Challenges and Benefits of Amazon Data Scraping

It’s getting easier to buy online. The same thing happened when retailers created online storefronts on Flipkart, eBay, Walmart, Alibaba, etc. However, internet businesses must employ data analytics to improve their offerings to attract consumers and convert them into customers.

Amazon dominates online retail sales with 38% of all sales as of 2022. Many buyers start their online searches on Amazon rather than Yahoo or Google. Businesses may better understand their customers and make decisions with this platform’s data.

Amazon is the greatest place to locate sellers, products, reviews, news, special offer, rating, and other information. Buyers, retailers, and suppliers benefit from Amazon data collection.

The costly process of scraping e-commerce data can be solved by getting data from Amazon rather than from hundreds of websites.

Let’s look at what kind of information you can scrape:

• Listing of competitor’s product
• customer profiles
• Local and global market pricing
• product reviews
• Your and your competitors’ product reviews

Why Is Scraping Amazon Data Hard?

Regardless of the methods you choose, there are inherent issues with scraping Amazon data for your own use. The worst part of self-scraping is that you might not even anticipate the problems and might even run into unexpected replies and network problems.

Here are a few illustrations of typical issues you could run into when scraping Amazon data for your own use.

Bot detection, IP blocking, and captcha

Whether the data is gathered manually or with the aid of a boot scraper can easily be managed by Amazon. It is discovered by observing a browser agent’s actions.

For instance, some actions are done against the person collecting the data when a website discovers scrapers or when a user makes 400+ requests for related sites at once. So, to prevent bots, IP blocks, and captchas are used. An IP address will be blacklisted or banned from Amazon if it keeps requesting pages without any Captcha information.

Hir Infotech uses a variety of techniques to overcome these challenges and works hard to improve the behavior of crawlers:

• Modify the headers of the scraper to simulate incoming browser requests.
• Utilizing proxy servers often switches between multiple IP addresses.
• Delete all query parameters from the URLs to get rid of the identifiers connecting queries.
• Send several page requests at irregular intervals.
• Change the User-Agent in the headers of crawlers to prevent Amazon from taking general action against them.

You may have run across a lot of exceptions and response issues while attempting to gather data on product descriptions from Amazon. The main cause is that the majority of scrapers are prepared for a specific page structure, scraping HTML from it and gathering pertinent data. A scraper, however, might not work if the structure of a website changes because it is not designed to handle exceptions.

The pages on the Amazon website have varied layouts, HTML components, and characteristics, and templates are used to update the product data. It primarily highlights the key characteristics and traits of particular product categories. The templates used in the Amazon product installation process are impacted by the product group or category of recently added ASINs.

So, at Hir Infotech, we create the codes in a way that can handle the exceptions in order to remove various inconsistencies. We can prevent our scripts from failing due to network or timeout failures by doing this.

Benefits of Scraping Amazon Data?

Amazon aggregates reviews, ratings, items, news, exclusive offers, and more. Thus, obtaining data from Amazon would solve the time-consuming process of scraping e-commerce websites. Automatic web scraping has important benefits:

1. Cost Comparison

Data scraping retrieves competitors’ Amazon pricing data routinely. If you don’t watch market price changes, especially in high seasons, you could lose online sales and competitiveness. Price analysis can track pricing trends, assess competitors, create promotions, and determine the best pricing plan for market survival. A well-organized pricing plan increases profitability and leads.

2. Identify the Targeted Group

Knowing a dealer’s target market makes it easy to offer popular products. Amazon consumer feelings and likes can help you define your customer base, analyze their buying habits, and develop product sets to boost sales.

Frequently asked questions:

What precisely can you obtain via scraping Amazon’s data?

You can choose the precise information you need from the Amazon website and put it in a spreadsheet or JSON file using web scraping. To update your data continuously, you may even automate this procedure to run daily, weekly, or monthly.

How does Amazon stop scraping?

For instance, it is obvious that a scraper is navigating the page if your URLs are altered frequently by a single query parameter at regular intervals. To prevent such bots, it thus employs captchas and IP blocks.

What advantages come with web scraping?

Data extraction from websites without an API or that don’t offer a simple means to access their data can be done via data scraping to gain access to otherwise difficult-to-get information. As a result, businesses are able to gather information and make data-driven decisions that may provide them with a competitive edge.