Web scraping – using scripts or bots to automatically extract data from websites – has become an increasingly common practice for gathering publicly available information at scale. For businesses, scraping data from major e-commerce sites like Amazon can provide valuable market intelligence, competitive insights, and consumer sentiment analysis.
However, many websites including Amazon have implemented strict measures to detect and block unauthorized web scraping. Moreover, the legal landscape around web scraping remains murky, with site owners arguing scraping constitutes theft and "unauthorized access," while scrapers believe publicly accessible data is fair game.
As a full-stack developer with extensive web scraping experience, I‘m often asked by clients – is it legal to scrape data from Amazon? The answer is not a simple yes or no, but rather "it depends." In this guide, I‘ll share an expert programmer‘s perspective on the key technical and legal factors to consider when contemplating scraping the world‘s largest online marketplace.
The Prevalent but Precarious Practice of Web Scraping
First, to underscore the significance of this issue, let‘s look at some telling statistics about the current state of web scraping:
- According to security firm Imperva, bad bots (including web scrapers) accounted for a record 25.6% of all website traffic in 2020.
- Research from Optery found that e-commerce sites are the #1 most scraped website category, making up 18% of all web scraping targets.
- The market for web scraping tools and services is projected to reach $5.7 billion by 2027, with a CAGR of 13.2% from 2020 to 2027.
Web scraping is an arms race – as companies deploy more sophisticated scraping bots, websites counter with increasingly stringent anti-scraping defenses like CAPTCHAs, user behavior analysis, IP blocking and legal action.
Amazon, as the 800-pound gorilla of online retail, is a prime target for web scraping. The massive scale of product pricing, inventory, seller, and review data available on Amazon.com is an alluring treasure trove for dropshippers, affiliate marketers, sellers, brands, hedge funds, and many others. So it‘s no surprise that Amazon is at the forefront of the technological and legal battle against unauthorized web scraping.
Amazon‘s Stance on Web Scraping
Amazon has taken an unambiguous stance against web scraping in their Conditions of Use, which every Amazon.com user agrees to:
"You may not use any robot, spider, scraper, or other automated means to access Amazon Services for any purpose without our express prior written permission."
The conditions go on to prohibit using "data mining, robots, screen scraping, or similar data gathering and extraction tools on this site."
So web scraping is clearly against Amazon‘s usage terms and will get your IP address (or entire IP range) blacklisted and blocked from accessing Amazon.com if detected. But is it actually illegal?
Violating a website‘s terms of service is not necessarily equivalent to breaking the law. The enforceability of these anti-scraping clauses remains an unsettled legal question that courts have come out different ways on.
For example, in the 2017 hiQ Labs vs. LinkedIn case, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that scraping publicly accessible data likely does not violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), even when prohibited by the site‘s TOS. The court opined that data visible to the general public cannot be considered private or protected by a login.
On the other hand, in the 2022 Compulife vs. Newman case, an insurance quotes website was able to sue a competitor for scraping their site, claiming a TOS violation qualified as "exceeding authorized access" under the CFAA.
Public vs. Private Data on Amazon
The consensus emerging from web scraping court battles is that scraping publicly available data is less likely to violate state and federal computer crime laws like the CFAA, while scraping private, login-protected info is much riskier legally.
So what qualifies as "public" versus "private" data on a site like Amazon.com? Here‘s a general breakdown:
Public Data (Scrapable with Caution)
- Product pages, including title, images, description, price, category, reviews, Q&A, etc.
- Seller profiles and feedback scores
- Brand and category pages
- "Best Seller" and "Most Wished For" lists
- Search results
Private Data (Do Not Scrape)
- Your personal account info and order history
- Logged-in user data like wishlists, save for later, and recommendations
- Non-public pricing or inventory data
- Customer emails and phone numbers
- Most backend Amazon Web Services (AWS) data
Even when scraping theoretically public Amazon data, it‘s legally safer to use the scraped info for non-commercial research and analysis purposes. The Amazon Conditions of Use specifically prohibit using scraped info "for creating competing products," as many Amazon sellers have painfully learned.
How Amazon Detects and Blocks Web Scraping
In my experience, Amazon has some of the most sophisticated bot detection and mitigation systems of any major website. Their anti-scraping measures aim to prevent automated bots and scrapers from siphoning data at scale.
Some common methods Amazon uses to identify and block suspicious scraping activity include:
Abnormal user behavior patterns – Amazon tracks signals like time spent on each page, mouse movements, scroll behavior, etc. Bots rapidly flipping through pages or erratically jumping around the site in a non-human way get flagged.
