Amazon sells more than 12 million products online. If you add to that the Marketplace Sellers products, that number increases to more than 350 millions unique products! With this huge offering, it’s understandable why it has become “the Google” for online shopping. It is one of the first places that customers visit in order to purchase a product or to get more information about it. Prices, product description, images and customer reviews are only some of the valuable product information that Amazon provides.
With this amount of product data available on Amazon and the large customer base, it’s no wonder why small and large businesses and professionals are very interested in collecting and analysing the Amazon products data.
In this post we are going to introduce our Amazon scraper and show you how you can extract Amazon product data directly in Google Sheets by using ImportFromWeb. Whether you need to compare Amazon products prices, monitor competition, or collect customer reviews data – ImportFromWeb can do it all.
Solutions for scraping Amazon products data
There are many solutions out there that are offering Amazon scraping products like for example ScrapeHero, WebScraping API, Beautiful Soup and others. However the issue with these scrapers is that most of them require some coding skills which makes them hard to use by non technical people like SEO experts, marketers, small business owners and others.
There are still some tools that provide scraping capabilities without the need to possess coding skills, but there are always limitations :
- ParseHub is a downloadable app that offers a free plan for scraping up to 200 pages. However this limit is reached quite fast and after then it costs 189$ per month which is above average amount.
- BrightData Amazon Scraper allows you to extract and parse product and category information for Amazon products. However it offers a limit amount of around 20 predefined parameters, extracting the data in JSON format which is not very intuitive and starts at 1000$ per month which makes it the most expensive tool in this list.
- Scrapstorm offers an automatic identification of the information available on the site. It comes as a downloadable application. The thing is that it can drain a significant amount of resources from your computer while the scraping is running in the background.
In the next section we are going to introduce you to ImportFromWeb, the one and only solution which we believe is the best Amazon scraping tool out there. Whatever the Amazon market you are interested in, it allows you to scrape hundreds of products if not thousands, retrieve more than 50 product attributes, add custom parameters and have all the data exported in a Google Sheet document. And since you will have the data in a spreadsheet, you can easily share it, make cross checks, export it to one of your tools or manipulate it in any other way.
How to use ImportFromWeb for scraping Amazon products details
What is ImportFromWeb?
ImportFromWeb is a simple to use Google Sheet plugin that can pull any data from any website into a spreadsheet using a single function. The best part is that you don’t need any coding skills so anyone can learn to use it in less than 2 minutes! All you need to do is to specify the data you want to extract using basic labels from our glossary of Amazon selectors, such as “title”, “sale_price” or “rating”.
Let’s dive into it and illustrate how you can scrape the name and price data for any Amazon product out there.
Once you have installed the ImportFromWeb add-on to your Google Sheets, we will open one new Google Sheet where we have activated the ImportFromWeb extension. We will create 3 columns as shown on the following image:
In the Product URL field we are going to paste a URL for the first product that we want to scrape the data from, and in the price column we will write a short formula where we will use the ImportFromWeb function as shown in this image:
The function is set as: =IMPORTFROMWEB(B3,$C$2) and this is where the magic happens so let’s cover it in details:
- =IMPORTFROMWEB() is the name of the function that we call from ImportFromWeb extension
- B3 value is the cell from which we will take the Amazon product page URL
- $C$2 or C2 is the attribute that we want to scrape from that page. In our case it is pointing to the “price” cell.
We will do the same for the “title” column by changing the $C$2 value to $D$2 so that it points to the “title” cell and voila – we have the price and the title for our first product! This is how the values look like in our example:
The exhaustive list of Amazon data points is available on this page
As a final step, let’s add more products into the list. We will insert the new products URLs and we will drag down our function:
As you can see we were able to add more products in a matter of seconds. And this is the main benefit of using ImportFromWeb – fast and easy scraping of product data without technical skills!
ImportFromWeb works with most of Amazon markets, including US (.com), Canada (.ca), Mexico (.com.mx), Brazil (.com.br), UK (.co.uk), France (.fr), Germany(.de), Netherlands (.nl), Spain (.es), Italy (.it), Turkey (.com.tr), India (.in), Saudi Arabia (.sa), UAE (.ae), Japan (.jp), Australia (.au), Singapore (.sg)
Benefits of using ImportFromWeb
Scrape data for hundreds of products in seconds
The ImportFromWeb works seamlessly with hundreds of formulas per sheet so you should not worry if you added too many products in a single sheet. What’s even more important, is that it is lightning quick no matter how many formulas you use so you should have your data available in a matter of a few seconds.
All product attributes available
Some of the tools for scraping out there are limited to scraping a number of attributes. ImportFromWeb is designed in a way that you can scrape more than 50 data points for the Amazon products.
Location based scraping
One another very important benefit of using ImportFromWeb is that you can retrieve location-based content. If the product price for instance varies from one country to another, you will know it! To proceed with this feature, you just need to insert the country code (see the countries list) as a third parameter in the standard function:
=IMPORTFROMWEB(B3,C2,"countryCode:us")
Update scheduling
You can automate the Amazon product data scraping so that the data is refreshed even when your sheet is closed. The schedule is set by activating a trigger in the sidebar. The trigger can be set to run hourly, daily or weekly based on your specific needs. You can find a tutorial on how to use scheduling on this link.
Regex support for cleaning and formatting your data
If you want to change your numbers from comma to dot separated, or you want to round them at a certain number of decimals, then the regex support is the right feature for you. Using the regex option you can also format dates and currencies. You can find more details about all these nice features on the following link.
Scrape Amazon Products data with a ready-to-use template
In order to simplify the scraping of Amazon products details even more for you, we have gone a step further by creating a Amazon scraping template! Once you have activated the add-on, on the sidebar shown on your right side you will find the “Templates” tab as shown on the image.
Once you have clicked on the Amazon Product template the following page will open:
This Amazon scraper tool will allow you to scrape hundreds of products within seconds. You only need to copy and paste the URL of the products for which you want to scrape the data and in a matter of seconds you will have all the data shown in your table.
The template is configured to let you choose the data you want using the selectors drop-down lists: image, featured_image_source, title, asin, sale_price, list_price, rating…you decide!
You can add up to hundreds of products in the list and have the fresh data updated on a daily basis. Hope you find this guide interesting and enjoy using ImportFromWeb!
Final thoughts
Amazon with its millions of products available on its websites represents a large data source that used in the right way can bring incredible value for you and your business. However there are not many tools that allow you to scrape this data. And those that do often have many limitations while at the same time cost hundreds of dollars per month.
That is why we have created the ImportFromWeb tool – a fast, easy to use and completely customizable tool that will meet all your needs.
Whether you need to simply compare Amazon products prices, check availability, scrape product reviews or get your competitors inventory, ImportFromWeb is the right tool for you!
We also invite you to discover the other Amazon ready-to-use scraping solutions we offer.
