5 Major Challenges That Make Amazon Data Scraping Painful
Amazon has been on the cutting edge of collecting, storing, and analyzing a large amount of data. Be it customer data, product information, data about retailers, or even information on the general market trends. Since Amazon is one of the largest e-commerce websites, a lot of analysts and firms depend on the data extracted from here to derive actionable growing e-commerce industry demands sophisticated analytical techniques to predict market trends, study customer temperament, or even get a competitive edge over the myriad of players in this sector. To augment the strength of these analytical techniques, you need high-quality reliable data. This data is called alternative data and can be derived from multiple sources. Some of the most prominent sources of alternative data in the e-commerce industry are customer reviews, product information, and even geographical data. E-commerce websites are a great source for a lot of these data elements. It is no news that Amazon has been at the forefront of the e-commerce industry, for quite some time now. Retailers fight tooth and nail to scrape data from Amazon. However, Amazon data scraping is not easy! Let us go through a few issues you may face while scraping data from is Amazon Data Scraping Challenging? Before you start Amazon data scraping, you should know that the website discourages scraping in its policy and page-structure. Due to its vested interest in protecting its data, Amazon has basic anti-scraping measures put in place. This might stop your scraper from extracting all the information you need. Besides that, the structure of the page might or might not differ for various products. This might fail your scraper code and logic. The worst part is, you might not even foresee this issue springing up and might even run into some network errors and unknown responses. Furthermore, captcha issues and IP (Internet Protocol) blocks might be a regular roadblock. You will feel the need to have a database and the lack of one might be a huge issue! You will also need to take care of exceptions while writing the algorithm for your scraper. This will come in handy if you are trying to circumvent issues due to complex page structures, unconventional (non-ASCII) characters, and other issues like funny URLs and huge memory requirements. Let us talk about a few of these issues in detail. We shall also cover how to solve them. Hopefully, this will help you scrape data from Amazon successfully. 1. Amazon can detect Bots and block their IPsSince Amazon prevents web scraping on its pages, it can easily detect if an action is being executed by a scraper bot or through a browser by a manual agent. A lot of these trends are identified by closely monitoring the behavior of the browsing agent. For example, if your URLs are repeatedly changed by only a query parameter at a regular interval, this is a clear indication of a scraper running through the page. It thus uses captchas and IP bans to block such bots. While this step is necessary to protect the privacy and integrity of the information, one might still need to extract some data from the Amazon web page. To do so, we have some workarounds for the same. Let us look at some of these:Rotate the IPs through different proxy servers if you need to. You can also deploy a consumer-grade VPN service with IP rotation random time-gaps and pauses in your scraper code to break the regularity of page the query parameters from the URLs to remove identifiers linking requests the scraper headers to make it look like the requests are coming from a browser and not a piece of code. 2. A lot of product pages on Amazon have varying page structuresIf you have ever attempted to scrape product descriptions and scrape data from Amazon, you might have run into a lot of unknown response errors and exceptions. This is because most of your scrapers are designed and customized for a particular structure of a page. It is used to follow a particular page structure, extract the HTML information of the same, and then collect the relevant data. However, if this structure of the page changes, the scraper might fail if it is not designed to handle exceptions. A lot of products on Amazon have different pages and the attributes of these pages differ from a standard template. This is often done to cater to different types of products that may have different key attributes and features that need to be highlighted. To address these inconsistencies, write the code so as to handle exceptions. Furthermore, your code should be resilient. You can do this by including ‘try-catch’ phrases that ensure that the code does not fail at the first occurrence of a network error or a time-out error. Since you will be scraping some particular attributes of a product, you can design the code so that the scraper can look for that particular attribute using tools like ‘string matching’. You can do so after extracting the complete HTML structure of the target page. Also Read: Competitive Pricing Analysis: Hitting the Bullseye in Profit Generation3. Your scraper might not be efficient enough! Ever got a scraper that has been running for hours to get you some hundred thousands of rows? This might be because you haven’t taken care of the efficiency and speed of the algorithm. You can do some basic math while designing the algorithm. Let us see what you can do to solve this problem! You will always have the number of products or sellers you need to extract information about. Using this data, you can roughly calculate the number of requests you need to send every second to complete your data scraping exercise. Once you compute this, your aim is to design your scraper to meet this condition! It is highly likely that single-threaded, network blocking operations will fail if you want to speed things up! Probably, you would want to create multi-threaded scrapers! This allows your CPU to work in a parallel fashion! It will be working