Amazon is one of the world’s largest online retailers, with over 300 million active customer accounts and more than 1.9 million selling partners worldwide (Figure 1). 1 It offers a wide range of products across various categories, with a large amount of data on products, prices, and customer reviews.
E-commerce companies can leverage Amazon’s data to
- Optimize their pricing strategies
- Understand market trends and competitive landscapes
- Improve their existing products and develop new ones.
However, collecting data from Amazon can be challenging due to factors like dynamic content, large amounts of data, pagination, and legal and ethical issues.
In this article, we explain what Amazon scrapers are and how they work. We will also explore best practices for using Amazon scrapers effectively while adhering to Amazon’s policies.
Figure 1: Amazon’s annual net sales revenue by segment from 2006 to 2022
Source: Statista2
What is an Amazon scraper?
Amazon scraper is a specific type of e-commerce scraper that extracts publicly available data from Amazon product pages, search results, and product categories. The extracted Amazon data can be used for various purposes, including price monitoring, competitive analysis, and sentiment analysis.
Which Amazon data can you scrape?
Web scraping must be done in compliance with Amazon’s terms of service and relevant legal guidelines. That being said, here is the information you could collect:
- Scrape product data: Scraping Amazon product data involves parsing HTML code of the target product web page and extracting the desired data. This could be product image, review, Q&A section, and pricing.
Figure 2: Shows sample output of a product description page scraped from Amazon.
- Scrape Amazon reviews: Scraping Amazon reviews involves extracting data about reviews of a product, including the review title, the username of the reviewer, and review text.
- Scrape Amazon best sellers: Data about the top-selling products on Amazon’s website or in a specific category. Amazon’s best-selling products are generally ranked based on their sales volume in a particular category. You might potentially collect information such as sales rank, star rating, and product category.
Figure 3: Shows sample output of scraped product data from Amazon best sellers.
Is it legal to scrape Amazon?
Other than public data, you may not scrape, collect and or duplicate the data provided to you from the Amazon Location Service. It is important to remember that web scraping can raise ethical and privacy issues. It is crucial to understand potential legal and ethical implications before scraping data from Amazon.
Amazon API enables individuals to access and extract data legally and in compliance with their terms of service. However, if the API is not suited for your specific use case, and you intend to use a web scraper, like Amazon product scraper, here are some best practices you could consider:
Our best practices don’t constitute legal advice, you should seek legal advice for your scraping projects.
- Your Amazon scraper must respect robots.txt file and comply with Amazon Terms of Service.
- The data being scraped shouldn’t be personal data.
- Respect the rate limiting imposed by Amazon. You may overload the servers, resulting in IP blocks.
How to scrape Amazon: a step-by-step guide
Data from Amazon can be scraped using pre-built solutions such as web scraping APIs and e-commerce data collections tools, or using web scraping libraries to build your in-house Amazon scraper. We’ll guide you through the process of scraping Amazon data using a off-the-shelf scraper with 6 easy steps:
- Enter the URL: Insert the category or product URL you want to extract data. It can be a category page and product details page.
- Locate the data you want to scrape: Most off-the-shelf Amazon scrapers have a point-and-click interface to select the data to be extracted. Manual identification of data points can be time-consuming for large scale data collection tasks.
Figure 4: Identification of product data points for web scraping
- Set up pagination: If you intend to scrape multiple Amazon web pages, your scraper should follow the pagination link to the next page.
- Additional adjustments (optional): Some Amazon scraping tools have additional features that allow users to customize their scraper based on their specific data collection requirements, including proxy setup, real-time or scheduled scraping, and local or cloud scraping.
- Run the scraper: You can collect data in real-time or at regular time intervals.
- Export extracted data: Download the scraped data in the format supported by the scraper, like CSV, Excel or JSON file.
Sponsored
Web scraping without getting blocked is challenging, especially while extracting data from e-commerce websites. Most e-commerce sites employ measures to prevent large-scale web scraping, such as rate limiting and CAPTCHAs. NetNut’s rotating residential proxies help users extract data from Amazon with the lower risk of getting banned.
Source: NetNut
7 Best Amazon scrapers: pricing & features compared
There’s a wide range of web scraping services on the market; we’ve selected those providers that are specifically designed to meet the requirements of data collection from Amazon.
1. Bright Data
Bright Data provides automated data collection solutions and proxy services for various web scraping use cases. Bright Data’s Amazon scraper allows individuals and businesses to extract and parse all the product data, including image URL, ASIN, initial price, and seller name.
