of the ways we measure success at Versable is to cut down the catalog team’s time by at least 50%. A lot of our onboarding calls revolve around how these teams are spending time today, and we make sure to align our product roadmap in line with automating as much of it as possible.
I soon found out that some companies had entire teams dedicated to manually finding and grabbing key pieces of information across supplier portals and competitor websites. These weren’t junior interns doing one-off research. These were experienced catalog managers, opening tab after tab, copying specs into spreadsheets, cross-referencing part numbers one SKU at a time.
Other companies tried to solve this by outsourcing it. Offshore agencies were brought in to collect and standardize the data. I have many thoughts around offshore data management agencies, but more on that in a later post. TLDR; this was slow, unreliable, and required a ton of QA before going live.
And then there was a third category that was even more concerning. Some companies simply uploaded listings without any of the data. These parts would sit on distributor sites or marketplaces taking up digital shelf space collecting dust.
A high-performing catalog team should be focused on growth: expanding coverage, identifying gaps, and improving conversion. When your best people are stuck gathering data, they’re not optimizing it. And that becomes a hidden bottleneck that quietly limits revenue and scale.
Let Versable do the hard work. Unlock the entire Internet as your data source.
Versable’s AI data extraction module is the easiest, smartest, and fastest way you can grab any data from the web.
We combine intelligent agents with resilient crawling systems that handle dynamic pages, interactive elements, bot detection mitigation, and adaptive retries. And the more you use it, the smarter it gets: learning website patterns, refining extraction logic, etc. What used to take teams weeks of manual research can now be done in a day.
The aftermarket never had a data shortage. It had an access problem. Once you remove that constraint, everything changes. The internet was always the largest product database in the world. Now you can finally use it.
PS: welcome to our third blog post! I'm Christina - founder and CEO of Versable. If you’re interested in learning more about our web scraping module, shoot me an email at tina@versable.ai or schedule a demo on our homepage!