on one response or another, even when each request is taking several seconds to complete. This might be able to give you almost 100x the speed of your original single-threaded scraper! you will need an efficient scraper to crawl through Amazon as there is a lot of information on the site! 4. You might need a cloud platform and other computational aids! A very high-performance machine will be able to speed the process up for you! You can thus avoid burning the resources of your local system! To be able to scrape a website like Amazon, you might need high capacity memory resources! You will also need network pipes and cores with high efficiency! A cloud-based platform should be able to provide these resources to you! You do not want to run into memory issues! If you store big lists or dictionaries in memory, you might put an extra burden on your machine-resources! We advise you to transfer your data to permanent storage places as soon as possible. This will also help you speed the process is an array of cloud services that you can use for reasonable prices. You can avail one of these services using simple steps. It will also help you avoid unnecessary system crashes and delays in the process. 5. Use a database for recording informationIf you scrape data from Amazon or any other retail website, you will be collecting high volumes of data. Since the process of scraping consumes power and time, we advise you to keep storing this data in a database. Store each product or sellers’ record that you crawl as a row in a database table. You can also use databases to perform operations like basic querying, exporting, and deduping on your data. This makes the process of storing, analyzing, and reusing your data convenient and faster! Also Read: How Scraping Amazon Data can help you price your products rightSummaryA lot of businesses and analysts, especially in the retail and e-commerce sector need Amazon data scraping. They use this data to make prices comparison, studying market trends across demographics, forecasting product sales, reviewing customer sentiment, or even estimating competition rates. This can be a repetitive exercise. If you create your own scraper, it can be a time-consuming, challenging ever, Datahut can scrape e-commerce product information for you from a wide range of web sources and provide this data in readable file formats like ‘CSV’ or other database locations as per client needs. You can then use this data for all your subsequent analyses. This will help you save resources and time. We advise you to conduct thorough research on the various data scraping services in the market. You may then avail the service that suits your requirements the wnload Amazon Data sampleWish to know more about how Datahut can help in your e-commerce data scraping needs? Contact us today. #datascraping #amazon #amazonscraping #ecommerce #issuewithscraping #retail
Web Scraping 101: 10 Myths that Everyone Should Know
1. Web Scraping is illegal
Many people have false impressions about web scraping. It is because there are people don’t respect the great work on the internet and use it by stealing the content. Web scraping isn’t illegal by itself, yet the problem comes when people use it without the site owner’s permission and disregard of the ToS (Terms of Service). According to the report, 2% of online revenues can be lost due to the misuse of content through web scraping. Even though web scraping doesn’t have a clear law and terms to address its application, it’s encompassed with legal regulations. For example:
Violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)
Violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
Trespass to Chattel
Misappropriation
Copy right infringement
Breach of contract
Photo by Amel Majanovic on Unsplash
2. Web scraping and web crawling are the same
Web scraping involves specific data extraction on a targeted webpage, for instance, extract data about sales leads, real estate listing and product pricing. In contrast, web crawling is what search engines do. It scans and indexes the whole website along with its internal links. “Crawler” navigates through the web pages without a specific goal.
3. You can scrape any website
It is often the case that people ask for scraping things like email addresses, Facebook posts, or LinkedIn information. According to an article titled “Is web crawling legal? ” it is important to note the rules before conduct web scraping:
Private data that requires username and passcodes can not be scrapped.
Compliance with the ToS (Terms of Service) which explicitly prohibits the action of web scraping.
Don’t copy data that is copyrighted.
One person can be prosecuted under several laws. For example, one scraped some confidential information and sold it to a third party disregarding the desist letter sent by the site owner. This person can be prosecuted under the law of Trespass to Chattel, Violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and Misappropriation.
It doesn’t mean that you can’t scrape social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. They are friendly to scraping services that follow the provisions of the file. For Facebook, you need to get its written permission before conducting the behavior of automated data collection.
4. You need to know how to code
A web scraping tool (data extraction tool) is very useful regarding non-tech professionals like marketers, statisticians, financial consultant, bitcoin investors, researchers, journalists, etc. Octoparse launched a one of a kind feature – web scraping templates that are preformatted scrapers that cover over 14 categories on over 30 websites including Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, Instagram and more. All you have to do is to enter the keywords/URLs at the parameter without any complex task configuration. Web scraping with Python is time-consuming. On the other side, a web scraping template is efficient and convenient to capture the data you need.
