How to scrape Amazon data without an API

Welcome back! Yesterday we talked about how to scrape data from any website using Python, let’s go ahead and specifically talk about Amazon and how to scrape data from it. Now, Amazon does have an API, but there are alot of benefits of not using an API sometimes (request limits is a huge reason), so let’s get started!

Basic introduction you could probably skip that I copied from my other article

First things first, we will need to have Python installed, read my article here to make sure you have Python and some IDE installed. Next, I wrote a article on using Selenium in Python, Selenium is a web scraping package that allows us to mimic a web browser using Python, it might be best to read that article for more of an understanding on web scraping, but it’s not a necessity, you can read that article here.

Python has several different web scraping packages, beautiful soup and selenium are a few, in this tutorial we’re going to be using Selenium, in another article we’ll talk about Beautiful Soup.

Amazon Website

First off, let’s make our way over to Amazon’s website and look at a product, yesterday we used this laptop as an example, so let’s continue with it: