The Easiest Way to Track Amazon Price

Amazon is an e-commerce giant with 12 million+ products and 200 million unique US visitors per month. A news giant reported:

55% of the shoppers start their online shopping journey on Amazon, and
90% of shoppers visiting a retailer’s page would compare the prices with the selection on Amazon.

Wow! Those are mesmerizing stats. No doubt why Amazon rules digital commerce. But how are these stats significant to your business? Chances are your buyers are comparing your product’s prices with that of your competitors and maybe with your own product’s Amazon prices if you’re on Amazon as a seller. Are you?. And it’s no secret that even small differences in prices affect online buyers’ purchase decisions and your sales. You can price your products based on cost, value, demand, competition. And tracking amazon prices could be a great way to intelligently price your products. Especially now, when eCommerce is booming in a COVID world. In short, you can scrape Amazon prices:

To intelligently price your products
To build your own Amazon price research & intelligence tool, or a price comparison website/plugin
To build a stellar pricing strategy for your Amazon FBA business

There are different approaches to track product data from Amazon. Read this article to discover the easiest way to track Amazon prices.

Table of Contents

How to track Amazon’s price?

For individual and small-scale needs you can use services like CamelCamelCamel, Keepa, or Amazon’s very own Amazon Assistant. But these are either not scalable or not affordable. Scraping is a scalable, affordable, customizable, as well as efficient approach to tracking Amazon ASIN prices.

What is web scraping?

Web scraping is an automated, programmatic approach to extract/collect data from the web and store it in your local or cloud database. You can store scraped data in your preferred format i.e, JSON, CSV, XLS, etcetera.

What are Amazon ASINs?

Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) is a unique 10 character alphanumeric code that identifies a specific product listed on Amazon. There are services like Amazon ASIN which provides product data, including pricing trends for ASINs. But it is not scalable or customizable.

How to scrape Amazon price data?

You can scrape amazon price data either manually, or write your scrapers, or use no-code tools to click once and scrape million times. Now, we shall discuss these three approaches to building your amazon price tracking engine.

Manual Scraping

Earlier when brick and mortar used to be the only retail channel, manually updating the prices was kind of effective but now prices change in a tick of a clock. Manual scraping is not the option. Manual scraping is when humans individually open each product landing page, copy the price and ASIN and enter it in an excel sheet or some other database. Manual scraping is a sure-shot approach to eat on your profits and fail.

Automated scraping solutions are the best way out. Whether you’re monitoring your competitor or not, your competitor is monitoring you and other competitors to intelligently price their products for boosting sales. They are leveraging scraping and so should you to track Amazon price data. We’ve two (technically three!) options for automated scraping of Amazon prices. What are they? Yes, programming your scrapers, or using a click and scrape tool.

Writing your own Amazon price scraping programs

This method requires you to have a programming background in any of the major programming languages like Javascript, Python, Java, PHP etcetera. You can use open-source tools like Scrapy to write your customized scrapers. These are very scalable, time-efficient, and of course customizable. The only two factors you should not choose this is when you don’t know how to code or lack the time & money required to write and set up your scraper. It’s okay if you don’t have a high budget for your custom Amazon price scraping solution. We have got a third option for you. Thinking, “how should you scrape Amazon prices if you want to quickly get started on a low budget without compromising on scalability or flexibility”? Enters Click & scrape no-code solutions.

No-code automated scraping solutions for Amazon price tracking

No code scraping solutions have all the benefits that you get while writing your scrapers, but it takes away the pain of learning, writing, debugging, maintaining code. Using no-code screen scraping tools like Octoparse, you can start scraping millions of Amazon products within 5 minutes. Here’s a detailed tutorial to get you started with scraping Amazon products using Octoparse. Here in this article, I’ll give you a quick hands-on demo to scrape Amazon prices with ASIN details in less than five minutes.

Pre-requisites:

Download Octoparse Tool.

