Scrape Amazon: Know all about how to Scrape on Amazon.com
WebscrapingAPI on Nov 15 2022
A 1995 launch marked the beginning of Amazon's reign as the world's largest online retailer. Its founders knew from the beginning that they wanted to create a massive online empire, even though Amazon started as an online book store.
Within a few years, the company went from selling books to being a large online retailer.
This progress leads to capturing of enormous amounts of data. Yes! You read that right. Amazon has huge data on its consumers, which makes it necessary for sellers to scrape Amazon product data.
Nearly 74% of consumers go straight to Amazon to buy a specific product. The US eCommerce market is expected to be dominated by Amazon by the end of this year, with more than 52% market share. It will give rise to tremendous customer-centric data shortly.
But what is scraping? Web scraping is a technique of extracting data solely from websites. It is widely used to extract data from large websites or to gather valuable insights. Scraping the web can also be useful for personal use.
It goes without saying that Amazon is the largest eCommerce website in the world, and what can be bigger than its data? There will be a tremendous amount of information available to you. That is why sellers often try to scrape amazon to retrieve important product data for their benefit.
Why would you want to scrape Amazon? Two Reasons To Know!
Retrieving Data: Amazon carries a tremendous amount of information and product data that retailers can benefit from products, reviews, ratings, special deals, news, etc. Both sellers and vendors benefit from scraping Amazon. You can find all the information you need at Amazon in one place.
Time-Saving: There is no doubt that it will help you understand the information on the platform. But usually, E-commerce data extraction is a time-consuming process. So it can be simplified with Amazon product data scraping.
A brief overview of Amazon scraping
Amazon offers all the relevant, valuable information about products, sellers, reviews, ratings, special offers, news, etc. All parties benefit from collecting data from the platform, including sellers, buyers, and suppliers.
It is more cost-effective to collect e-commerce information from Amazon instead of scraping hundreds of different websites. You can get the following kinds of data:
Listings of competitor's products
Getting ahead of your competitors and researching them is a good idea. Using Amazon's updated product lists, you can regularly compare and track competitors' products from their stores.
Product reviews of your products and those of your competitors
Reviews provide valuable information about the positives and negatives of products, which you can then use to improve quality and customer service. Researching competitors and your product reviews can give you a lot of insight.
As an example, you can find out what people like and dislike most about your products and whether your products have satisfied your customers' needs and desires.
A comparison of local and global prices
You can use Amazon price analysis to identify pricing trends, analyze competitors, and improve your pricing strategy to increase profits and improve competitiveness.
You can also identify international sales opportunities by examining products that ship overseas and expand your influence in those markets based on data analysis since Amazon also operates outside your country.
Extract Data to Reviews and product ratings
There is a feature on Amazon that allows you to sort items by rating. When you scrape and analyze information regarding the highest-rated items in chosen categories, you can identify current trends in the market and consider adding similar best-selling items to your assortment, which will rank high in sales.
Scrape amazon product data to analyze Profiles of customers
Analyzing customer profile data will open up new possibilities for generating leads. Amazon has a strict policy about scraping customers' personal information, so scraping personal accounts can be a challenge for you.
However, if you want to ask some of Amazon's top reviewers to review existing products or a new product after it launches, you can obtain a list of those people.
Now that you know how much product data you can get from Amazon scraping, you need to figure out how to squeeze it. While there are several ways to scrape the web, the best way to scrape big amounts of data from complex websites like Amazon is to use web scraping services.
Why? What Makes Scraping Amazon Yourself So Difficult? The answer is its policies, and it is simply not that easy.
It is complicated to scrape Amazon products and other information due to Amazon's strict web scraping policies. Using an API or any other method to scrape Amazon website yourself might result in some issues, so we'll list the most significant challenges here:
1. Amazon Is Smart! It identifies bots and blocks their IP addresses.
First, websites can have complex algorithms that are difficult to scrape. It will be impossible for automotive crawlers to scrape the web properly.
You might need more time to scrape the data because Amazon is different from other websites you're used to scraping. It has been built in a way that minimizes crawling practices.
As Amazon stops scraping web data on pages, it can quickly identify whether a web scraper or browser is using a manual proxy.
A data scraper goes through a page if URLs are changed repeatedly by query parameters. These bots are therefore blocked using captchas as well as IP bans.
In light of the previous point, it's easy to surmise that many crawlers get blocked. Amazon's algorithms can block traditional API crawlers, and you will again be unable to extract e-commerce data.
2. Amazon's pages often have unique page structures.
If you have tried scraping Amazon product descriptions and extracting data from Amazon, you may have encountered many unidentified errors and exceptions. It's because most web scrapers are designed as well as customized for any particular page structure.
Using this method, you can follow any special page structure, scrape HTML data, and collect the required data. The data scraper might fail if it is not well-prepared to deal with exceptions if the page structure changes. That's what Amazon does. It often designs special page structures.
