Ever wonder why people spend the time to scrape Amazon reviews? People copy you when you’re the best. They look up to you all the time for that one particular thing that you are excellent at. This imitation is widely spread in almost all domains of life. Many styles come and go but the only thing that remains constant is, the one who is excellent serves as a role model for people. Business world is not immune from this characteristic as well. 

Why Scrape Amazon Reviews?

All the business giants serve as role models for startups and incubated businesses. To follow the foot-steps, one must have information about the role model. But, asking for such information is the same as asking someone about all the ins and outs of their work. All the secrets that were discovered after years of hard work and determination. That is a priceless asset. 

Nobody would be willing to give it out to anyone at any cost. Yet, think tanks have found solutions to this problem. They simply analyze each and every byte of data they can find about that particular company and infer important results out of it. Results which can help them grow and walk on the footsteps of the ones who are successful now. 

No company or business setup would allow access to their data to anyone no matter what. In this situation, web scraping helps the users to scrape data from the ecommerce business giants and use it for analysis. Web scraping refers to the collection of all kinds of data from a website to compare or use for analysis. People normally do this when they’re looking to start a business of their own and want to know the different trends of the market. There are many tools and techniques that can be used to scrape data online. 

Online business is growing at a very fast pace. Many companies have excelled a lot and serve as an example for all the entrepreneurs out there. Amazon is the most successful ecommerce giant with more than 100 million American prime members. The turnover of the company is escalating every year and has achieved many milestones. Every entrepreneur looks forward to achieve the same heights of success. 

Scraping Various Information from Amazon

For this, they need to think and work the same way as Amazon does. The product information such as prices, delivery time and different offers on products are not a coincidence. They are decided, keeping in mind all the market statistics, demand and supply, in turn, they get the best results. Amazon generated $232.9 billion in revenue in 2018. Moreover there are 5 million marketplace sellers across all Amazon marketplaces. 

More than 50% of sales of Amazon come from third party sellers. Even after surmounting many obstacles and reaching the top, Amazon never compromised on its quality. This is inferred from the amazing number of reviews the customers give about Amazon. Only this year, 113,098,076 sellers have given reviews on the site. The interesting and astonishing thing is only 4% of these reviews were negative. 

The company with net worth roaming around 1-trillion dollars and all the other jaw dropping stats attracts many eyes. This is because of many reasons mentioned above. Amazon’s data is a kind of safe haven for entrepreneurs. For the same reason there are a lot of people who are using Amazon’s data for analyzing the market and using the results to grow their businesses. They get this data through Amazon scraping. 

Amazon Data for Business Intelligence

They scrape important data from Amazon and use it for their purposes. The data normally being collected from Amazon is quite versatile. It ranges from prices of different products to reviews about the products, from the customer profiles to their contact information, from what people normally like to what is not getting much sales. This data can, no doubt help a business man to plan his sale strategy, the products he should invest in and the changes he needs to make in the quality of the products. They compare everything and then try to give a better offer than Amazon or at least come at par with what Amazon is offering. 

Scraping data can be quite a tricky job if one is not familiar with all the ins and outs of it. Scraping data basically refers to the process of importing information from a website into a spreadsheet into your computer. This is one of the most efficient and time saving ways to get data from a website. 

Amazon Proxies

There are numerous methods to scrape data but the easiest one is scraping through Amazon proxies. One can use Html or other coding techniques for scraping but everything changes when it comes to scrape over 1,000,000 products from the largest ecommerce website. The proxy servers are the best solution for this. Easy and efficient way to scrape data. 

Proxies are a vital part of any website scraping project. There are many things to know before using a proxy server to scrape through Amazon or any other site and it can get pretty hard to know where to get started. How do you attach the proxy with your scraping software? What number of proxies are required for a particular project? What kind of proxies do you need and how can you access them? 

Keep reading for answers to all of your questions.

Amazon Scraping-Compatible Proxies

Proxy servers work on the principle of using someone as a cover. When scraping a website, a software has to make many requests to one website and it can get caught. That’s because so many requests from the same IP can make Amazon insecure and it would surely lead to deterrent measures by the website. These measures involve blocking and banning by the website. These bans can last a lifetime as well. 

So one needs to be very careful while scraping Amazon reviews. That’s because Amazon’s policy is very strict in this regard. They can also take legal action against the user. 