Post Login, you get the following screen:

As you can observe there is an Amazon template already available to get started instantly. Click on it to get to the list of 19 different templates for scraping Amazon prices across different countries. Or if you don’t see the Amazon template icon on the home page click on the +New button on the extreme left top of the screen, and then on the Task Templates option:

Now, you should see the following screen where different popular templates are listed:

Select Amazon from the list and it takes you to a list of Amazon templates:

Let’s select the US URLs Amazon option i.e, the second option in the first row.

You can also view the sample of data you’ll extract before you try the scraper:

Then you’re asked to enter the keywords for your target products and a number of pages to scrape. We’ve entered “Jeans” as our target product keyword, and the PIN code we entered belongs to Oreland in Ohio state of the US.

Now, if you’re a premium member you can schedule the scraper or start extracting in the Cloud by clicking respective options:

You must be like, “Wait, you said the product is free!”. Yes, it is. There is a freemium plan, but for a premium experience, Octoparse also has different plans for premium customers. Now, having shown you how you can get started scraping in one minute, I’ll tell you how you can build your custom scraper using an advanced customized template. It’s completely free to scrape the data using advanced templates that you build on your own but again for scalable requirements we strongly recommend a non-freemium plan. Freemium should be preferred when you’re evaluating the tool, or when the scraping needs are very small.

To start building custom templates, click on the +New button at the top, yes like you did earlier. Next, click on advanced mode.

In the next screen, enter this URL, and click SAVE.

You’ll either land on that URL or Amazon throws a CAPTCHA to solve. The last time I was scraping Amazon India, it did not throw any CAPTCHA, but this time it did.

To solve the captcha you can turn on the Browse button at the top then solve the captcha, click continue shipping, and switch back to template building mode by turning off the browser mode.

Also, on every action set a wait before execute time of 7 seconds, so that you can solve CAPTCHAs if it pops again.

For big projects, the Octoparse team can help you customize Javascript templates and integrate Captcha solving solutions in it to prevent CAPTCHAs from interrupting your scraping experience.

Now, to create pagination on the search listing page, scroll to the bottom and click on the Next button and in the “Tips” pop-up select “Loop click single URL”. Usually, when we need to scrape all product data, we go to the product landing page but we have already covered scraping Amazon product data. This tutorial is just about scraping ASIN prices, so we won’t visit every single product page, instead, we’ll scrape Amazon’s product prices from the listing page itself.

Our Amazon price scraping workflow now looks like this:

Click on “Go to Web Page”, and you’ll get back to page-1 of the search results page. When you’re creating a pagination loop, you’re automatically taken to page-2 of search results because you clicked on NEXT.

Once the page loads, click on the “Pagination” box. Remember, you have to click on the box not on the “Click to paginate” button.

Now, click a search result item in such a way that the entire component is selected.

Next, Click on Select sub-elements in the Action Tips dialog, and the Octoparse scraper automatically selects the remaining 48 product items on the page:

Click on the Select all option in the action Tips. If you hover over to Field Names, you get an option to delete fields. Let’s delete all fields except Title i.e, Field1, and price i.e, Field4. Now hover your mouse on the image, and click on it.

You’ll see –

Now, click on “A” at the bottom because we need product URLs. We see this in the Action Tips:

Click on “Extract the URL of the selected link”.

Our data preview should now look like this:

Save the workflow and let’s run it.

For demonstration, we’ll run this on the local system by selecting the first option “Run task on your device”.

It starts scraping. Note, if Amazon throws CAPTCHA, solve it and click on “Run”. In my case, it didn’t. Within a minute Octoparse scraped 344 Product’s Title, URL, and Price data. Remember, this is on a freemium account. Imagine the speed, scale, and scraping experience you will get with premium plans 😉

Want to look at how the data looks? Click on “Export Data”.

Then press OK. Give a file name and that’s it. Yay!! We successfully scraped 300+ products in under a minute.

Glimpse into the data by uploading it on Google Sheets:

Conclusion

It’s easy to track Amazon prices using the right tools. In this article, we saw what is web scraping, why you should scrape Amazon prices, and how you can scrape Amazon prices for free using Octoparse. Did you see that? How fast Octoparse is, and how easy 🙂 On a broader level, here are some of the obvious benefits of using Octoparse as your Amazon price scraping solution: