Scrape product information from Amazon

In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to scrape the product information from Amazon.com. (video version is also available here).

To follow through, you may want to use this URL in the tutorial:

https://www.amazon.com/s?rh=i%3Aelectronics%2Cn%3A172541%2Cp_n_feature_four_browse-bin%3A12097501011&ie=UTF8&lo=electronics

We will scrape data such as product title, brand, rating, and price from each product detail page with Octoparse.

This tutorial will also cover:

• Deal with AJAX for pagination

 

Here are the main steps in this tutorial:  [Download task file here ]

1. "Go To Web Page" - to open the targeted web page
2. Create a pagination loop - to scrape all the results from multiple pages
3. Create a "Loop Item" - to loop click into each item on each list
4. Extract data - to select the data for extraction
5. Start extraction - to run the task and get data

 

• Click "+ Task" to start a new task with Advanced Mode

Advanced Mode is a highly flexible and powerful web scraping mode. For people who want to scrape from websites with complex structures, like amazon.com, we strongly recommend Advanced Mode to start your data extraction project.

• Paste the URL into the "Extraction URL" box and click "Save URL" to move on

 

• Click "Next" button
• Click "Loop click next page" on "Action Tips"
• Set up AJAX Load for the "Click to paginate" action

Amazon.com applies the AJAX technique to the pagination button. Therefore, we need to set up AJAX Load for the "Click to paginate" action.

• Uncheck the box for "Retry when page remains unchanged (use discreetly for AJAX loading)"
• Check the box for "Load the page with AJAX" and set up AJAX Timeout as 10 seconds
• Click "OK" to save

Tips! If you want to learn more about AJAX, here is a related tutorial you might need： Deal with AJAX

 

• Click "Go To Web Page" to go back to the first page

When extracting data throughout multiple pages, you should always begin your task building on the first page.

 

• Click the name of the first product on the current page
• Click "Select all" on the "Action Tips" panel

Octoparse will automatically select all the links to the detail pages on the current page. The selected links will be highlighted in green while other links to the detail pages will be highlighted in red.

• Click "Loop click each element" to create a "Loop Item"

Octoparse will click through each link captured in the "Loop Item", and open the detail page.

 

After you click "Loop click each element", Octoparse will open the detail page of the first product.

• Click on the data you need on the page
• Select "Extract text of the selected element" from the "Action Tips"
• Rename the fields by selecting from the pre-defined list or inputting on your own

Tips! When the content of the page has already shown out, but it is still loading, you could click the "X" button at the right end of the navigating bar to stop loading.

 

• Click “Start Extraction” on the upper left side
• Select “Local Extraction” to run the task on your computer, or select “Cloud Extraction” to run the task in the Cloud (for premium users only)

 

Here is the sample output. You can see some blank fields in the column "Price". This is because these products are out of stock and thus they don't have the price information. 

Tips! By default, if Octoparse cannot find the element of the defined pattern on the page, the field will be left blank. However, Octoparse may fail to find the element of the defined pattern even if the element needed is shown on the website. If you encounter this problem, here are a related tutorial you might need： What to do with those blank fields I got in the extracted result?

 

Happy data hunting!

 

Author: Surie

Editor：Yvonne

 

From: https://www.octoparse.com/tutorial-7/scrape-product-information-from-amazon