Amazon Scraper 101: How to Scrape Product Data from Amazon

Are you a marketer or a researcher interested in the wealth of business-related data available on Amazon? With Amazon Scrapers built by yourself or others, you can lay your hands on the data on Amazon. Come in now to learn more.

amazon scrapers

Amazon is to e-commerce what Facebook is to social media – and just like how Facebook holds lots of data that can be used for social studies and research, Amazon is the place to go for business-related data. This is even more important to sellers and vendors on Amazon. For businesses, the reviews dropped by buyers of his products can help him fine-tune his decision and know what the users of the product actually like and dislike. When I say reviews, I don’t mean star ratings but actual comments which can be used for sentimental and other forms of analysis. Sellers can use it for competitive analysis and use it to monitor their competitors’ product ranking and prices.

Aside from review data and product data, data on top rated products and their ranking can be used for detecting changes in the popularity of products. In fact, there’s much more you can do with data on Amazon if you can get your hands on them. To facilitate your access to this data, Amazon provides an API. But this API is too restrictive and comes with lots of limitations that make them not useful in most use cases. What then do you do as a marketer or researcher interested in the wealth of data available on Amazon? The only option left to you is to scrape and extract the data you require from Amazon web pages.


Amazon Scraping – an Overview

Are you a coder planning on scraping data from Amazon? If you answer yes to this question, then this section is very important for you to read. Amazon is not like any other website you flex your web scraping muscles and skills on – it is backed by a huge and experienced technical team, much more experienced than you are.

When you need to scrape Amazon at a small scale, you might not even experience any form of a problem, but when you are interested in this at a large scale or even to a level of wanting to scrape big data off Amazon, then you have a lot of challenges to contend with – IP blocks, Captchas, and even a deceitful HTTP 200 success code with no meaningful data returned.

Amazon Scraping Overview

Unlike other websites that you need to log in to scrape, Amazon scraping does not work that way. While you might see this as a plus on your side, the complex anti-bot algorithm put in place by Amazon to prevent web scraping can make up for that. Even without a persistent cookie and session, Amazon has an Artificial Intelligence based anti-spam system that will sniff you out and prevent you from scraping. It is very good at detecting bots and blocking them. Unlike other sites that will hesitate before blocking you, Amazon does not – in fact, Amazon can be said to be liberal with IP bans, and when your IP is banned, it is mostly permanent.

IP rotation is key to scraping Amazon and make sure you’re using residential high rotating proxies. You also need to avoid following a pattern and spoof different browser headers and rotate them. While you are at it, you have to keep a low profile and be mindful of the legality of your action. Web scraping can be legal and illegal, depending on what you use the scrapped data for. Be kind and set delays to avoid bombarding their servers with too many requests – even though they can handle them.


How to Scrape Amazon Using Python, Requests, and BeautifulSoup

Do you want to scrape Amazon yourself and avoid paying the high fees labeled on ready-made Amazon scrapers in the market?  Then you need to know that you have a lot to deal with. While Amazon can be straightforward when it wants to deny you access to its publicly available data, some web scraping tutorial will tell you to check if the HTTP status returned is 200 to make sure your requests were successful before scraping. Well, Amazon can return the 200 status code and still returns an empty response.

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You also have to deal with the issue of always upgrading and updating your scraper as they make changes to their site layout and anti-bot system to break existing scrapers. Captchas and IP blocks are also a major issue, and Amazon uses them a lot after a few pages of scraps. While using Requests and BeautifulSoup can help you guide against behavioral analysis using JavaScript, Amazon can still sniff you out, and as such, you need to make use of residential proxies and Captchas solving services to make you evade them.

How you develop your scraper depends on the data you require. If a page makes use of Ajax, then you will have to use the network inspection tool of your browser to monitor and mimic the requests being sent by JavaScript behind the scene. This can be a lot of work to do, and as such, it is advisable to use Selenium. If you browse the customer review page, you will observe different layouts and how layouts change; sometimes, between pages – this is all in a bid to prevent scraping. The review pages themselves use Ajax.