5. You can use scraped data for anything
It is perfectly legal if you scrape data from websites for public consumption and use it for analysis. However, it is not legal if you scrape confidential information for profit. For example, scraping private contact information without permission, and sell them to a 3rd party for profit is illegal. Besides, repackaging scraped content as your own without citing the source is not ethical as well. You should follow the idea of no spamming, no plagiarism, or any fraudulent use of data is prohibited according to the law.
Check Below Video: 10 Myths About Web Scraping!
6. A web scraper is versatile
Maybe you’ve experienced particular websites that change their layouts or structure once in a while. Don’t get frustrated when you come across such websites that your scraper fails to read for the second time. There are many reasons. It isn’t necessarily triggered by identifying you as a suspicious bot. It also may be caused by different geo-locations or machine access. In these cases, it is normal for a web scraper to fail to parse the website before we set the adjustment.
Read this article: How to Scrape Websites Without Being Blocked in 5 Mins?
7. You can scrape at a fast speed
You may have seen scraper ads saying how speedy their crawlers are. It does sound good as they tell you they can collect data in seconds. However, you are the lawbreaker who will be prosecuted if damages are caused. It is because a scalable data request at a fast speed will overload a web server which might lead to a server crash. In this case, the person is responsible for the damage under the law of “trespass to chattels” law (Dryer and Stockton 2013). If you are not sure whether the website is scrapable or not, please ask the web scraping service provider. Octoparse is a responsible web scraping service provider who places clients’ satisfaction in the first place. It is crucial for Octoparse to help our clients get the problem solved and to be successful.
8. API and Web scraping are the same
API is like a channel to send your data request to a web server and get desired data. API will return the data in JSON format over the HTTP protocol. For example, Facebook API, Twitter API, and Instagram API. However, it doesn’t mean you can get any data you ask for. Web scraping can visualize the process as it allows you to interact with the websites. Octoparse has web scraping templates. It is even more convenient for non-tech professionals to extract data by filling out the parameters with keywords/URLs.
9. The scraped data only works for our business after being cleaned and analyzed
Many data integration platforms can help visualize and analyze the data. In comparison, it looks like data scraping doesn’t have a direct impact on business decision making. Web scraping indeed extracts raw data of the webpage that needs to be processed to gain insights like sentiment analysis. However, some raw data can be extremely valuable in the hands of gold miners.
With Octoparse Google Search web scraping template to search for an organic search result, you can extract information including the titles and meta descriptions about your competitors to determine your SEO strategies; For retail industries, web scraping can be used to monitor product pricing and distributions. For example, Amazon may crawl Flipkart and Walmart under the “Electronic” catalog to assess the performance of electronic items.
10. Web scraping can only be used in business
Web scraping is widely used in various fields besides lead generation, price monitoring, price tracking, market analysis for business. Students can also leverage a Google scholar web scraping template to conduct paper research. Realtors are able to conduct housing research and predict the housing market. You will be able to find Youtube influencers or Twitter evangelists to promote your brand or your own news aggregation that covers the only topics you want by scraping news media and RSS feeds.