Features:
Figure 5: Illustrating how Bright Data’s CAPTCHA solving service works
Pricing:
- Starting price: $4/CPM for pay-as-you-go plan
- Free trial: 7-day
- Provides pay-as-you-go option without any commitment
2. Smartproxy
Smartproxy is a web data collection platform, offering a wide range of proxies and no-code web scraping tools. They offer an eCommerce scraping API for Amazon scraping that combines the capabilities of a web scraper with a data parser. A no-code web scraper is available if you desire to collect data from Amazon without writing a single line of code.
Features:
- In-built scraper and parser: You can download the data from the target web page and extract the information you require from it.
- JavaScript rendering: Allows users to run and load JavaScript code to generate the full content of a web page before you scrape the target Amazon page.
- API integration: Supports real-time and proxy-like integration. You can collect real-time data, ensuring the data you obtain is up-to-date. Proxy-like integration allows you to reduce the risk of being detected and blocked by the target website using rotating IPs or other techniques.
Pricing:
3. Oxylabs
Oxylabs offers web scraping solutions, including proxies, scraper APIs, and web crawlers for a variety of use cases. Oxylabs’ Amazon scraper is a part of e-commerce scraper API that allows users to scrape and parse different Amazon page types, such as product details, best sellers, search, and Q&A.
Features:
- Real-time data collection: Allows you to extract real-time product details data.
- Results in JSON: Delivers the scraped and parsed Amazon data in JSON format.
- JavaScript rendering: Generates the full page content before scraping it.
Pricing:
- Starting price: $49/month
- 1 week free trial (rate limit 5 requests)
4. DataOx
DataOx provides web data scraping solutions for individuals and businesses. They also offer Amazon scraping services used for data mining and data collection. You can access and collect different product data points, such as product images, shipping details, and competitor prices.
Features:
- Handle multiple requests simultaneously: This allows users to make multiple connection requests at the same time, which is especially useful for large-scale data collection projects.
Figure 6: Showing how to locate product details automatically
- Results in Excel and CSV file: Download the collected data in CSV or Excel format. You can choose the file format in which you want to receive data.
Pricing:
- They provide customized prices based on your web scraping project and specific needs.
5. Infatica
Infatica offers Amazon scraping API powered by proxy services, including datacenter and residential IPs.
Features:
- Unblocking technologies: Provides advanced features for seamless web scraping, including CAPTCHA solving and concurrent API requests.
- JSON parsing: Converts a JSON string into a data structure that is a programming language you can work with.
- JavaScript rendering
- US & EU Geotargeting
Pricing:
- Starting price: $27/month
- 3-day trial
- They provide a free plan with limited features.
6. Apify
Apify provides different web scraping tools for Amazon scraping, including an Amazon product scraper, a review scraper, and a seller scraper.
Features:
- Export data in CSV, JSON, Excel, or other formats.
- Help users collect data from Amazon based on URL and country input.
- Enable users to integrate Amazon product scraper with any cloud service or web app.
Pricing:
- Starting price: $40/month
- 14 days free trial
7. WebScrapingAPI
WebScrapingAPI’s Amazon product API helps users scrape real-time product information in CSV, HTML, or JSON format.
Features:
- JavaScript rendering
- Automatic CAPTCHA solving
- Headless browsers
- Proxy rotation
Pricing:
- Starting price: $44/month
- Offers a free plan with 1000 requests
Sponsored
If you want to skip the data collection process and directly access data, ready-made Amazon datasets are cost-effective and time-saving options. Bright Data’s Amazon dataset includes different data points related to the Amazon marketplace, such as seller ID, rating, description, price, ASIN, and category. You can buy an Amazon subset tailored to your specific data needs.
Source: Bright Data
More on Amazon scraping
Download our whitepaper on web scraping if you want to learn more about it:
Check out our data-driven list of web scrapers for help choosing the right tool, and get in touch with us:
References
- Quaker, D. (Mar 31, 2022) “Amazon Stats: Growth, sales, and more“. Amazon. Retrieved July 18, 2023.
- Coppola, D. (Apr 5, 2023) “Annual net sales revenue of Amazon from 2006 to 2022, by segment“. Statista. July 18, 2023
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Gülbahar is an AIMultiple industry analyst focused on web data collections and applications of web data.
