Sure, scrapping an eCommerce website grants you access to critical data for competitive analysis, sales forecasting, and market research. What’s more, you can access up-to-the-minute data to put together a dynamic pricing strategy. However, there’s a caveat!
To successfully scrape an eCommerce site, especially one like Amazon, you need to understand how to handle JavaScript-rendered content, infinite scrolling, changing website structures, and legal requirements. So, how do you navigate all these hiccups?
Yes, using Python! Starting off with insights into scraping legally and ethically, here is how you can scrape an E-commerce website with Python (whether a beginner or expert scraper).
Ethical and Legal Considerations When Scraping with Python
1. Review the site’s ToS (Terms of Service)
The ToS defines the guidelines and rules for using any E-commerce website. Looking into the ToS documentation lets you know if the site owner welcomes web scraping or automated data collection bots or scripts. Scraping websites that prohibit scraping may mean having to deal with lawsuits or getting cease-and-desist orders.
2. Inspect and respect the robots.txt file
Before developing a web scraper, consider going through the robots.txt file of the target eCommerce website to know what parts of the site you can scrape.
The file is usually located in the website’s root directory and specifies which sections of the website are off-limits. Respecting the robots.txt restrictions reduces the chances of IP bans or other scraping countermeasures affecting your scraping operations.
3. Avoid overloading the server
Sending too many requests to an eCommerce website’s server in a short time can slow it down or crash it. This is possible, especially when targeting niche eCommerce sites.
So, implement rate limits within your scraping script to avoid overloading the target server, facing an http 499 status or even being blocked entirely. Or, if you find it challenging to have rate limits in place, you can outsource an eCommerce scraper.
Besides offering you web scraping tools, Python allows you to integrate your scraping scripts with third-party systems. This is another added advantage making Python greatly suitable for web scraping.
Overall, you have the option to operate your Python scraper or the eCommerce scraper separately. Then, when you need to build a robust scraping system, you can integrate the two. Here is how you can put together an effective and scalable Python eCommerce scraper.
Step-by-Step Guide to eCommerce Web Scraping in Python
Before you can start building a Python scraper, select a target eCommerce website and review its robots.txt file. Remember to go through the ToS, too.
Python is pretty simple and readable, making it easy for you to learn the syntax as a beginner or expert scraper. Moreover, it offers you an extensive ecosystem of web scraping libraries and frameworks to build a scalable scraper.
Keep in mind, Python has one of the largest active developer communities. Such a support network would come in handy whenever you need help with finding code snippets, troubleshooting issues, or learning best practices for scraping with Python. Do this to get started with scraping an eCommerce website:
1. Get Python up and running
To run Python scripts on your device, you must correctly install it. Visit Python’s official website and follow the instructions to install Python, depending on the device’s operating system. Once installed, verify its functionality by running this command:
Command:
python --versionIf all is well, the prompt should display the installed Python version. Else, you have to troubleshoot the installment with the help of the appropriate documentation.
After installing Python, install the necessary Python libraries. Some of the essential libraries include:
- Requests: For sending HTTP requests and handling incoming responses.
- BeautifulSoup: For parsing HTML pages to facilitate the extraction of data from static pages.
- Selenium: For automating a select web browser to interact with the eCommerce website of your choice. Mostly suitable for handling JavaScript content.
- Pandas: Facilitates data manipulation and analysis after scraping data from a select eCommerce website.
You can install all these libraries at once with the help of Python’s package installer, pip. Open your command prompt and run this commands:
Commands:
pip install requests
pip install beautifulsoup4
pip install selenium
pip install pandasWith these libraries and Python in place, you can write scraping scripts capable of scraping static and dynamic content. Let’s proceed to the next phase.
2. Set up your script to fetch data from the eCommerce website
To extract data from the desired pages of an eCommerce website, you first need to fetch them from the site’s server. For this, you’ll use the requests library. It allows you to send HTTP requests, like POST or GET, submit data to the server, or fetch pages from the server.
Requests simplifies the process of accessing the eCommerce content, maintaining cookies, and managing sessions. Moreover, you can customize the information within agent headers and handle responses from the server. You can mimic actual browser behavior with the help of requests and access static or dynamic content through various protocols, including HTTPs.
3. Use BeautifulSoup to parse HTML
BeautifulSoup simplifies extracting data from static pages. After fetching the web pages, BeautifulSoup converts them into a parse tree for efficient data extraction. There are built-in methods for you to extract data from HTML pages. Moreover, BeautifulSoup can handle poorly structured HTML. So, you can extract data from any page and it will transform the unstructured part of the page into a more usable format for effective analysis.
4. Use Selenium to navigate JavaScript-rendered content
Just like you interact with a browser, so can Selenium. You can configure it to fill forms, click buttons, handle pop-ups, and navigate through pages. That is why it is suitable for extracting dynamic content from eCommerce websites. It can execute JavaScript, wait for the elements to load and extract the desired data.
5. Employ Pandas for data storage and analysis
Rather than manually organizing, manipulating, and analyzing the extracted data, you can use Pandas to handle all these. It is a versatile library suited for cleaning and transforming the extracted data into useful structures for analysis. Also, after analyzing the data, Pandas provides you with tools to export the clean data in formats including SQL databases, Excel, and CSV.
6. Scale with the help of Scrapy
Want to take your scraping operations a notch higher? Employ Scrapy, a Python web scraping framework capable of extracting, processing, and storing data in various formats. It is particularly built for large-scale scraping because of its ability to handle asynchronous requests. This means it can scrape multiple pages concurrently, bolstering your scraping efforts.
Closing Words
Scrape an eCommerce website and you have access to data for market research, sales forecasting, competitive analysis, and more, including product innovation. However, scraping an eCommerce website comes with its unique challenges. From fulfilling legal and ethical requirements to dealing with dynamic content. Luckily, we’ve covered how to navigate the challenges. You can opt for a third-party scraper to do the heavy lifting for you or build yours and scale it. Take a read to find out how.