Source: Created by the author on Canva
Data is critical for success in the e-commerce industry and e-commerce platforms like Amazon and eBay house vast amounts of product-related data such as pricing, listing, and customer reviews. Typically, businesses resort to web scraping to gather this data.
However, collecting this data isn't easy as these e-commerce platforms employ complex blocking mechanisms that thwart data collection efforts.
Here are some of the challenges you will face while scraping an e-commerce website:
- Anti-Bot Measures: E-commerce websites employ various anti-bot measures such as CAPTCHA, IP blocking, and rate limiting to deter automated scraping activities.
- Dynamic Website Structure: These websites often have dynamic and frequently changing HTML structures, making it challenging to consistently locate and extract desired data elements.
- Data Volume: E-commerce platforms typically contain vast amounts of data, including product listings, prices, reviews, and images, which can be overwhelming to scrape efficiently.
- Legal Concerns: Scraping these websites raises legal concerns regarding terms of service violations, copyright infringement, and data privacy regulations. It's essential to ensure compliance with relevant laws and regulations.
- IP Blocking and Proxies: E-commerce websites may block IP addresses that are detected as scrapers. Using rotating proxies to mask IP addresses can help mitigate this risk, but managing proxies effectively can be complex.
- Maintenance: These websites also frequently update their layouts, change their HTML structure, or implement new anti-bot measures, requiring constant monitoring and maintenance of scraping scripts.
To overcome these challenges, you should consider using an appropriate scraping tool. This article will explore five stand-out scrapers in the industry that can make data collection a seamless process.
This list includes APIs and tools that abstract common scraping strategies and mechanisms, providing clean, structured, and actionable data. These solutions enable automated data extraction with custom filters, offering cost and time savings that free up resources for other critical business needs.
Bright Data
Source: Bright Data
Bright Data's Web Scraper IDE is a one-stop solution for scraping data at scale with zero infrastructural costs. Built on top of Bright Data's vast proxy network, spread across 195 countries, covering almost every city in the world, and a powerful unlocker technology, the Web Scraper IDE is a full-fledged, browser-integrated IDE purpose-built for web scraping.
While it's actually a general-purpose scraper, it comes with readymade templates for scraping e-commerce sites, ensuring you no longer have to spend hours building (and maintaining) your scraper from scratch. With a little knowledge of JavaScript, you can get even more out of the templates by modifying them to specific needs or leveraging the various API commands.
Bright Data's team regularly updates and maintains these templates to keep up with frequent layout changes in e-commerce websites, ensuring a smooth-sailing scraping operation. If, by chance, a template doesn't exist for your use case, Bright Data's team can also build one upon request.
Source: Bright Data
With the Web Scraper IDE, all you have to do is run the scraper and save the output in a format of your choice --- JSON, CSV, XLSX, or even as an API call that you can integrate into your app. You can also save the data on Google Cloud Storage or Amazon S3, thus removing the need for any in-house infrastructure.
The Web Scraper IDE promises a success rate of 99.9% and this is because of two reasons:
- Out of the box, it comes with a powerful unlocker infrastructure that gets around IP/device fingerprint blocks by seamlessly emulating header information as well as other browser details (to learn how the unlocker infrastructure helps overcome website blocks in greater detail, give this article here a read).
- It automatically rotates four different kinds of proxies --- residential, datacenter, ISP, and mobile --- with automatic retries, to get around geo-blocks, ReCAPTCHAs, rate-limiting, etc. (Find out more about proxies here, here, and here.)
Overall, the Web Scraper IDE is a comprehensive solution for collecting highly accurate, geo-specific data at scale. It's also compliant with all major data protection laws so you're secure regarding the legality of your operations as well.
Moreover, should you run into issues, Bright Data offers 24/7 live support to ensure there are no hiccups to your operational workflow. Besides, Bright Data also provides detailed documentation, a comprehensive FAQ section, several blog posts, tutorials, and videos that can help with troubleshooting efforts.
As for pricing, Bright Data gives you a pay-as-you-go option along with other enterprise-grade plans for the Web Scraper IDE, but before checking those out, you could opt for their free trial to see how the product fares for your use case.