There are a lot of Amazon products that have a lot of pages and attributes that differ from the standard template. The purpose is usually to highlight various features and key attributes of different types of products. You will need to write code to handle exceptions and resolve these inconsistencies. Additionally, your code needs to be resistant to attacks.
3. Getting Banned
Whenever a web scraper bot sends multiple parallel requests in a short period of time or unnaturally high numbers of requests, you risk crossing the thin line between ethical and unethical scrapping. This results in getting flagged and finally banned.
Web scrapers can stay on the right side of the law only if they are smart and have sufficient resources.
How to Utilize Amazon's Scraped Data?
As you witnessed the challenges and methods of scraping Amazon, let us have a look at some of the benefits. Analyzing customer reviews is one of the major benefits of scraping. However, there are several ways in which you can take advantage of scraping Amazon reviews:
Evaluation of competition
Competitive analysis is one of the most critical aspects of business decision-making. Analyzing the products of competitors can help you formulate your product strategy. Reviewing data can provide limitless information about competitors' products, product designs, and more.
Using Amazon reviews data gathered via web scraping can assist you in making product-based marketing decisions.
Examine top reviews
To evaluate a product's performance on the market, online product sellers should continuously monitor customer reviews. Amazon's ranking algorithm prioritizes product reviews highly.
Hence it would help if you analyzed the positive and negative aspects of a genuine product review from the customer's perspective. By analyzing this data, you can determine which parts of your products need improvement and what measures you should take to improve customer satisfaction.
Sentiment Analysis
It is helpful to evaluate customer sentiments by reading Amazon reviews. This will enable you to identify customer emotions towards a particular product. By scraping the web, we can learn what customers really think about the product rather than relying on assumptions.
Monitor your online reputation
Small retailers and online product sellers need to monitor their online reputations. Using web scraping for Amazon reviews can provide small retailers with helpful information about their product's reputation.
Forecasting demand
Analyzing market data in detail is necessary for determining the most lucrative niche. Studying your products' fit in the existing market, tracking interest in them on Amazon, and identifying the most popular products is easy via scraping.
After thoroughly examining the data, you can improve your supply chain to optimize your internal assortment, manage inventory correctly, and make better use of production resources by scraping the platform.
How to Scrape Amazon Data? 3 Simple Methods
There are majorly three methods which you can use for scraping Amazon product data.
Method 1. Utilize a programming language to scrape Amazon data
A programmer could use multiple APIs to get Amazon data if they want to communicate with Amazon.com via script. It only takes a few minutes of coding to connect to the API and download the data.
One of them is the Amazon Product Advertising API. It provides application programmers access to Amazon's product catalog data via a web service. The service is provided by Amazon and is free to use.
Using this API, users can access Amazon's databases to retrieve detailed product info, reviews, and images to gain access to the sophisticated e-commerce data and functionality that Amazon offers. You can do it, too, if you have coding skills and basic python knowledge.
Unlike most APIs, however, the API only provides some of the product information. You can use Python or other languages to create your customized web scraper to scrape data or to monitor prices.
The process of building a web scraper requires professional coding knowledge as well as time. Web scraping extensions and software are better for non-programmers or non-coders who want to save time.
Method 2. Extracting Amazon data from web scraping extensions
It is possible to scrape web pages with the help of many Google web scraping extensions. Browser extensions are often easy to use and make the most of your browser's capabilities. You do not need special software or programming skills if you use a browser and a Chrome extension.
With the widely available extensions, you can create a sitemap showing how the website should be traversed and understand the way to scrape data. By using these sitemaps, these extensions can navigate the site however you like and extract data, which can later be exported as a CSV file.
However, this process is again time-consuming and does not work well with huge amounts of data. Although this method does not require coding, it will fail to meet your expectations when you want to retrieve complicated data.
Method 3. Use Affordable and Accurate Amazon Product Web Scraper
The extensions do not scale well when you need lots of data or the data field is hidden deeply. In such cases, web scraping software is a better and more economical solution.
Scraping software is also quite simple to use but quite powerful in dealing with complicated scraping needs, such as scraping behind the login screen, infinite scrolling, etc.
Web Scraping Api is a fast and scalable web scraper. If you are tired of getting blocked while scraping the web, then this is the best option. Web Scraping API rotates proxies for you and handles headless browsers.
You don't have to deal with concurrent headless browsers that will consume all your RAM and CPU and focus on extracting the data you need. Because Web Scraping API handles everything from browsers, CAPTCHA, and rotating proxies to automatic scaling and anti-bot detection.
WebScrapingAPI: A cost-effective option for scraping websites
You can get Amazon product data from all categories and countries in JSON, CSV or HTML format using Web Scraping API.
Get started and scrape full product information on Amazon, including customer reviews, prices, descriptions, ASIN data, best sellers, new releases and latest deals easily.
