Scraping Amazon data

Price API is a service for Amazon price & product data in real-time to compare & monitor competitors, optimize pricing on Amazon and improve Amazon SEO

“Why do we need to scrape Amazon data?”, perhaps that is the first question that you might be asking.

There are a number of benefits that you could utilize the data for your business. Here are some of them:

Benefits to using the data scraped from Amazon, for both sellers and vendors alike:

  • Compare and monitor competing products (prices, reviews, availability, …) from competitors that are selling the same products with you (for competitor pricing analysis, competitive pricing and repricing, cost management, seasonality tracking)
  • Compare and identify opportunities for international sales (cross-border selling) with product and offer information from overseas shopping platforms and online price comparison sites: When a product is being sold for more expensive in other markets, you could consider entering that market but you first need the comparative price data to make that decision
  • Get the top selling product lists for a category with bestsellers information to know exactly which products are trending to consider adding them to your assortment and also review your current assortment structure (for assortment analysis and assortment optimization
  • Compare and monitor competitor assortments (with product and offers information) to know exactly what your competitors are offering in their assortment (for competitor assortment analysis, assortment optimization) on the marketplace
  • Identify the products that gained or lost the most tractions in recent time period (with movers and shakers report) so that you could identify which products are being trendy or are losing its top sales positions, in order to make a decision for assortment optimization
  • Using product search results information to know the ranks and other product-related information in product search result list (for optimizing Amazon SEO position, or Amazon marketing campaigns)
  • Using reviews information (in text format or numeric format) for review management, assortment optimization for retailers or product management for manufacturers, and amazon SEO in order to utilize the product ad copy/ bullet points/ features from positive feedback of customers
  • With cross-selling and substitutes product information, Identify cross-selling, up-selling opportunities as well as gaps & opportunities in your assortment optimization, use product information for Amazon SEO efforts
  • With shop information, know where your competitors’ product categories are competitor assortment analysis
  • Knowing and understanding the category structure of Amazon, knowing where certain products fit in which category/ sub-category in order to use it for your internal assortment optimization, and use the sub-category information to find out all the best selling products in all or each sub-category that you might be interested in selling
  • Know what deals are being offers by your competitors for the same product that you are offering, for competitor price analysis, competitive pricing, cost management, and seasonality tracking

And more, you can use literally whatever could be found on Amazon to serve your use cases.

When you want to get all the exact data from Amazon, the only way to obtain the data you need is to scrape the information. Now comes the next question, how do you get the scraped data? Should you do it yourself?

Scrape that site they said. It will be fun they said.

If you tried to do scraping yourself or your company is currently doing this, you might have noticed, that getting first results is not that hard. Retrieving big quantities on a regular basis and reliably is a different story.

Things can and will go wrong:

  • Crawlers get blocked by firewalls
  • Target sites change their HTML structure
  • Your system can’t handle the constantly changing CAPTCHA
  • Target sites could be too complex to scrape

And then you need a fix, asap. Probably on a weekend.

If scraping isn’t your core business, you will probably invest more than you should to get the data that you need, and instead, you should focus your resources on your core competencies in e-commerce to yield higher ROI.

Price API can help you solve this. We provide a hassle-free solution that gives you the e-commerce data that you need, and pay less than if you scrape it on your own.

Best Practice

Our core business is to extract information reliably. However, there are things beyond our influence: sites will change their structure and block our crawlers — just not as often as others’.

Of course, now we are the ones fixing these asap.

Nevertheless, you have to design your application in a way that is robust when a product or a whole source cannot be accessed for a certain time span.