Key Features:
- Pre-made code templates
- Custom templates on request
- Ready-made functions
- Access e-commerce data from 195 countries
- Interactive preview
- Built-in debug tools
- Browser scripting in JavaScript
- Easy parser creation
- Save output in multiple formats or as API call
- Auto-scaling infrastructure
- Auto-retry mechanism
- Built-in proxy & unblocking
- Fully hosted cloud environment
- Trigger crawls on a schedule or by API and connect the API to major storage platforms.
- Adheres to major data-protection regulations
- 24/7 live support
- Detailed documentation, tutorials, blog posts, and videos
Pricing:
- Starting from $2.40/1000 page loads
- Free trial available
- No setup fees or hidden fees
Get started with the Web Scraper IDE here:
Web Scraper IDE - Free Trial
*Web Scraper IDE lets you easily scrape websites at scale. Extract data in the format you need. Take your web scraping...*brightdata.com
Oxylabs
Source: Oxylabs
Oxylabs offers a specialized e-commerce scraper service. With its platform, users can access product data from 50 major online marketplaces, including industry giants such as Amazon, eBay, etc.
Their E-commerce scraper boasts extensive functionality, including country and postal code targeting across 195 locations. Additionally, it incorporates crawling and scheduling features, a rarity among APIs in this domain.
You can also integrate the E-commerce Scraper API as either a proxy server or an API. The latter option enables users to scrape e-commerce pages either in real-time or asynchronously in batches.
The API comes with a built-in parser and supports a broader range of targets than just Amazon. Utilizing AI, Oxylabs' parser can organize data from any product page comprehensively. Depending on the specific website being targeted, users can extract parsed information from various e-commerce attributes, such as search pages, reviews, and pricing data.
Pricing-wise, Oxylabs offers a regular tier and an enterprise tier. Pricing for regular tiers starts at $2.80 per 1k results while the enterprise tiers start at a rate of $2.20 per 1k results. You also get a 1-week free trial that you can opt for before you think about buying any of the plans.
Key Features:
- Pay only for successful requests
- Real-time highly-localized product data
- Maintenance-free web scraping infrastructure
- Access e-commerce data from 195 countries
- Country or postal code targeting
- Gather data from the top 50 online marketplaces
- Easy integration
- ML-powered proxy management
- Dynamic browser fingerprinting
- JavaScript rendering
- Outputs in structured data format
Pricing:
- Starting from $2.80/1000 results
- 1-week free trial available
Check out Oxylabs' E-commerce Scraper here:
E-Commerce Scraper API - Free Trial
*With E-Commerce Scraper API, effortlessly gather product pricing data, starting from just $1.6 per 1000 results. Get...*oxylabs.io
Smartproxy
Source: Smartproxy
Smartproxy offers a specialized eCommerce scraping API, focusing on two prominent online marketplaces: Amazon and Wayfair.
With a broad reach spanning 195 locations, Smartproxy's tool allows users to target any country of interest. Integration options include using it as a proxy server for accessing results through an open connection or utilizing it as an API, with the flexibility to either receive real-time data or fetch scraping jobs without maintaining an open connection.
To facilitate seamless integration and testing, Smartproxy provides an API playground where users can build and execute requests, view their outputs, and download generated code snippets.
Their e-commerce scraper features a data parser designed specifically for structured results from Amazon. It offers endpoints catering to various aspects such as product data, reviews, search pages, and more.
As for pricing, Smartproxy offers regular and enterprise tiers. The regular tiers' pricing starts from $3.33 per 1k requests while the enterprise tiers' pricing starts at $1.4 per 1k requests. All plans come with a 14-day money-back guarantee and you can also opt for a 7-day free trial before buying any plan.
Key Features:
- 100% success rate
- Results in raw HTML or JSON
- Any country, state, or city
- Headless scraping
- No CAPTCHAs
- Real-time integration
- Proxy-like integration
- 24/7 support
Pricing:
- Starting from $3.33/1000 requests
- 7-day free trial available
- 14-day money-back
Check out Smartproxy's eCommerce Scraping API here:
eCommerce Scraping API - a 100% successful full-stack tool. Try free!
*Gather neatly structured eCommerce data by sending just one API request with our eCommerce Scraping API. Free trial...*smartproxy.com
ScraperAPI
Source: ScraperAPI
ScraperAPI offers a distinct approach to e-commerce website scraping, providing a versatile scraper that caters to both general online stores and a specialized endpoint for Amazon.
