Proxy vs API
to scrape Amazon.

Weigh the cost of maintaining a large proxy list, say 20,000 proxies, against using the Amazon API for product details, price comparison, similar products and availability across marketplaces. Some use cases require residential proxies: you are unlikely to see Amazon Sponsored Ads on datacenter IPs.

Proxies are often cheaper than the Amazon developer API. You can request a quota from Amazon’s developer API support team and they will share instructions and a cost summary for pulling Amazon data.

Data from web scraping is not the same as data from Amazon APIs, and it is unlikely to ever be. A few reasons:

• APIs are limited and expose only what the website chooses to expose.
• Web scraping gives you data that may never appear in any website’s API.
• Scraping quality varies with your scraper. A weak scraper may miss information the API would include.
• APIs are consistent, so using them helps keep you running.

When scraping an Amazon marketplace, request it with the right geolocated proxy. Why it matters:

• Results differ by marketplace. Amazon.com from a European IP returns different results, language and details than a United States IP.
• Amazon Prime pages exist in some marketplaces and not others, so the right proxy improves coverage and data quality.
• Amazon is more likely to show a CAPTCHA if you request, say, the German marketplace from an Asian IP, because that traffic looks unusual.

At Crawlbase we make accessing Amazon data a simple GET request to our API. You hit one endpoint, that is it, no extra steps.

The main benefits of our API vs the Amazon API vs a proxy list:

• An easy interface to any website, including Amazon.
• Geolocate your traffic to any Amazon marketplace.
• Receive raw HTML or scraped, structured data.
• No proxy lists to maintain.
• No CAPTCHA pages or banned IPs to worry about.
• Render pages that need a real browser with JavaScript.
• Scale to any volume your project needs.