But for pages that display even without JavaScript enabled, you can use the duo of Requests and BeautifulSoup. However, make sure it sends with your requests the necessary headers such as User-Agent, Accept, Accept-Encoding, Accept-Language, etc. Without sending headers of popular web browsers, Amazon will deny you access – a sign you have been fished out as a bot. Below is an Amazon product detail scraper that accepts a list of product ASIN as an argument and returns a JSON object with the product details using Requests for downloading the product web pages and BeautifulSoup for extracting the data.

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
user_agent = 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/80.0.3987.132 Safari/537.36'
accept =
"text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8
,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9"
accept_en = "gzip, deflate, br"
accept_lan = "en-US,en;q=0.9"
cache_con = "max-age=0"
cokies = ""
down_link = "0.35"
headers = {'accept': accept,
           'accept-encoding': accept_en,
           'accept-language': accept_lan,
           'cache-control': cache_con,
           'cache': cokies,
           'user-agent': user_agent,}

class AmazonProductScraper:
    def __init__(self, asin):
        self.asin = asin
        self.page_url = "https://www.amazon.com/dp/" + self.asin
def scrape_product_details(self):
        content = requests.get(self.page_url, headers=headers)
        soup = BeautifulSoup(content.text, "html.parser")
        product_name = soup.select("#productTitle")[0].text
        product_price = soup.select("#priceblock_saleprice")[0].text
        product_review_count = int(soup.select("#acrCustomerReviewText")[0].text)
        product_categories = []
for i in soup.select("#wayfinding-breadcrumbs_container ul.a-unordered-
list")[0].findAll("li"):
product_categories.append(i.text.strip())
product_details = {'name': product_name,
                           "price": product_price,
                           "categories": product_categories,
                           "review_count": product_review_count}
        return product_details
product_asin = "B075FGMYPM"
x = AmazonProductScraper(product_asin)
x.scrape_product_details()

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Best Amazon Scrapers

For non-coders or coders will less experience, using Amazon scrapers already in the market is the way to go. This is because some of these tools have experienced developers managing and supporting their development; when the need for update comes, they are effected faster than you can. Below are the 5 best Amazon scrapers in the market.


BrightData Amazon Collector

Bright Data - Luminati

  • Pricing: Starts at $500 for 151K page loads
  • Free Trials: Available
  • Data Output Format: Excel
  • Supported Platforms: Web-based

Bright Data Amazon Scraper

You do not need a coding skill to scrape Amazon, thanks to Data Collector. Data Collector has proven to be one of the top Amazon scrapers as it has been developed in such a way that it is never detected and blocked.

This means that you will always get the data you want from Amazon with the help of the Data Collector. With Data Collector, you can scrape product details, check product offers, and even discover fresh products.

Bright Data Amazon Scraper overview

If you need to scrape reviews and ratings, you will have to contact Bright Data for a custom collector that meets your specific requirement. The tool can be seen to be expensive compared to the other scrapers. However, you are assured of always getting the data you want.


Octoparse

Octoparse

  • Pricing: Starts at $75 per month
  • Free Trials: 14 days of free trial with limitations
  • Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON, MySQL, SQLServer
  • Supported Platform: Cloud, Desktop

Put your Amazon data scraping task on autopilot with Octoparse, a cloud-based web scraping tool. They equally have an installable desktop application. Octoparse has proven to become one of the best web scraping tools in the market right now with its ease of use. For Amazon, it provides different ready-to-use Amazon templates for different tasks and different Amazon country sites.

With this, you do not have to start creating new tasks. Octoparse comes with a smart pattern detection system and robust capabilities. One thing you will come to like about Octoparse is that they provide easy to understand tutorials. It has a free trial plan that is perfect for testing and smaller projects.