With ScraperAPI, users benefit from the automatic handling of IP rotation, headers, and retries, alongside the ability to customize requests through session creation and custom headers. Comprehensive documentation is available for popular programming languages like Python, NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, and Java. Moreover, the tool offers access to 12 locations across the US and EU.
Parsing options are flexible: users can either include a parameter when sending URLs to the API to parse various elements of Amazon pages such as product details, search results, listings, and reviews, or they can utilize the Amazon endpoint with ASIN as a parameter to retrieve specific product pages.
The provider offers a free plan including 1,000 API credits per month, along with a 7-day trial period providing 5,000 free requests. Besides, the free plan, there are four plans which are billed either monthly or annually. These plans start at $49 for 100,000 API credits per month. Instead of monthly payments, if you opt for annual payments, you'll get a 10% discount.
However, it's worth bearing in mind that ScraperAPI's credit-based pricing model can become complex, particularly when scraping heavily protected e-commerce websites that may require features like JavaScript rendering or premium proxies, consuming more credits and potentially leading to increased expenses.
Key Features:
- Structured data and templates
- Convenient scheduling options
- CAPTCHA & Anti-Bot Detection
- 40M IPs Around the World
- 50+ Geolocations
- 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Professional support
- JS rendering
- Premium proxies
- JSON auto parsing
- Smart proxy rotation
- Custom header support
- Automatic retries
- Desktop & mobile user agents
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- Custom session support
Pricing:
- Starting from $49 per month
- 7-day free trial available
Check out the Scraping API here:
Scraping API - ScraperAPI
*Gather real estate data at a large scale to empower your investment decisions with a simple-to-use API. Reduced costs...*www.scraperapi.com
Shifter
Source: Shifter
Shifter provides a versatile scraper suitable for e-commerce websites, offered both as an API and SDK.
The SDK supports NodeJS, Python, and Rust programming languages for seamless integration. Key features include request customization options such as device type selection, session establishment, and form filling, as well as the ability to send cookies and custom headers. Although Shifter's web scraper lacks an in-built parser, structured data can still be obtained using CSS selectors.
Their entry-level plan operates on datacenter proxies and offers 10 locations across the US and EU. Higher-tier plans provide access to a broader range of options, including 12 countries and the choice between residential or mobile proxies. Alternatively, the enterprise plan boasts a vast network of 195 global locations, albeit at an additional cost.
Pricing-wise, Shifter presents an affordable option, particularly if premium features are unnecessary for your scraping needs, with prices starting at $44.9 for 100,000 API credits. Shifter only charges for successful requests.
However, it's worth noting that the entry-level plan only offers datacenter proxies, while the rest of the plans come with residential and mobile proxies. Another drawback of the entry-level plan is that it only allows US/EU region targeting while the higher tiers offer geotargeting for all regions.
Key Features:
- Anti-bot detection
- Collect data from any web page
- Automatic scaling
- Instant activation
- 24/7 support
- Proxies included
- Advanced bot evasion
- Around-the-globe targeting
- JavaScript compatible
Pricing:
- Starting from $44.99 for 100,000 API credits
- 3-day money-back guarantee
Check out Shifter's Web Scraping API here:
Shifter - REST Proxy Scraping API
*Web scraping API for extracting raw HTML from any website. Forget about proxies, CAPTCHAs, or JS rendering issues.*shifter.io
Conclusion
All the tools discussed in this article provide comprehensive solutions for the myriad challenges you could face while scraping e-commerce websites. However, it's not easy to single out one tool and crown it the best among the lot. Choosing the right scraping tool depends on a lot of factors --- budget, volume, need for customization, complexity of target website, etc.
For instance, if you need to seamlessly scrape strict e-commerce sites for terabytes of data with minimal hiccups during the operation and adhere to ethical standards at the same time, you should definitely opt for premium options such as Bright Data or Oxylabs. These two options offer a lot of customizations and their plans scale really well as your requirement increases --- ideal for enterprise-grade scraping.
If you're a bit concerned about the budget but need to scrape huge amounts of data, you could opt for Smartproxy. Their plans scale pretty well after a certain threshold.
The scraping tool you choose ultimately depends on your specific use case and needs. I hope this article helps you in that regard.