How to Scrape Amazon Reviews
Amazon is the ultimate destination for online shoppers, so naturally, it’s also a goldmine of customer reviews. These reviews offer insights for businesses aiming to understand consumer preferences, researchers analyzing market trends, and shoppers making informed decisions. In this guide, we'll explore the types of data available from Amazon reviews, discuss various methods for scraping this information, and demonstrate how to scrape reviews from Amazon using our eCommerce Scraping API.
What are Amazon reviews?
Amazon reviews are user-generated feedback provided by customers who have purchased and used products available on Amazon's platform. These reviews play a crucial role in the eCommerce ecosystem by offering insights into product quality, functionality, and user satisfaction. They help potential buyers make informed decisions and enable sellers to understand customer experiences and areas for improvement.
Each Amazon review typically consists of several key data points:
- Review ID. A unique identifier assigned to each review.
- Title. A brief headline summarizing the review, often including the star rating and a concise opinion.
- Author. The username or display name of the customer who wrote the review.
- Rating. The star rating given by the reviewer on a scale from 1 to 5.
- Content. The main body of the review where the customer shares their detailed thoughts and experiences.
- Timestamp. The date and location when and where the review was posted.
- Profile ID. A unique identifier associated with the reviewer's Amazon profile.
- Verified purchase status. Indicates whether the reviewer purchased the product through Amazon, adding credibility to the review.
- Helpful count. The number of other users who found the review helpful.
- Product attributes. Specific details about the product variant being reviewed, such as color, size, or style.
These components allow customer sentiment analysis, competitor monitoring, product performance tracking, and gaining insights into consumer behavior. By examining these data points, businesses can identify trends, address issues, and enhance their products or services to better meet customer needs.
Scraping Amazon customer reviews: best methods
Amazon reviews scraping typically involves using a service, automated tools, or software to programmatically extract customer review data from Amazon's product pages. Here’s a list of the best ways you can get Amazon reviews data:
1. Buying datasets from third-party services
One option for obtaining Amazon review data is to use third-party services that offer pre-collected datasets. There are several companies that specialize in aggregating large volumes of data from various sources, including eCommerce platforms like Amazon.
By purchasing these datasets, you can access extensive review information without the need to build your own scraper or manage the complexities of data extraction.
These services often provide the data in structured, ready-to-use formats, which can save you significant time and resources. Also, if it’s a reputable provider, this data is collected ethically and in compliance with all relevant laws and Amazon’s terms of service.
2. Building a custom solution
If you have unique requirements or prefer complete control over the data extraction process, building your own scraper might be a great option. Developing a custom scraper allows you to tailor the functionality to your specific needs, such as targeting particular data fields, handling complex webpage structures, or integrating the scraper into existing systems.
Building a custom scraper involves programming a tool to navigate Amazon's website, interact with its dynamic elements, and extract specific data like customer reviews. Using Python with Selenium is a popular approach because Selenium automates web browsers, allowing you to handle JavaScript-rendered content and simulate user interactions.
An important factor to consider is the importance of high-quality proxies in a custom scraper setup. Amazon implements anti-scraping measures like IP blocking and rate limiting, so employing reliable proxies helps distribute your requests and reduces the risk of detection.
3. Using web scraping tools
Another effective method for collecting Amazon review data is to use specialized scraper APIs that provide real-time, structured information. These APIs are specifically designed to handle the intricacies of web scraping, such as navigating dynamic web pages, managing request rates, and parsing complex HTML structures.
By making API calls, you can retrieve up-to-date review data in formats like JSON or CSV, which you can easily integrate into your applications or analysis tools. Many of these services also offer features like automatic IP rotation and CAPTCHA solving to reduce the risk of being blocked by anti-scraping measures.
At Smartproxy, we offer our eCommerce Scraping API for this purpose. It’s a full-stack solution that features a pool of 65M+ proxies, bypasses anti-bot protection, and has flexible output options, real-time or on-demand results, task scheduling, ready-made scraping templates, and more.
Easy way to scrape Amazon for product reviews
Since web scraping tools strike a balance between intuitive use and customization options, let's explore how easy it is to scrape Amazon product reviews without the need for technical expertise or extensive coding using our eCommerce Scraping API.
1. Get eCommerce Scraping API
Log in to your Smartproxy dashboard, select eCommerce as the Target group, and opt for the Advanced subscription type, or claim a 7-day free trial to test our service.
2. Find the ready-made scraper
A ready-made scraper is a pre-configured template within our Scraping API that offers target-specific scraping with appropriate parameter options and parsing capabilities. Follow these steps:
- Navigate to the Scraper tab.
- Click on Choose Target to select a specific scraping template.
- Choose Amazon Reviews.
You now have the scraper set to target Amazon reviews!
3. Configure your scraping request
Enter your query, which should be the product’s ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number). It’s a 10-character alphanumeric string that can be found in the product page’s URL. You can enable the Bulk parameter to target several queries simultaneously.
Then, select parameters like website domain, device type, browser, and pagination.
As an example, we’ll use the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite product and choose the .com domain, Desktop device, Chrome browser, and page number 1.
4. Send your request and export the response
Once you’ve set up your scraping parameters, click the Send Request button. You can also schedule your task by saving your scraper and then choosing the Schedule scraper button, which can be found by clicking on the three dots icon. This way, you can have the response delivered to your email address, webhook, or Google Drive at intervals that suit you – hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or a custom rate.
Alternatively, you can copy the request code in cURL, Node.js, or Python and integrate it into your development environment. Check our documentation to adjust the parameters to suit your needs. Our request code in Python looks like this:
import requestsurl = "https://scraper-api.smartproxy.com/v2/scrape"payload = {"target": "amazon_reviews","query": "B0CFPJYX7P","domain": "com","device_type": "desktop_chrome","page_from": "1","parse": True}headers = {"accept": "application/json","content-type": "application/json","authorization": "Basic [YOUR_BASE64_ENCODED_CREDENTIALS]"}response = requests.post(url, json=payload, headers=headers)print(response.text)
After clicking Send Request, you’ll receive the response in JSON or table format shortly. You can copy this data or export it in JSON or CSV format.
With our scraper, you can access comprehensive data from Amazon reviews, including the review ID number, title, rating, author's name, review content, date of the review, author's profile ID, verification status of the purchase, the number of users who found the review helpful, and the specific product version being reviewed.
Bottom line
We’ve shown how to scrape Amazon product reviews with eCommerce Scraping API’s ready-made scraper in a matter of minutes. It streamlines data extraction, delivering real-time reviews without technical challenges. By collecting a substantial number of Amazon reviews, you’ll be able to analyze customer opinions and market trends that can help you refine your strategies to your advantage.
Scrape Amazon reviews with our API
Streamline your Amazon review data collection with a 7-day free trial of eCommerce Scraping API.
About the author
Dominykas Niaura
Technical Copywriter
Dominykas brings a unique blend of philosophical insight and technical expertise to his writing. Starting his career as a film critic and music industry copywriter, he's now an expert in making complex proxy and web scraping concepts accessible to everyone.
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