Amazon represents one of the largest e-commerce stores in the US. It offers the largest range of products you can ever find in the world. And the products information can be useful in a variety of ways, including building useful catalogues.
However, despite the wide range of amazing services Amazon offers, they will never offer you easy access to their product data. So if you’re planning to use basic methods to export product data from Amazon to a spreadsheet for your business needs, you may need to have rethink because it is impossible.
Luckily, web scraping can solve this issue and can help you export product data for either competitor research, building an API for your project or for comparison-shopping.
Interesting statistics you need to know:
- With an estimation of 7.7 billion people living in the world, about 25% shop online.
- About 54% of purchases online are conducted by Millennials
So you see, with these few statistics, it clearly shows that there are many online shop owners. Most of these shops will need to build a lot of automation around e-commerce websites like Amazon to help them stay ahead of their competitors.
In other words, shop owners will need:
- A way to build a catalogue of products
- Data on customer’s needs, preferences, and satisfaction
- A way to monitor their competitors
- Data on several factors for market research and intelligence
Hence, being able to scrap e-commerce websites and build a good product catalogue will be a valuable skill to learn.
Benefits of building product catalogue from Amazon
You can easily build product catalogue from Amazon using web scrapers, especially the pre-built options like Amazon scraper on “Web Automation.” This tool allows you extract data like product name, price, image, and description from Amazon, without the need to write a single code.
Using web scrapers, you can get the following product information:
- ASIN
- Description
- Category
- Model
- of Reviews
- Star rating
- Manufacture
Other product information you can get using web scrapers include title, prime, UPC, quantity, image URL, and weight.
The beauty of using web scrapers like “Web Automation” is that after building product catalogue from Amazon, you can easily monitor the products for changes in price, rating, stock count/availability, etc.
More so, you can easily scrape product details that aren’t available with the product advertising API. And you can drop ship website data.
All you need is just a few mouse clicks and you can copy and paste product information building a catalogue from Amazon. You can get relevant data in a spreadsheet or JSON format. You can even automate the process to update the product catalogue on a regular monthly or weekly basis.
Here are some key benefits of using web scrapers to build product catalogue from Amazon:
- You can utilize product details to improve your Amazon marketing campaigns or Amazon SEO status.
- You can easily review product optimization for manufacturers and retailers
- You can use the scraped data for competition mapping or SWOT analysis of your business compared to your competitor’s business.
- You can quickly discover trending products and check the top
Looking at the large number of companies offerings different products, price, analysis and other types of information specifically for Amazon, scraping amazon to build product catalogue is an intriguing method used today by those who wants to save cost and time.
If you attempt to scrape Amazon data on a wide scale, it may be difficult. In fact, you may be blocked by their anti-scraping technology. You already know Amazon is a giant site, so it is not surprising that it’s quite an impossible task to scrape. The solution remains the use of already-made scrapers like “Web Automation.
As a beginner, there’s an option to try the Web Automation scrapers free!
Decide on your web scraping approach
Scraping data from Amazon can be achieved using several approaches. You may scrape each shelf list or keyword’s category, and then request the product page for each one before moving to the next. This approach is the best for small-scale scraping.
If you desire to perform large-scale scraping, however, a good method you can adopt is to create a database of products you want to track by having a list of the products or ASINs(special product identifiers), and then have your pre-built web scraper scrape each of the pages every month, week, or day.
Pre-built scrapers like the Web Automation’s Amazon Scraper can help you perform large-scale scraping for product, department, category, and search pages. You can easily use this product data pre-defined extractor to build product catalogue from Amazon.
And if you’re not into building yourself, you can get their concierge to build you an extractor for Amazon that you can run on Web Automation. Then you can easily transfer your built product catalogue to Shopify, Google Sheets +, Dropbox, and more.
That said, here are some of the benefits Web Automation offers:
- IP rotation: Scrapers like web automation prevents your IP from being blocked by Amazon. This pre-built extractor uses automatic IP rotation
- Scrape Dynamic Sites: You can extract data with more than levels of navigation and data behind login on Amazon.
- Re-Captcha solver: Web Automation allows you to bypass CAPTCHA’s, making you scrape bot protected websites like Amazon with ease.
- API: Web Automation allows you to integrate your extracted product data from Amazon through their API and Webhook.
Useful strategies to build product catalogue from Amazon
You need to be strategic when scraping product data from e-commerce websites like Amazon. Some important steps you should take include:
Know what you want
You need to be very direct in what you want. If you’re interested in extracting product data to build a catalogue, for instance, you need to check all the categories you want the product data from. This might be as simple as product names, categories, and images. However, you may decide to include average customer’s rating and review.
Also you might want to build an extractor that uploads products to more than one e-shops. And you may want to still want to do some modifications like adjust products’ prices after extracting the data.
Research the website
You need to research Amazon to know if they have the data you want. But if they do not have, say, the customers’ and sellers’ email address, and you’re interested in that data, you can as well check whether they have social media channels or websites where you can get these data from.
Also, you need to check if a regular scraper will work on the website. You can view the HTML source and see if all the data is present. If they are present you can be sure of using a regular scraper. But if there are lots of button to click and other kinds of dynamic responsive, then you may need to use a headless browser.
How to get the data
Some data may be clearly displayed on the product’s page, while some others will require you to visit other pages to access them. For example, you may find products name and description on the product’s page, but you may need to click on a button to see seller’s info, customers review and more.
You may come across Captchas, but using a pre-made scraper like Web Automation makes it easy to solve these captchas.
Use a scraper
After deciding on the data you want and how to reach them. You can simply use a scraper to extract all of the product data without writing a single code. You can use pre-built scrapers such as the Web Automation’s Amazon Scraper. This scraper comes with a good interface and a good flow that you can simply use to extract the product data you want to build a catalogue.
Final Remark
Web scrapers are great tools to help you build product catalogues from amazon. You just need to know what data you’re interested in and where they are located. Pre-built scrapers like Amazon scraper on Web Automation is an amazing tool you can use to extract data like product name, image, price, description and more.
If you’re not into building yourself, you can simply tell an expert at WebAutomation your needs and have a good scraper created for you to build a great product catalogue from Amazon