A proxy server is kind of a veil for a scraper. It works as a cover as I mentioned earlier. A scraping software would make many requests. So when you’re using an Amazon proxy, the request would not go directly to the Amazon’s site. It would first go the proxy server and that server would then request on your behalf and would pass the response to you. 

From the view of target site (Amazon in this case) they don’t know what is going on. They simply see it as a normal request coming from proxy server’s IP address. Good proxy servers send no information about the original machine. 

There are two main benefits of using Amazon proxy servers for scraping data. The first one is that your machine’s IP would stay hidden and the second is you can get past rate limits on the target website. Most of the big websites have software that helps them detect the presence of many requests coming from a single server in a very short span of time. They simply block it or some send access denied message. If you’re willing to get access to thousands of pages of data from a particular website, then you’ll likely run into rate limits. 

That can simply be avoided by using a large number of proxy servers in this case (Amazon proxy servers). In this way all of the servers would stay in the rate limit without being detected by the website being scraped.

How Many Amazon Proxies Do You Need?

One of the important questions that arise while using proxy servers and scraping Amazon reviews is, how many proxy servers would you need approximately? Well it is simple mathematics. The rate limit dominates the number of proxies one user can need, and this all also is greatly dependent upon guessing the rate limit of every site. That happens because every site has their own criteria for setting rate limits. They have the total right to do so. 

Therefore, it becomes difficult for the scraper to judge what would be the rate limit of a particular website. At times it is 600 requests per hour and it can decrease to 300 requests per hour in case of the websites that have strict policies. So, to find out how many servers we need, we can simply choose a number between 600 and 300 to stay on the safe side. You can make 400 requests per hour from one IP address and stay inside the request limit. Now simply divide the total requests that you have to make per day by the number you’ve chosen, 400 in this case. 

This will bring you to the number of proxies you need approximately. If you’re scraping 100,000 URLs per hour, you’ll need 100,000/500=200 different proxy servers to be approximately at the rate limit.  This leads us to a conclusion i.e. if we rotate all the 100,000 requests per hour in the right way over the 200 proxy servers we have access to, you’ll just be making 500 requests per hour. If you can afford a little bit more over 200 proxy servers, that would serve as an icing on the whole dish. In other words, it would make your life a lot easier by simply adding 2 times to 3 times more proxy servers than the calculated ones. 

So it would be a far better investment if you use 400 servers to scrape 100,000 URLs per hour. 

What Type Of Proxies To Use?

One more question that hits the mind of scrapers is what type of proxy server should they use? That is an important question and should be addressed properly. Setting up our own proxy servers isn’t the best choice. These days people rent these servers and that’s the most economical and efficient solution. So when your goal is to scrape a huge website, you cannot manually administer hundreds of proxies. 

Using software won’t be a worthy choice as well. You have to change the pool of servers from time to time which is the same as getting the house cleaned timely. It protects you from harm.  

Deciding which proxy to depends upon two main factors. The first one is whether you’re looking for having exclusive access to the server. It means that you have two options, Shared or dedicated proxy servers. The second factor is what protocol you’re using to connect to the proxy over. 

Dedicated Proxy

The first factor is pretty much clear for everyone. If you get a dedicated proxy, no one is going to mess with your setup. It will work totally as per your demands and setup. No additional requests would be made to the site that you’re scraping and hence your rate limit would stay unaffected. Well, all these benefits come with a price. 

Shared Proxy

In case of shared proxies, there could be multiple users accessing the same website and in turn affecting the rate limit. Nevertheless it is cheaper so one can rent many proxy servers as mentioned earlier, to be on the safer side.  

The second factor is not a problem at all. It depends upon the user to choose the protocols (SOCKS or HTTP). Most of the proxies offer both connection types so it won’t be much of a problem i.e. deciding factor.

Choosing which proxy services are best in the market is also a challenge. Everyone looks for the best in terms of efficiency and economics.

What Is A Good Amazon Proxy?

With so many proxy providers in the market, you can use these points as a reference when picking the right provider:

Reliability

Proxy providers should be reliable and the proxies provided should work as expected.

Uptime

Top proxy providers are providing an unprecedented 99.9% uptime – make sure they provide you with such uptime.

Availability of Proxy Locations

Amazon is available in multiple countries. Having proxies from a country that you are scraping data from, would work best for such use-case.

Customer Support

Never forget customer support. A good proxy company should provide unparalleled customer support to their customers.