Amazon Scraping API - Start Guide

The key to successfully scraping Amazon is really having access to a large pool of quality residential proxies and a team that works on patching automated browser activity (among other aspects). As you can imagine, the cost of maintaining such a tool can be quite expensive. For a small or even a medium to large business, activating in the e-commerce industry, building an Amazon scraper from scratch is often more expensive than marketing itself.

With Web Scraping API’s Amazon scraper on the other hand, you get access to a top of the line scraping tool, at a fraction of the cost. How is this possible? To begin with, all resources within Web Scraping API, are shared between thousands of satisfied users each month. From team, to servers, to proxies and so on, everyone in our ecosystem has access to everything. But let’s split “everything” in pieces and see exactly what you get when signing up for our cloud-based Amazon Scraper API:

• Expert Customer Support: Our customer support is covered by software engineers working on the actual scrapers. This way, we ensure two aspects: you get amazing, expert level support and every potential bug is being fixed in the shortest possible time. For example, if you encounter a bug and reach out to support to report it, chances are it will get fixed on the spot and pushed into production.
• Infrastructure and Scalability: Web Scraping API and its subsidiaries (Amazon Scraping API, SERP Scraping API etc.) is made of thousands of servers and proxies. Moreover, we have scaling procedures that make it possible to add resources to this complex infrastructure in little to no time. When you sign up for either of our services, you only need to focus on your goal, which is the data itself. We take care of how you get it.
• Ready-to-Use Solution: Developing an Amazon scraper can take months and is a continuous process. This means time, resources and ultimately, financial investments and losses. When you sign up for the Amazon Scraping API, you get instant access to the scraper.

Moreover, as we’re dedicated to helping our partners succeed. That is why we offer a Free tier designed to help you get started with your e-commerce business. It gets you 100 credits with full access to the API every month, meaning you get to scrape 100 Amazon pages every month, for free.

Having access to a free cloud-based Amazon scraper can help you scale your business and outgrow your competitors in no time. To get started with our free Amazon scraper, all you have to do is register an account on our Registration page. Once you have created the account, you will have access to all our scraping solutions (you’ll find a general purpose web scraper and some more specialized ones - i.e. the Google Scraper). However, since our focus for today is the Amazon API, we’ll focus on that.

Upon creating the account, you just have to select the Amazon API and then click on the “Get Free Trial”. That’s it! Your subscription is active. For the first 7 days, you get a full access trial. Upon completion, you can either get a paid subscription, or you’ll be automatically granted the Free tier, which includes 100 API credits per month.

With the Amazon Scraping API, the main difference between the Free tier plan and the paid tiers is the total number of API credits. While consuming credits with our general purpose web scraper can differ depending on the configuration (i.e. proxy type, browser support etc.), with the Amazon API the credit system is quite simple: one credit equals one successful call.

So each time you make a request to our API, if it’s successful and we return the real time data, then you get charged 1 credit. If the result is unsuccessful (i.e. you encounter a captcha or we get detected), then we won’t charge you.

A more in-depth comparison of our paid plans can be found on our Pricing page. On a high note, we mainly offer four paid plans:

• Starter, which includes 10,000 API credits for $44
• Grow, which includes 50,000 API credits for $149
• Business, which includes 250,000 API credits for $249
• Pro, which includes 1,000,000 API credits for $849

And there’s also a custom tier which you can get, called Enterprise, which is designed for customers requiring over 1M credits. However, for up to date information, please refer to our Pricing page.

Using the Amazon Scraping API is a straightforward process. You send requests to our API and we provide you with real time data, organized in a JSON object. However, the Amazon API is made of a few solutions. We call them types and they refer to the type of Amazon page you want to access.

Always pass the engine=amazon query parameter to access the Amazon scraper API, regardless of the scraper type you’re accessing.

There are 9 total types for the Amazon API at the time of writing this article (we’re always working on adding and improving our solutions, so who knows… there might be more types when you’re reading).

Again, we keep up to date information on our Documentation, here. But since you’re here, let’s explore the available types here:

The name speaks for itself. This scraper gathers and returns real time data from the Amazon search page. To enable it, you’ll have to pass the following query parameters:

https://ecom.webscrapingapi.com/v1?engine=amazon&api_key=<YOUR_API_KEY>&type=search&q=<KEYWORDS>

As we never cache results, it might take a few seconds to get the real time date. That is because, in the background, we’re launching a real browser, we’re navigating to Amazon and we’re typing inside the search bar just like an actual human would do. This way, we ensure we never get detected and we provide our customers with a higher than average success rate.

There are actually three types of scrapers included in this category, but we grouped them because they’re all about the seller profile:

• Amazon Seller Products Scraper - type=seller_products
• Amazon Seller Profile Scraper - type=seller_profile
• Amazon Seller Feedback Scraper - type=seller_feedback

Regardless of which one you pick, you also have to pass the seller_id query parameter, which is the identifier of the seller you want to scrape data about.

It might not come as a surprise to no one, but this is actually one of the most demanded scrapers. The Amazon product scraper API navigates to a product based on its unique ASIN, parses the entire HTML and returns what’s important as JSON.

If you’re an experienced Amazon seller, I’m sure you won’t have issues finding the ASIN. But just in case, we’ve documented that here. Basically, when you visit Amazon products, this is the format of their URL:

https://<AMAZON_DOMAIN>/<PRODUCT_NAME>/dp/<ASIN>

Say you want to scrape specific products from a given category. With Web Scraping API’s Amazon API, you simply have to enable the category type parameter and give it a category_id. The scraper will parse all products in the given category and return the results. Moreover, we offer a FREE API that you can use to query category IDs by name. You can find information about it here, but it’s really easy to use. You simply have to send your to:

https://amazon-helpers.webscrapingapi.com/categories?q=<category_name>

I’m going to group the last three types available for the Amazon Scraper API, as they work in similar ways to each other:

#1: The Amazon Bestsellers Scraping API

Scraping Amazon bestsellers can help you better understand the market. This scraper gives you an overview of what products are being favored by Amazon customers. To use it, you have to pass the following parameters:

• type=bestsellers - which enables the scraper
• category_ID=<ID> - to specify the category from which you want to get an overview of best selling products

Remember you can use the previous free API to get the category ID, if you’re uncertain about the actual ID.

#2: The Amazon New Releases Scraping API

Just like the Bestsellers scraper, this one is quite useful if you want to keep track of what’s new to Amazon. It works similarly to the Bestsellers scraper, the only difference being that you will have to pass the type=new-releases query parameter.

#3: The Amazon Deals Scraping API

Last but not least, there’s the Amazon deals scraper. It scrapes products from Amazon’s 'Today's Deals' page, which will help you identify deal prices to adjust your offers and stay on top of your competitors.

Using the Amazon Scraper API enables you to get real time information from Amazon, at a fraction of the cost of maintaining your own scraper. Moreover, when subscribing for our cloud based Amazon scraping tool, you get instant and full access to it and to the infrastructure behind. You can focus on the real important aspects of your business, which is selling. We take care of scraping for you!

If you wish to test the API or if you’re just starting out selling on Amazon, we’re here to help! We provide a Free monthly subscription, which includes 100 successful requests. This means you get to scrape 100 products per month, at no cost! Then when business starts to scale, you can grow your subscription too.

Moreover, our infrastructure was built around scalability. Regardless of concurrency or the number of requests you want to make per month, we’ll cover it! Before all, our customers are our partners and their success is always our goal!