Amazon is one of the leading e-commerce platforms with various products that can cover almost every need in people’s daily lives. Its countless product listings make it a large data mine. Online shop owners usually extract data from Amazon to track their competitors, improve their business strategies, and understand market trends.
Python is the most common and popular programming language for web scraping. Many online shop owners scraping Amazon data with Python. However, it is hard for those who have no knowledge base about coding. Then, choose another no-coding web scraping tool will be a better choice.
In this article, we’ll walk you through how to use Python to scrape data from Amazon and collect Amazon data more effortlessly with a no-coding Amazon scraper.
How to Scrape Amazon Data with Python
Many web frameworks are written in Python nowadays, which makes Python a widely used programming language for web scraping. Many Python libraries like BeautifulSoup and Selenium make parsing HEML and scraping dynamic websites easier, and people can use them to automate scraping tasks and processes through scripts.
Steps on scraping Amazon data using Python
Step 1: Install the library Requests to get the HTML content, and BeautifulSoup to parse the HTML content.
Step 2: Use the Requests library to send a GET request to the Amazon page you want to scrape. Then you’ll get the HTML of the page.
Step 3: Pass the HTML to BeautifulSoup to create a soup object. It’ll allow you to parse the HTML.
Step 4: Find the data you want to scrape from HTML. For Amazon products, you might need product titles, descriptions, prices, ratings, review counts, etc.
Step 5: Extract the text and attributes from the HTML elements with BeautifulSoup.
Step 6: Store the extracted data in a data structure such as a list, dictionary, or Pandas DataFrame.
Here is a sample of how to scrape Amazon product titles from a page using BeautifulSoup:
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
url = "https://www.amazon.com/s?k=laptop"
headers = {
"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/58.0.3029.110 Safari/537.3"}
response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
soup = BeautifulSoup(response.content, "html.parser")
titles = [title.get_text() for title in soup.find_all("h2", class_="a-size-mini a-spacing-none a-color-base s-line-clamp-2")]
print(titles)The process of this Amazon scraper is to send a GET request to the Amazon search page for laptops and retrieve the HTML content. Then use BeautifulSoup to parse it and extract the product titles using a CSS selector.
Although Python scripts are relatively simple and readable compared to other languages, building an Amazon data scraping with Python is challenging for people who have no experience in coding. That’s where no-coding Amazon scrapers come in.
No-coding Alternative: Scrape Amazon Data within a Few Clicks
Octoparse is an easy-to-use web scraping tool that anyone can use regardless of their coding skills. Rather than writing scripts, you can build an Amazon scraper with a few clicks. Also, Octoparse has powerful features that can help web scraping be more effortless and automatic.
Preset templates
Octoparse now offers more than 100 preset templates for scraping data from particular websites. Templates allow you to extract data with zero setups by entering a couple of required parameters. For Amazon, there are several templates to scrape prices, reviews, ratings, etc., from different regions. You can search “Amazon” in the Template Gallery on Octoparse to find the scrapers that meet your needs.
Related Reading: How to scrape product data with Octoparse easily?
Auto-detect webpages data
However, you might have more specific needs, so you’ll need a customized crawler. In Octoparse, building a scraper is simplified into several steps. You can create a task to scrape product details, reviews, prices, etc., within clicks rather than writing scripts.
Auto-detection is the key feature to make building scrapers easier and effortless. This feature will let Octoparse scan the page and detect extractable data automatically. So users can get wanted data fields in seconds but not bother to read HTML files and local data by hand.
Related Reading: Scrape Amazon reviews without any coding skills
Schedule run and automatic data export
Amazon product data is ever-changing. Getting up-to-date information on Amazon can help you stay ahead of competitors. It contributes to competitive pricing strategies, insightful market research, in-depth sentiment analysis, etc. Octoparse offers schedule scrapers and automatic data export to help you keep an eye on competitors and the market around the clock.
With these features, you can set up an Amazon scraper in one go and schedule it to pull the latest data from webpages weekly, daily, or even hourly, and export scraped to databases or as local files automatically.
Related Reading: How to build an Amazon price tracker with web scraping tools?
Cloud servers
Octoparse is equipped with a cloud platform that can maximize scraping efficiency. Cloud servers can process scraping tasks 24/7 at a faster pace. When tasks are run in the cloud, there are no hardware limitations. During operation, you can shut down the app even their computers without missing a row.
Building Amazon scrapers with such powerful features only needs several clicks on Octoparse. You can even explore more with XPath, regular expressions, API access, IP proxies, etc., to improve the efficiency of scrapers. To have a try on all these features, download Octoparse for free and have a trial of 14 days.
Final Thoughts
Leveraging the power of Python and libraries like BeautifulSoup and Selenium can unlock valuable data from Amazon to analyze and gain actionable insights. This technique requires some coding knowledge and experience, and the HTML structure of pages can break the scraper.
If you are looking for an easier and more convenient alternative, Octoparse should be on the shortlist. It does not need coding skills and provides a solution for automatic web scraping. Besides these options, you can also check the top list of Amazon scrapers to find one that can meet 100% of your needs.