Unusually high request volume – An extreme number of pageviews or actions from one IP in a short timeframe is an obvious red flag of bot scraping. Amazon imposes strict request rate limits before blocking.
Tracking account activity – Accounts engaging in outlier usage patterns consonant with scraping (e.g. rapidly accessing hundreds of random product pages in succession) may be suspended.
Browser fingerprinting – Amazon captures many unique client-side attributes (user agent, plugins, screen size, etc.) to create a browser "fingerprint." Many requests with identical fingerprints suggest headless browser scraping.
CAPTCHAs and "Proof of Work" – The latest weapon in the anti-bot arms race, these challenge-response tests aim to filter out requests from non-human bots. Amazon employs Google‘s reCAPTCHA v3 on sensitive pages.
If a scraper is detected, the associated Amazon account may be suspended, and the IP address (or even entire netblock for a data center or proxy provider) blacklisted and blocked from accessing Amazon‘s servers. Some blocks are temporary, but repeated violations can lead to permanent bans.
Tips for Scraping Amazon Safely and Successfully
Despite Amazon‘s prohibitions and precautions, some amount of web scraping for benign market research, pricing intelligence, and SEO purposes is still very widespread. Many businesses consider the insights gleaned from Amazon data worth the risk of scraping.
If you do choose to scrape Amazon, here are some best practices to minimize the chances of detection and blocking:
Use rotating proxies and user agents. Sending requests from different IP addresses (ideally a pool of residential IPs) with varying user agent strings makes your scraping appear more distributed and human.
Space out requests with random delays. Calling pages too rapidly is a dead giveaway of robotic scraping. Slow down the crawl rate, ideally mimicking human browsing speeds with pauses.
Only scrape publicly accessible data, i.e. info you don‘t need to log in to view. Don‘t try to scrape private user data or glean info from password-protected backend systems.
Cache scraped data to avoid making unnecessary repeat requests to Amazon‘s servers. Re-scraping pages that haven‘t changed antagonizes rate limits.
Employ a scraping tool that can handle Amazon‘s anti-bot countermeasures, like solving CAPTCHAs, detecting page layout changes, and retrying failed requests.
Be judicious in how you use scraped Amazon data, avoiding unauthorized republishing, derivation of competing products, or other commercial exploitation of the data.
Even when following scraping best practices, there‘s always some possibility of disruption by Amazon, so it‘s prudent not to rely on web scraping as the sole source of mission-critical business data.
Alternative Methods to Get Amazon Data
For many use cases, there are Amazon-approved ways to access their product data without resorting to web scraping:
Amazon Product Advertising API – Amazon provides an official free API for developers to retrieve product info, pricing, and reviews. The API requires registering as an Amazon Associate.
Amazon Selling Partner API – Sellers can use this API to programmatically exchange data with Amazon about their orders, fulfillment, payments, and more.
Amazon Retail Analytics Premium – A paid data service for Amazon suppliers, providing aggregated insights on sales, market share, and customer behavior.
Affiliate Storefronts – Amazon Influencer and Onsite Associates can get enhanced API access for integrating Amazon product listings into their own sites.
There are also many SaaS platforms like Jungle Scout, Helium 10, and AMZScout that aggregate Amazon data into handy dashboards for sellers and agencies. Using a reputable provider is generally safer than "roll your own" web scraping.
The Final Verdict on Scraping Amazon
So is it legal to scrape data from Amazon? As we‘ve seen, it depends. Here‘s my TLDR as an experienced web scraping developer:
✅ Less legally risky:
- Scraping only publicly viewable Amazon data
- Respecting robots.txt directives
- Limiting request speed and volume
- Varying IP, headers, and user agents
- Using scraped data internally for non-commercial research
⛔ More legally risky:
- Scraping private/login-protected Amazon data
- Disregarding CAPTCHAs and security measures
- Sending extremely high volume of requests
- Reselling or competing with scraped data
- Republishing Amazon data on your own site
The safest path is to use Amazon‘s official APIs and seller tools wherever possible. If you do need to scrape, follow technical best practices to be a "polite" bot, and keep usage of scraped data internal.
Amazon‘s stance is clear that any scraping is unwelcome, so tread carefully. The legal precedent remains mixed, with courts applying laws like the CFAA differently in different scraping lawsuits. When in doubt, consult an attorney well-versed in the evolving legalese around web scraping.
Like many programmers, I believe information on the open web should be openly accessible. But until web scraping law catches up unambiguously, scrapers and site owners will continue to play a cat-and-mouse game within the current gray area.
Happy, ethical scraping!