Amazon, the biggest company in the world, is still doing well in the e-commerce sector. Unofficial estimates put the percentage of web pages targeted by scrapers at around 50% of all pages. If we’re talking about global website traffic, Amazon is by far the most scraped.
Because of its immense popularity, scraping efforts in this market also encounter substantial resistance. Failure to use the proper tools and approaches can make Amazon scraping extremely difficult and problematic. In this post, we will go over how to use a proxy to scrape Amazon. We will also go over some things to remember before you start scraping.
What is Web Scraping?
This practice of extracting data from a webpage is called “web scraping.” It is then exported into a more user-friendly format after the data has been collected. This can take the form of an API or a spreadsheet.
Web scraping can be done manually; however, automated methods are usually better for extracting web data because they are faster and cheaper. The reason is that automated systems may swiftly extract data from the web.
But, web scraping is usually not an easy task. There is a vast array of features and capabilities available to web scrapers since websites can have many different forms and setups.
Web scraping is usually done with the intention of selling the collected data to other users or participating in promotional activities on websites. While some websites do prohibit certain forms of data mining, the practice has nonetheless grown in popularity.
Why is Proxy Essential for Web Scraping?
The term “website scraping” describes the practice of automatically collecting data from various websites, whether those sites are structured or not. The usage of software tools called web scrapers is essential for the systematic collection of data from websites. The code for these scrapers can be written in a number of languages, such as Python or JavaScript, or they can utilize libraries and frameworks that were already created for web scraping.
Price comparison, market research, competitor monitoring, and search engine optimization are some common uses of web scraping.
To facilitate automated tools’ navigation of the web and avoid obstacles, proxies are an essential component of web scraping. If they want to stay hidden, proxies can use IP address hopping or residential/mobile proxies to make themselves look like ordinary users.
Using reliable proxies can greatly lessen the chances of facing an IP block and get beyond the rate limits set by some websites. Say a marketing firm wants to scrape data from several websites to learn more about the trends in the sector. When you use a proxy that can rotate IP addresses, the procedure becomes significantly easier.
Using IP addresses from specified regions, certain proxies can circumvent geo-restrictions on content by making it seem as though the user is requesting it from a government-approved country. On top of that, by using encryption techniques, current proxy servers hide the user’s actual geolocation and identity.
To illustrate the point, consider a US citizen attempting to access a Chinese website that is only available within China. The most efficient way to accomplish this would be to utilize a proxy that has an IP address associated with China.
An excellent tool for proxy servers is the CAPTCHA solver. Sure, there are a few ways to do it; nevertheless, most proxies employ some sort of machine learning to solve text- or image-based CAPTCHAs. Moreover, some proxies employ headless browsers to engage with dynamic content like JavaScript and tackle more complex CAPTCHA problems.
For this purpose, proxy servers can be helpful, as they mask the scraper’s identity and change IP addresses, making automated activity harder for websites to detect.
Using Proxy Pools
Suppose you’re trying to scrape data from Amazon using a single IP address or proxy. In that case, you might be limiting your performance, crawl reliability, number of simultaneous queries, and geo-targeting options.
This fact highlights the importance of having a proxy pool that can efficiently distribute traffic among numerous proxies for optimal data scraping results.
The following factors can influence the eventual size of the proxy pool:
- Data scraping from websites with advanced anti-bot countermeasures will necessitate a larger pool of proxies for the targeted websites.
- Making a specific number of requests every hour is highly suggested.
- You get to decide which proxy server to use—a residential IP address, a mobile device, or a datacenter.
- The reliability of the IP addresses you employ as proxies is important, regardless of whether they originate from mobile devices, datacenters, or private residences.
- How feature-rich your proxy management software is in relation to session management, throttling, proxy rotation, and other aspects.
With the increased anonymity that residential IPs are renowned for, residential proxies are “mimicking” the role of datacenters in terms of reliability. This is something that has been noticed when observing a proxy network directly connected to an Internet service provider (ISP).
Residential and mobile locations may have far higher IP quality than datacenters, which may have much lower IP quality. However, datacenter IPs outperformed the other two categories in terms of stability when tested in a typical peer-to-peer network.
Types of Proxy IPs
Option selection is available for IPs in three main categories. They are explained in detail as follows:
Residential IPs:
Residential IPs are the numerical identifiers given to individual homes. They enable the transmission of your requests over a private, encrypted network. The following section will give us more information about the many kinds of IPs that are utilized, as residential proxies are the subject of this article.
‘datacenters IPs:
The most common proxy IPs are mentioned here, though there are many more. In datacenters, you’ll find the servers that assign these IP addresses, hence the name. As of right now, datacenter IPs are the most reasonably priced proxy IPs available.
Mobile IPs:
Mobile IPs are the private Internet Protocol addresses that mobile devices use. Since it steals the IP address of another mobile user in order to scrape the web, these IPs might be expensive to acquire.
There are three different ways to categorize proxies: public, shared, and dedicated. Anyone can utilize a public or open proxy server, making them insecure. Here is a rundown of what’s happening. This will result in the blocking of your IP addresses very quickly. Utilizing a dedicated proxy is the most effective way to achieve high-quality performance while using a larger proxy pool.
Using Residential proxies for Amazon product scraping
It is not uncommon for Amazon to provide inaccurate information when an IP address is reported. Your data will be inaccurate in the end if your scraping is compromised and an IP address is found. Ultimately, you can lose a lot of time and money if you don’t figure out how to fix this.
You might be able to avoid problems like these by using residential proxies with your web scraping program. Identifying and connecting residential IP addresses to bot operations is considerably more challenging. A datacenter proxy may quickly and easily restrict your IP address by linking it to the datacenter.
In addition, if you choose the residential option, you can choose the exact location and perform any type of geo-targeted scraping. One example is the availability of region-specific data, such as shipping costs and other relevant details.
You must remember the following details:
- If you want top-notch scraping results, you need to take user agent administration seriously.
- Make sure that scraping and proxy servers do not cause you any trouble.
- To stay undetected while crawling Amazon, try varying the delays.
A more efficient way to retrieve Amazon orders.
With a dynamic network that provides further scalability improvements and faster proxy speeds, Bright Data provides a premium proxy solution.
An efficient and safe way to start scraping Amazon is via a service that provides circulating residential IP addresses from across the globe.
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