Amazon web scraping with python is a very popular solution for those of you who needs fast solution and it's affordable. But is it really that cheap? See the following screenshot so you can see how much you need to spend for a one-time solution based on hiring a freelancer.
I have a Python code to scrape Amazon product listing. I have set the proxies and headers. I also have sleep before each crawl. However, I still cannot get the data. The msg I get back is: To discuss automated access to Amazon data please contact api-services-support@amazon.com. Portions of my code are.
As you know, it's expensive. Although python script is free, but the code is somewhat expensive. There were 40 freelancers apply for this job for an average $154! You will need to contact those freelancers, then spend more if Amazon changes their layouts and testing around their site. Maintaining the code is expensive and time consuming, especially for non-programmers who don't know how to code in python.
- How to Scrape Data from Amazon using Python Web Scraping. Download Python Script. Send download link to: Amazon is an Ecommerce giant and the biggest company on earth in terms of market value. One can find almost anything and everything on Amazon. With advancing technology and lifestyle changes Amazon has become the go to destination for any.
- You can have valued product data to become integrated into online stores with scraping product information from the leading website and your competitor websites as quickly as possible through our.
- Web Scraping with Python: Collecting More Data from the Modern Web Mitchell, Ryan on Amazon.com.FREE. shipping on qualifying offers. Web Scraping with Python: Collecting More Data from the Modern Web.
- When I first started web scraping with BeautifulSoup4, I found that the most difficult hoop to jump through was pagination. Getting the elements from a static page seemed fairly straightforward.
For a quick search on google, you would see a bunch of employers hiring freelancers for different job specifications and budgets. Different than hiring freelancers for amazon price scraper based on php scripts, it depends on the budget, this would come around more than $100. Less than that you will only get a data input jobs, not a product (which is python script).
The problem with Amazon scraping with python script
Two big problems are maintaining the script, then spend some more fortune on dedicated server which you need to host the script. $154 would boost up to more than $300+ for the domain and the server not to mention buying proxies and captcha breakers. And you need to spend hefty number each month. Another issue might happens, your server would got hacked. You will then need more money to spend on cleaning the site, then contacting the freelancer with some more budget to plug up the security hole in their script. Not to mention when Amazon changes, which is frequently. We recorded it happens daily across different countries and categories.
Amazon Web Scraping Tool
Programmers might find it cheaper to code Amazon web scraping with python as they don't need to buy time, they spend their time coding. There are books for this, but many books for Amazon web scraping with python is very outdated. There might be big demands on the scripts, but not enough to make a fortune for authors. For non-programmers, that time might be worth to spend on growing their business instead. That's when ZonASINHunter shines. This Amazon web scraping tool is desktop based, maintenance free and geek free.
ZonASINHunter vs Amazon web scraping with python
The obvious comparison between the two Amazon web scraping tool would be the physical form. ZonASINHunter is a windows desktop form, whereas python is a script which needs hosting or server to run. ZonASINHunter doesn't need any server to run, and it runs on Windows. This makes ZonASINHunter a perfect companion for non-programmers who need some fix solution which is cheap and reliable. No need to spend hundreds of dollars for a python script if you can have less hassle-free. Moreover, we have developed the software for over 6 years, so we are confident that it delivers what our customers need.
However, Amazon web scraping with python scripts would remains popular as the reproduction of data is somehow beneficial for businesses. But for non-programmers, ZonASINHunter would be more than enough to cater the need.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could build your own FREE API to get product reviews from Amazon? That’s exactly what you will be able to do once you follow this tutorial using Python Flask, Selectorlib and Requests.
What can you do with the Amazon Product Review API?
An API lets you automatically gather data and process it. Some of the uses of this API could be:
- Getting the Amazon Product Review Summary in real-time
- Creating a Web app or Mobile Application to embed reviews from your Amazon products
- Integrating Amazon reviews into your Shopify store, Woocommerce or any other eCommerce store
- Monitoring reviews for competitor products in real-time
The possibilities for automation using an API are endless so let’s get started.
Why build your own API?
You must be wondering if Amazon provides an API to get product reviews and why you need to build your own.
APIs provided by companies are usually limited and Amazon is no exception. They no longer allow you to get a full list of customers reviews for a product on Amazon through their Product Advertising API. Instead, they provide an iframe which renders the reviews from their web servers – which isn’t really useful if you need the full reviews.
How to Get Started
In this tutorial, we will build a basic API to scrape Amazon product reviews using Python and get data in real-time with all fields, that the Amazon Product API does not provide.
We will use the API we build as part of this exercise to extract the following attributes from a product review page. (https://www.amazon.com/Nike-Womens-Reax-Running-Shoes/product-reviews/B07ZPL752N/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_show_all_btm?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews)
- Product Name
- Number of Reviews
- Average Rating
- Rating Histogram
- Reviews
- Author
- Rating
- Title
- Content
- Posted Date
- Variant
- Verified Purchase
- Number of People Found Helpful
Installing the required packages for running this Web Scraper API
We will use Python 3 to build this API. You just need to install Python 3 from Python’s Website.
We need a few python packages to setup this real-time API
- Python Flask, a lightweight server will be our API server. We will send our API requests to Flask, which will then scrape the web and respond back with the scraped data as JSON
- Python Requests, to download Amazon product review pages’ HTML
- Selectorlib, a free web scraper tool to markup data that we want to download
Install all these packages them using pip3 in one command:
The Code
You can get all the code used in this tutorial from Github – https://github.com/scrapehero-code/amazon-review-api
In a folder called amazon-review-api
, let’s create a file called app.py
with the code below.
Here is what the code below does:
- Creates a web server to accept requests
- Downloads a URL and extracts the data using the Selectorlib template
- Formats the data
- Sends data as JSON back to requester
Free web scraper tool – Selectorlib
You will notice in the code above that we used a file called selectors.yml. This file is what makes this tutorial so easy to scrape Amazon reviews. The magic behind this file is a tool called Selectorlib.
Selectorlib is a powerful and easy to use tool that makes selecting, marking up, and extracting data from web pages visual and simple. The Selectorlib Chrome Extension lets you mark data that you need to extract, and creates the CSS Selectors or XPaths needed to extract that data, then previews how the data would look like. You can learn more about Selectorlib and how to use it here
If you just need the data we have shown above, you don’t need to use Selectorlib because we have done that for you already and generated a simple “template” that you can just use. However, if you want to add a new field, you can use Selectorlib to add that field to the template.
Here is how we marked up the fields in the code for all the data we need from Amazon Product Reviews Page using Selectorlib Chrome Extension.
Once you have created the template, click on ‘Highlight’ to highlight and preview all of your selectors. Finally, click on ‘Export’ and download the YAML file and that file is the selectors.yml file.
Here is how our selectors.yml
looks like
You need to put this selectors.yml in the same folder as your app.py
Running the Web Scraping API
To run the flask API, type and run the following commands into a terminal:
Then you can test the API by opening the following link in a browser or using any programming language.
Your response should be similar to this:
Web Scraping Amazon Python Github
This API should work for to scrape Amazon reviews for your personal projects. You can also deploy it to a server if you prefer.
However, if you want to scrape websites for thousands of pages, learn about the challenges here Scalable Large Scale Web Scraping – How to build, maintain and run scrapers. If you need help your web scraping projects or need a custom API you can contact us.
We can help with your data or automation needs
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