Scraping Amazon: How to scrape Amazon reviews in under a minute?

Paid Amazon reviews have become the norm of the modern marketplace. Consumers have no choice but to rely on what they are told, and it's up to the few that still trust their instincts to find out which reviews are trustworthy. What is the best way to tell which reviews are paid? Furthermore, how can we scrape them promptly? Let me show you!

Those with experience scraping Amazon should read this article. It covers the basics of how to scrape for reviews in under a minute.

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping, also referred to as web harvesting or web data extraction, is a software technique for extracting information from websites. The web scraping software may "watch" and interpret elements on a page or present page content in alternative ways and then save the resulting interpretation. This will allow you to extract data in an automated fashion, that is, without human website intervention. Amazon Reviews Scraping is a perfect way to fetch all the reviews for your products in one go.

Use cases of Amazon review scaping:

1. Find competitors' product reviews for review manipulation:

A couple of months ago, Amazon.com announced that Amazon.com would introduce a new 'Reviews' section on its website homepage to increase customer review and rating feedback.

2. Collect reviews and ratings for products to be sold:

After some tests, we found that we could get the best results by scraping the Amazon product review webpage daily via an automated script.

3. Use Amazon product reviews to determine whether or not customers are satisfied with your product:

Sometimes, more is needed to know whether or not customers are happy with your product. You may also want to know their opinion of your competitors' products. In this case, it would be wise to use a review scraping software tool that deeply analyzes all reviews, allowing you to see which ones are written by real people who have used the product in question.

4. Find new product ideas:

Since Amazon reviews are a great source of reviews and ratings, you can use them to determine what you should build next. The tools allow you to get detailed information on what people want and what they don't want. Here's how it works - a person might ask, "What kind of tool would you recommend for cutting wood?" They might have googled about it in the past, but now that Amazon has implemented the 'Reviews' section on its website homepage, they can see which feedback is strong or weak.

Benefits of Amazon reviews scraping:

1. You can verify the authenticity of the reviews:

• The number of reviews;
• The number of stars;
• The use of superlatives in comments (e.g., "perfect," "great");
• The presence of spam comments and keyword stuffing;
• Excessive mentions of the product's features rather than its benefits.

2. You can collect more data from the Web than you could collect through manual methods:

Review Scraping Tools contains large amounts of data from multiple sources, allows you to automate data collection fully, and saves time when performing day-to-day operations.

3. You can gather more information than you could with pre-built software:

Review Scraping Tools are built based on open-source codes to allow third-party development of tools that fit specific applications.

4. You can obtain data at the source:

Review Scraping Tools collect data that is not only unmodified but also enriched with additional meta-information.

How to scrape product reviews from Amazon

Scraping Amazon reviews will help you maximize your client's return on investment. It will improve the quality of reviews and broaden your base of genuine reviewers. However, Amazon reviews are more challenging to fetch than they seem. Here's what you should keep in mind when scraping Amazon product reviews:

• Avoid spam comments using an anti-spam software tool or script.
• If a user leaves a review within 24 hours of buying a product, it should be considered fake.
• some products have no reviews or ratings at all.
• The competition on Amazon is fierce, so you should scoop up as many honest reviews as possible to gain an edge over your competitors.
• It's essential to scrape the reviews in any language - this will help broaden the base of genuine reviewers and make them more international.
• ReviewScraper is suitable for extracting only negative reviews from Amazon.

Scraping Amazon Reviews: The Basics

There are several ways to scrape Amazon reviews. One way is to configure an automated script that runs every time a page is loaded in your browser. The other way is to use regular expressions. Let's start with the latter.

Regular expressions have been around for decades and are still widely used in programming languages like Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. You can find a great explanation of them in the Wikipedia article. What you need to know about them is that they are powerful tools that can be used for all sorts of things, such as replacing text or extracting specific characters such as digits or special characters like ampersands (&). To scrape Amazon reviews, you need to use the following regular expression:

<a id="rLink_\w+" href="(/.*)?" title="(.+)">\w*?</a>

This regular expression is used to match all product URLs in Amazon. You'll modify it so that it will scrape all product reviews from Amazon continuously. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Use the Firebug add-on in Firefox (or equivalent add-ons for other browsers) to a) view the HTML source of a webpage and b) highlight text that you want to extract.

2. Using the tool of your choice, extract the text you highlighted in Step 1.

3. Insert a list of all URLs from which you want to collect reviews - they should be placed within a single pair of square brackets. For example:
(http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00XZ0TKNK/?tag=thetoolreport-20)

4. Use the following regular expression to extract all product review texts from Amazon:
<a id="rLink_\w+" href="(/.*)?" title="(.+)">\w*?</a>

5. Re-highlight the HTML source in Firebug and save the page. You should find that the text that is 
from Amazon is now present in Firebug:

6. Use a tool like w3c_validator to validate the HTML that you just saved. You can now use this validated HTML to extract product reviews from Amazon by running a simple PHP script on it (see below).

7. Paste this code into your PHP script:

$url = "http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00XZ0TKNK/?tag=thetoolreport-20";
$regex = '/<a id="rLink_\w+" href="(/.*?)" title="(.+?)">\w*?</a>/';
$products = preg_match($regex, $html, $matches);
for ($i=0; $i<sizeof($matches); ++$i) {
echo $products [$i] ['title']. ' ';
echo htmlspecialchars($products [$i] ['href'], ENT_QUOTES,"UTF-8") . " |."

Wrapping up:

Scraping Amazon reviews is a powerful way to help you better understand why your product has succeeded or failed. And this understanding will play a critical role in helping you create more successful outcomes in the future.

There were two lawsuits against Amazon related to their review system. In March 2018, a New York judge granted a summary judgment in favor of the plaintiff in the case of "Moranic v. Amazon.com," which was an individual who sued Amazon alleging that they had been falsely removed from a Top Seller's List because they received low feedback and had no reviews. The judge ruled that the removal of an individual from the Top Seller's List could not be considered "aggregate data" and, therefore, was not subject to disclosure under New York law because:

In total, 27 million reviews were written by 25 million individuals. It was done via a computer script that would repeatedly navigate to Amazon's website and submit reviews in the same manner as if human users were entering them. This script aims to identify and exploit specific characteristics of Amazon's review system to mine reviews from it.