{"id":6525,"date":"2023-10-18T14:47:43","date_gmt":"2023-10-18T14:47:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/royadata.io\/blog\/?p=6525"},"modified":"2023-10-18T14:47:43","modified_gmt":"2023-10-18T14:47:43","slug":"e-commerce-scraper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/royadata.io\/blog\/e-commerce-scraper\/","title":{"rendered":"E-Commerce Scraper 2022: How to Scrape E-commerce Website with Python"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Are you looking forward to scraping e-commerce platforms for product and review data? Then the article below has been written for you as we would be taking a look at how to develop an e-commerce scraper and some of the best already-made e-commerce you can use if you are not a coder.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"E-Commerce\n<\/picture>\n

E-commerce platforms hold some of the most interesting data on the Internet that is useful to marketers and product researchers. From Amazon to AliExpress, down to eBay, Wayfair, and some of the other niched e-commerce platforms, there are millions and billions of product data that can be collected and analyzed to reveal patterns, identify marketing and product development opportunity, or just keep a tab on the price of a product.<\/p>\n

Price extraction and monitoring tools, review analysis software, competitive research, and many of these require extraction of data from e-commerce platforms. Interestingly, these tools and use cases can\u2019t be done with manual data extraction because of the magnitude of data required, and many of the e-commerce platforms on the Internet do not provide a data API to the public.<\/p>\n

If you are interested in product data or review on Amazon, AliExpress, Walmart, or any other e-commerce platform, you will need to collect the data yourself and the method to do that since no API is provided is via web scraping. In this article, we would be taking a look at some of the best web scraping tools you can use to scrape e-commerce platforms. We would also be discussing how you can create your own web scraper if you are a coder and would be providing you a sample script using Python. Before we begin, let take a look at an overview of scraping e-commerce.<\/p>\n\n

<\/span>E-Commerce Scraping \u2013 an Overview<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

\"E-Commerce\n<\/picture>\n

E-commerce scraping is the process of automatically extracting product data such as price, description, seller, rating, and other details such as product review from e-commerce websites such as Amazon<\/a>, AliExpress<\/a>, Walmart<\/a>, eBay<\/a>, Wayfair<\/a>, among others using computer bots known as web scrapers. This method of automatically pulling data from e-commerce platforms is the best alternative for platforms that do not provide a data API to furnish the public with data.<\/p>\n

However, it is more aggressive in approach as it sends too many requests within a short period of time, downloading full content on a page just to extract out a few details on the page. However, in the absence of a data API, it is the only viable option for a large dataset.<\/p>\n

One thing you need to know about web scraping is that it is frowned at by websites including e-commerce websites. E-commerce platforms have some of the most strict anti-scraping systems that discourage and prevent the scraping of their content.\u00a0 You will only succeed at scraping the product and review data from e-commerce platforms if you successfully bypass the anti-scraping systems<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If you will be using an already-made web scraper, there is a high chance that anti-scraping techniques have been implemented and all you need to do is add proxies to it. On the other hand, developing a custom scraper for scraping e-commerce platforms would require you to start incorporating measures to bypass the anti-scraping system from scratch.<\/p>\n\n

<\/span>How to Scrape E-Commerce Platforms Using Python<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

\"Scraping\n<\/picture>\n

This section is meant for coders. If you know you do not know how to code or d not want to develop a custom web scraper for scraping your target e-commerce platform, go to the next section and make a choice from the list of recommended already-made web scrapers that you can use to scrape e-commerce platforms.<\/p>\n

As a coder, it might interest you to know that developing a web scraper for an e-commerce platform is not very difficult as web scrapers are bots<\/a> \u2013 all you need is a way to send web requests and parse out the required data. You can use any programming language of your choice but in this article, we recommend Python for beginners<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Because the term e-commerce does not specify the actual platform of a target but a group of sites, there is no one fit all tool for that. And as such, we cannot say either Requests and Beautifulsoup<\/a> or Selenium<\/a> is the library for such. For this reason, there is a rule of thumb to it. If the data you are interested in resides on a page that requires Javascript execution and rendering, then Selenium is the tool for the job.<\/p>\n