Amazon, being the biggest eCommerce company in America, has the largest variety of products in the world. You can benefit from the product data in many ways. Here are some benefits of utilizing the product data for your business:
- Compare and monitor competing products of competitors with yours.
- Get the top-selling product lists for a category to know exactly which products are trending.
- Use product search results information for optimizing Amazon SEO position, or Amazon marketing campaigns.
- Use reviews information for review management, and optimization for retailers or product
In this article, we’ll introduce 3 easy methods to help you scrape product data from Amazon.
Difficulties and Solutions in Scraping Amazon
You must know that Amazon is not a supporter for you to scrape their data in its policy. They have put anti-scraping measures in place to deal with your scraping needs on different scales. For example:
- IP blocking
- CAPTCHA
- Page-structure change
- Page structure might or might not differ for various products
Therefore, in order to maximize your chances of successfully harvesting all of the data you need on an ongoing basis, you’ll need to consider the below anti-anti-scraping approaches.
- IP proxy service provides rotated and residential IPs
- Implemented CAPTCHA solving solution
- Switching from user agents
- A cloud platform with cloud servers and storage
- Scraping from Amazon API
- Deploying a data monitoring system so you will be notified once data volume changes dramatically
- Hire somebody to maintain the scraper once anything goes wrong
Don’t be intimidated by the complicated solutions listed there. You might not need them at all if you just scrap a top 100 product under one category a few times only. You might happily get the data without any problems and you have a range of tools to choose from. But if you need high-frequency data with a huge amount of data volume or your desired data points are rarely popular, you might need to consider more comprehensive features.
3 Methods to Scrape Amazon Product Data
Next, you can learn three different ways to extract product data from Amazon. Choose the one that is most suitable for you.
1. Scrape Amazon Data by Programming
If you are a programmer and want to communicate with Amazon.com with a script, there are multiple APIs you could utilize to get Amazon data. What you need is just to code to connect to the API and easily download the data.
Amazon Product Advertising API is one of them. It is a web service and application programming interface that gives application programmers access to Amazon’s product catalog data. It is officially provided by Amazon and free to use. This API opens the doors to Amazon’s databases for users to retrieve detailed product information, reviews, and images so that they can take advantage of Amazon’s sophisticated e-commerce data and functionality.
But like most APIs, the API doesn’t provide all the information on the product page. To get those data or to realize other scraping needs such as price monitoring, you can program your own customized web scraper using Python or other languages.
Building a web scraper needs professional coding knowledge and is also time-consuming. For non-coders or programmers who want to save time, web scraping extensions and software are better choices.
2. Web Scraping Extensions to Extract Amazon Data
There are many Google web scraping extensions helping people get data from web pages. Extensions are often easy to use and really leverage your browser. By using just a browser and a Chrome extension, you do not need any special software or programming skills.
Webscraper.io is such a popular extension for extracting data from dynamic web pages. You can create a sitemap showing how the website should be traversed and what data should be extracted. With these sitemaps, Web Scraper will navigate the site anyway you want and extract data which can be later exported as a CSV.
Some extensions are specially designed for scraping Amazon data. For example, Keepa is an extension used for Amazon price tracking and comparing. It can show the price history in a chart and notify you once the product dropped below your desired price.
3. Best Amazon Product Scraper (No Coding)
The extensions do not scale well if you need lots of data or the data field is hidden deeply. For such cases, web scraping software is a better and more economical option. Web scraping software is also simple to use but quite powerful to deal with complicated scraping needs, such as scraping behind the login, infinite scroll, etc.
Octoparse is a fast and scalable web scraper. The point-and-click interface makes it easy for everyone to build their own scraper. Tons of ready-to-use scraping templates even allow you to scrape data with only several parameters entered. Octoparse also offers cloud service helping you to scrape 24/7 with faster scraping speed. You can check how to scrape the Amazon with Octoparse at Scrape product information from Amazon or use the preset templates to have a try.
Easy Steps to Scrape Amazon Product List Using Octoparse
Steps 1: Paste page URL to Octoparse and start auto-scraping
Download, install, and sign up for an account for free in Octoparse. Then copy the Amazon product page URL you need to scrape and paste it to the main interface of Octoparse, the auto-detect mode will start.
Steps 2: Customize the data fields
Create a workflow after the quick auto-detect. You can make more customized options like Pagination, Loop, and modify the data fields. Just finish all operations by clicking and dragging-and-dropping.
Steps 3: Download Amazon product data in Excel
After you have previewed all data you will scrape, click on the Run button to start scraping. The whole process will be finished quickly and you can download the file in Excel format.
Scraping Amazon is not so hard as you can choose any of the above options to get product data from the website based on your coding skills, scraping requirements, and budget. With the help of so many scraping tools, you will be able to get full data and make good use of it.
