We were speaking of the variation between using web scraping and API. Still, that means we are expecting that every website will let you reach their saved information by both means. That is entirely wrong. Very few websites will let you access their data even if that means restricted or managed data. Most websites will not permit you to access their web scraping API. This means when you are on to establish your fashion E-Commerce shop and try to get information from your competition, you will find no APIs and will have to code modify scrapers.
And it is not just regarding E-Commerce companies. In a vast majority of businesses, you will have to examine data from your competitors to continue in the competition. Data is easily available on the internet and anybody can open a website on their web browser and see it. Whether Or Not you want to tap this unlimited source of data using web scraping and choose it to your advantage is all up to you.
Whenever you are thinking about how to replace old APIs that you use in your business with web scraping applications, you can combine a team of R developers and Python who have had earlier experience in web scraping python, if perhaps your business moves around the scraped data completely and you have the funds to invest in such a team.