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Apify Amazon Crawler

Apify Logo

  • Pricing: Starts at $49 per month
  • Free Trials: Fully functional free account with $5 credit every month
  • Data Output Format: JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, HTML, RSS
  • Supported Platform: Cloud, Desktop

Apify’s Amazon Scraper lets you go beyond the limits of the official Amazon API. This ready-made scraping tool can extract and download reviews, prices, descriptions, images, seller name, condition, and all other product information.

It also allows you to get price offers for a specific Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN). You can even crawl direct ASIN URLs if you already have them.

The Apify Amazon Scraper can also search by keyword and specify the country you want to target. The Apify platform includes a proxy service designed especially for web scraping, so you can expect fast and reliable results along with expert support.

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ParseHub

Parsehub Logo

  • Pricing: Starts at $149 per month
  • Free Trials: Desktop version is free with some limitations
  • Data Output Format: Excel, JSON
  • Supported Platform: Cloud, Desktop

ParseHub is a general web scraping tool that you can use to extract data from any kind of web page, whether old web pages that feature only HTML and CSS or the modern ones that are JavaScript rich. This web scraper comes with a visual point and clicks interface for training the software on the data to scrape – and this is perfect for Amazon scraping, especially when you are interested in scraping product details or review data. By just clicking on one of the data points, every other one with the same pattern will be highlighted – thanks to the intelligent pattern detection of ParseHub.

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Proxycrawl Amazon Scraper

Proxycrawl

  • Pricing: Starts at $29 per month for 50,000 credits
  • Free Trials: first 1000 requests
  • Data Output Format: JSON
  • Supported Platforms: cloud-based – accessed via API

Proxycrawl is an all-inclusive scraping solution provider with a good number of products tailored towards businesses interested in scraping data from the web. Among their Scraper API is an Amazon Scraper, which can be said to be one of the best Amazon scrapers in the market. With just an API call, you can get all the publicly available data about a specified product on Amazon.

Not only that, but the Proxycrawl Amazon Scraper can also help you get data from the Amazon Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), including bestseller information as well as ranking information. This Amazon scraper is easy to use and returns the requested data as JSON objects.

proxycrawl amazon scraper


ScrapeStorm

Scrapestorm Logo

  • Pricing: Starts at $49.99 per month
  • Free Trials: Starter plan is free – comes with limitations
  • Data Output Format: TXT, CSV, Excel, JSON, MySQL, Google Sheets, etc.
  • Supported Platforms: Desktop

With a scraping tool like ScrapeStorm, data scraping from Amazon, such as extracting customers’ reviews, star ratings, product listing, and product details, is easier than you think. ScrapeStorm supports a good number of operating systems and also has a cloud-based solution perfect for scheduling web scraping tasks.

ScrapeStorm is an Artificial Intelligence-based web scraping tool that, in many cases, does not even require you to specify the required data as it uses its intelligence-based system for data identification. ScrapeStorm was developed by an ex-Google crawler team, and as such, it is certain the team knows what they are doing.

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Diffbot Automatic API

Diffbot Automatic APIs Logo

  • Pricing: Starts at $299 per month for 250,000 credits
  • Free Trials: 10,000 credits for 14 days
  • Data Output Format: JSON
  • Supported Platforms: cloud-based – accessed via API

Diffbot Automatic API makes the extraction of product data easy not only on Amazon but all every other e-commerce website. Aside from product data, you can also use it for extracting news, article, images, and discussions on forums. For their product extraction API, it can crawl web pages to fetch and clean structured product data without you writing site-specific rules – thanks to its use of Artificial Intelligence for the detection of key data points. Before using it, you can even test it without signing up to verify if it will be functional on the site you intend to use it on. Diffbot Automatic API will make your Amazon web scraping task easy – and you can even integrate it with your application.

Diffbot Automatic APIs Overview


Conclusion

No doubt, even though Amazon frowns and discourages against scraping it listing, product details, as well as customer profile and reviews, the practice has come to stay – until they provide an extensive API that will make web scraping a waste of time. Until then, individuals and businesses interested in the wealth of business data publicly available on Amazon will find ways to scrape and extract them using automated means. The above is a list of the 5 best Amazon scrapers in the market you can use.


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