Most of us who deal with Amazon selling or affiliates have this problem: Productivity.. It’s easy to get lost to many online tools out there to extract data from Amazon to Excel, only to find out that the data is not useful for you because it’s not real-time data.
Web-Based ASIN Tool Disadvantage
Many Amazon ASIN tools out there uses some kind of cache to serve data to its users, as real-time data extraction would take too much time and resource on their end if using web scraping.
This cache is saved in database and will be updated from time to time. It is good if you’re only researching past data and make of use history out of it. However, if you’re looking for Amazon price changes right now, then it’s useless.
Another issue that many ASIN tools lack is not using URL in order to get their inputs, but uses keywords and categories in order to get the product data by web scraping. You won’t need this data if you’re looking forward to finding out what your competitors are doing.
Microsoft Excel spreadsheet is one of the formats, which can process sheets, text file or CSV. CSV format is very versatile, as you can open it on any Microsoft Excel version, or even other CSV software. Unlike XLS or XLSX which can only be opened in Microsoft Excel, CSV is far more superior on handling the job easily. However, CSV needs to be converted to XLS/XLSX file when saving to Microsoft Excel in order to retain the formatting you do.
So next time you want to get data to Excel by web scraping, just remember to save it into CSV file.
Extract Data From Amazon Benefits
Both sellers and affiliates will gain many uses of extracting Amazon data, which are:
- Scrape Amazon products data, which can’t be retrieved using Amazon Product Advertising API
There are a lot of Amazon data that are hidden from Amazon Product Advertising API such as Prime, Shipping, Rank, Stock Count, Availability – the only way to get it by web scraping Amazon. - Check for data changes over time
It’s very useful to get real-time data extraction as it will provide you with a fresh data of Prices, Rank, Prime, Stock Count, Rating, Availability. - Competitors Spying
Do you want to know what your competitors are doing in Amazon search results or track their price changes on their Storefront URL? It can only be done with Amazon scrapers, which uses web scraping method. - Find best-selling products within Amazon search results.
Researching products to sell or affiliate will be easier if you can find out the review numbers, ratings, search result rank and keyword from Amazon data using a Web scraper.
Methods to Crawl Amazon Products
Two methods of crawling Amazon products are: using Amazon API and Web Scraping.
Amazon ASIN Lookup Using API
One cheap and fast way of getting data is to get it using Product Advertising API. However, it’s not quite a web scraping crawler as it only requests the data and processed it. Processing and data extraction from Amazon using API cannot be done by most of the people out there because it needs some technical degree of utilizing API and processing it by code before saving it into functional data.
Amazon Scraper
Crawling Amazon products using a web scraper also needed some technical proficiency since you are going to deal with operating software and setting it up before getting any Amazon data.
Many general web scraping tools are not ready-made, but rather have hours of a learning curve which deals with setting up the software, not to mention how to get around captchas or IP blocks.
How about using Excel for web scraping Amazon prices? I wouldn’t recommend you to do it. Using Excel to web scrape Amazon price has many disadvantages that will cost you greatly in the long run.
Ready-Made Amazon Scraping Tool
If you find yourself to get a headache when using Amazon scraping tool for data extraction because of those long hours just to set the web scraping software right, you might want to use ready-made Amazon scraping tool. ZonASINHunter is one of the best Amazon scraping tool, gets the Amazon product data in real-time with just push of a button. It uses URL, no coding needed and provides you with CSV formats, which can be opened with any version of Microsoft Excel.