Source:
Dryer, A. J., and Stockton, J. 2013. “Internet ‘Data Scraping’: A Primer for Counseling Clients, ” New York Law Journal. Retrieved from
Best 5 Web Scraping APIs For Harvesting Amazon Data
Web scraping is the process of fetching a web page and extracting the data found on it. Once you have the information, you’ll typically want to parse, analyze, reformat or copy it into a scraping has plenty of uses, but today we’ll focus on just a few: gathering price and product data from marketplaces. Retailers use this knowledge to understand the market and their competition advantages can be pretty huge, in fact. Think about it: to counter your competition’s strategy, you have to first know it. By knowing their prices, for example, you can get a leg up on sales with a special discount, or by selling at a lower represents one of the largest marketplaces on the Internet. People use its services on a daily basis to order groceries, books, laptops, and even web hosting services. In the future, Amazon plans to add fully built houses to this a top eCommerce site, Amazon is one of the biggest databases for products, reviews, retailers, and market trends. It’s a web scraping gold are going to analyze the best 5 APIs to scrape Amazon data without getting blocked. If you’re trying to find the best tool to extract data from Amazon, this article will save you a lot of ’s begin! Click on any one of the following services to jump to its would anyone scrape Amazon data? If you have ever tried to sell anything online you know that some of the most important steps in this process are:competitor analysis;improving your products and value proposition;identifying market trends and what influences scraping amazon data, we can easily get, compare and monitor competing product information, like price, reviews, or availability. We can analyze the cost management for their operations but also find great deals for thing is certain. If you use Amazon to sell your products, you will benefit from analyzing all the previously presented factors. You can do it by yourself, manually watching over hundreds or even thousands of products, or you can use a tool to automate the following paragraphs, we are going to try to offer a couple of solutions for anyone who is having a hard time scraping Amazon do you need a web scraping API? Amazon represents one of the largest (if not the largest) shops the Internet has ever seen. As such, Amazon is also one of the biggest collections of data regarding customers, products, reviews, retailers, market trends, and even customer we start discussing data extraction, you should know that Amazon does not encourage scraping its website. This is why the structure of the pages differs if the products fall into different categories. The website includes some basic anti-scraping measures that could prevent you from getting your much-needed information. Besides this, Amazon can find out if you’re using a bot to scrape it and will definitely block your scraping APIs for the jobIn order to get the job done as fast as possible and without creating a new project for each tool we are going to test, we are going to do the scraping using a terminal and some curl requests. We have chosen five promising web scraping APIs to try ’s take each one of them for a test and find out which is the best tool to scrape Amazon data:1. WebScrapingAPIWebScrapingAPI is a tool that allows us to scrape any online resource. It collects the HTML from any web page using a simple API and it provides ready to process data. It’s great for extracting product information, processing real estate, HR, or financial data, and even tracking information for a specific market. Using WebScrapingAPI, we can get all the information needed from a specific Amazon product, let’s find an interesting product on the Amazon ’re going to scrape the product page presented in the image condly, let’s get the product’s page URL: we create a new WebScrapingAPI account, we are going to be redirected towards the application’s dashboard. WebScrapingAPI offers a free plan with 1000 requests to test the application. That is more than enough for what we are going to the dashboard page, we are going to click on the “Use API Playground” button. Here we can see the full curl command that will help us scrape the Amazon product ’s paste the product’s link in the URL input. This will change the preview of the URL command on the this step is completed, copy the curl command, open a new terminal window and paste it right there. If you followed the previous steps, you should get something like this:After we hit enter, WebScrapingAPI is going to return the product’s page in HTML our research, WebScrapingAPI managed to successfully get the information needed in 99. 7% of the cases with a success rate of 997 out of 1000 requests and just 1-second latency. 2. ScrapingBeeScrapingBee offers the opportunity to web scrape without getting blocked, using both classic and premium proxies. It focuses on extracting any data you need rendering web pages inside a real browser (Chrome). Thanks to their large proxy pool, developers and companies can scrape without worrying about proxies and headless ’s try to scrape the same Amazon page as we did before. Create a new account on ScrapingBee, go to the application’s dashboard, and paste the previously presented URL in the URL on the “Copy to clipboard” button that can be found in the “Request Builder”, let’s open a terminal window, paste the code we have just copied, and hit running this command, we are going to scrape the same page on the Amazon marketplace, so we can compare the results each API our research, we have found out that ScrapingBee managed to get the information successfully in 92. 5% of the cases and a pretty big latency of 6 seconds. 