Proxy vs API to scrape Amazon

What is better for Amazon scraping a Proxy or an API?

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Usually, developers use proxies either rotating or static to scrape amazon public pages. They do that in order to avoid their server IPs getting blocked by Amazon. Companies that require Amazon public data that is not offered by the API of Amazon, normally require a well maintained and qualified proxy list. In many cases maintaining proxies at your application side can be a very complicated and expensive process, but you have no much other choices other than keep buying proxies, residential or data center to keep your crawling engine running without being blocked.

Residential or Data Center Proxy costs vs Amazon APIs

You could evaluate the cost of maintaining a big proxy list like 20,000 proxies or using Amazon API to get access to Amazon product details, maybe you need them for price comparison, checking similar products and inspecting availability in different Amazon marketplaces. Depending on your use case sometimes using residential proxies can be mandatory, for instance it is unlikely that you will see Amazon Sponsored Ads on data center proxies.

It is very possible that using proxies is much cheaper than using Amazon Developer API. You can request a quota from Amazon by writing their developer API support team and they are likely to give you instructions and cost summary on how to pull Amazon specific data from Amazon API.

Data from web scraping vs data from Amazon APIs

Data coming from web scraping is not the same as the data that comes from Amazon APIs, and it is unlikely to ever be the same.

Here you have some reasons why:

APIs are limited and expose only information of what the websites want to expose.
Web scraping gives you the data that might never be exposed in an API of any website.
Web scraping data quality can vary depending on your scraper capabilities. In some cases where your scrapers are of low quality you might be missing some important information that can be available via the API.
APIs are normally consistent, using them makes sure that you are always running.

Amazon marketplaces scraping using GEO Proxies

It is very important when you are scraping an Amazon marketplace to request it with the proper geolocated proxy.

Here are the most important factors why using geolocated proxies is crucial while web scraping Amazon SERPs.

The results are different from one Amazon marketplace to another. If you request Amazon.com from a European IP address, you get different results, language and details than using an IP address or a proxy from the United States.
Amazon Prime pages are available in some marketplaces and not available in others, so using the proper proxy will increase the effectiveness of your web crawler and data quality.
Amazon is more likely to present your web scraper with a CAPTCHA page if you request for example Amazon German marketplace from an IP address or a proxy from Asia. Why? Because it is not common for a user in Asia to browse a marketplace in Germany. You should do the proper math before you launch your web scraper to different Amazon marketplaces.

Switch your Amazon scraper to use Crawlbase API

At Crawlbase we are sophisticated on helping you access data from Amazon using a simple GET request to our API.

We provide you an endpoint, you make calls to it. That's it, no extra step required.

Here are the main benefits of using our API vs Amazon API vs a proxy list:

Crawlbase API exposes an easy to use interface to any website including Amazon.
Crawlbase API gives you options to geolocate your traffic to any Amazon marketplace.
Crawlbase API allows you to receive raw HTML or scraped data.
Crawlbase API takes the hassle of maintaining proxy lists from you.
You no need to worry about CAPTCHA pages or banned IP addresses.
You can render Amazon pages that must be rendered in a real browser with JavaScript enabled.
You can use the API to scale up to any scraping volume your project needs.