3. ScraperAPIScraperAPI is a tool for developers building web scrapers — as they say — the tool that scrapes any page with a simple API call. The web service handles proxies, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so that developers can get the raw HTML from any website. Moreover, the product manages to find a unique balance between its functionalities, reliability, and ease of as we did before, we’re going to create a new account on ScraperAPI and use their 1000 free requests to test their scraping tool. After we’ve completed the registration process, we’re going to be redirected to the following page:At first glance, ScraperAPI doesn’t look like it offers the option of customizing the curl request by writing a new URL. That’s not a big deal. We’re going to open a new terminal window and copy the code from the “Sample API Code” we can see, the default URL that it’s being scraped is “:/”. We are going to change it to the escaped version of the product’s page URL presented at the top of the section. Change the previously presented link with the following one:%3A%2F%2F final command should look something like this:After we hit enter, we will be presented with the HTML code of the product’s page. You can, of course, use Cheerio or any other markup parser in order to manipulate the resulting data raperAPI seems to be one of the best choices as its success rate is 100% and the latency does not exceed 1 we’ve stated in the previous chapter, keep in mind that Amazon discourages any attempts at scraping their website data. 4. ZenscrapeZenscrape is a web scraping API that returns the HTML of any website and ensures developers collect information fast and efficiently. The tool allows you to harvest online content smoothly and reliably by solving Javascript rendering or as we did before, after we complete the registration process, we’re going to be redirected to the dashboard ’s copy and paste the product’s page URL in the URL order to reveal the curl command we need for scraping the Amazon data, we will scroll down to the middle of the page. Click on the “Copy to Clipboard” button, open a new terminal window and paste it. It should look similar to this:Just like with the other web scraping tools, the result we’re going to get will be the page structured in HTML our research, we found out Zenscrape has a success rate of 98% with 98 successful requests out of 100 and a latency of 1. 4 seconds. This ranks it lower than the previously presented tools, but in our opinion, it has one of the most intuitive and beautiful user interfaces and it definitely gets the job done. 5. ScrapingAntScrapingAnt is the scraping tool that provides its customers a full web harvesting and scraping experience. It is a service that handles Javascript rendering, headless browser updates and maintenance, proxies diversity, and rotation. The scraping API offers high availability, reliability, and customization of features to fit any business our final test, we are going to repeat the same process. Let’s create a new account on ScrapingAnt and use their 1000 free requests to scrape the Amazon product’s page. I think we got pretty familiar with the web scraper as we did before, replace the URL input value with our URL, copy the curl command to a new terminal window, and hit will return a similar HTML structure which we can then parse by using Cheerio or any other markup parser. ScrapingAnt’s key features are Chrome page rendering, output preprocessing, and scraping requests with a low chance of CAPTCHA check our research, we have found out ScrapingAnt has a request success rate of 100% with a latency of 3 full seconds. Although its success rate is one of the highest in this list, the 3 seconds latency presents a big issue when we’re scraping a lot of Amazon product nclusionAs we have seen, the process it’s pretty much the same for all the web scraping APIs. You find a page to scrape, write the curl request including the product’s link, make the request and based on your personal needs, parse the received this process, we tried to determine what is the best tool for the job. We managed to test and analyze 5 scrapers and found out the results are not that different. In the end, they all get the job done. The difference is made by each scraper’s latency, success rate, number of free requests, and pricing. WebScrapingAPI is a great solution when it comes to scraping Amazon data as it has one of the smallest latencies (1 second) and a success rate close to 100%. It includes a free tier for those of us who don’t need to make a large number of requests and it also comes with 1000 free requests if you just feel like testing it rapingBee is the second web scraper we have tested but the results were not so satisfying. With a success rate of only 92. 5% and a pretty big latency (6 seconds), we would have a challenging time trying to get the information needed about our Amazon raperAPI is also one of the fastest scrapers we have tested. With only 1-second latency and a 100% success rate, it has the best results when it comes to technical requirements. Its downside is the user interface, as it seems to be like the most rudimental one. The pricing model is another weak point, as it does not provide any free tier. Zenscrape definitely has one of the most intuitive user interfaces of all of the scrapers we have tested. The only one that gets close is WebScrapingAPI. Zenscrape has a latency of just 1. 4 seconds and a success rate of rapingAnt is the last scraper we have tested. With a latency of approximately 3 seconds and a success rate of 100%, it’s a good choice for scraping the Amazon information we need, but a bit the end, all the web scrapers we have tested do a very good job when it comes to scraping Amazon product data. Although the scoreboard is pretty tight, we should always choose the most efficient tool for our specific recommend you try them yourselves. See which product is the best fit for your needs. Also, check out this article on how to use a web scraping API to its full extent. After all, picking a tool and knowing how to utilize it is not the same thing.
Frequently Asked Questions about is web scraping amazon legal
Is web scraping allowed in Amazon?
Since Amazon prevents web scraping on its pages, it can easily detect if an action is being executed by a scraper bot or through a browser by a manual agent. … It thus uses captchas and IP bans to block such bots.Oct 27, 2020
Can you get in trouble for web scraping?
Web Scraping is illegal Web scraping isn’t illegal by itself, yet the problem comes when people use it without the site owner’s permission and disregard of the ToS (Terms of Service). According to the report, 2% of online revenues can be lost due to the misuse of content through web scraping.Aug 16, 2021
What is web scraping Amazon?
Top 5 Best Scraping Tools For Amazon. Web scraping is the process of fetching a web page and extracting the data found on it. Once you have the information, you’ll typically want to parse, analyze, reformat or copy it into a spreadsheet.