How to Extract ASIN and Price Information from Amazon: A Guide for Data Scientists

How to Extract ASIN and Price Information from Amazon: A Guide for Data Scientists

As a data scientist or software engineer, extracting valuable data from large-scale websites such as Amazon is a critical skill. This blog post will provide you with step-by-step instructions on how to get Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (ASIN) and price information from Amazon.

What is ASIN?

Before we delve into the extraction process, let’s first understand what ASIN is. ASIN stands for Amazon Standard Identification Number. It’s a 10-character alphanumeric unique identifier assigned by Amazon and its partners for product identification within their product catalog. Each product sold on Amazon.com has its own unique ASIN. For books, the ASIN corresponds to the ISBN number.

Prerequisites

To follow this guide, you will need a basic understanding of Python and web scraping. Familiarity with Beautiful Soup, a Python library used for web scraping purposes to pull the data out of HTML and XML files, is a plus but not a requirement.

Step 1: Install Required Python Libraries

First, install Beautiful Soup and requests if you haven’t already done so:

pip install beautifulsoup4 requests

Step 2: Identify the URL

Identify the Amazon product URL you want to scrape. Here’s an example of a URL:

url = 'https://www.amazon.com/dp/<ASIN>'

The <ASIN> part is where you replace the ASIN of the product you want to scrape.

Step 3: Send HTTP Request

Next, send an HTTP request to the URL and save the response from the server in a response object called r:

import requests
r = requests.get(url)

Step 4: Parse HTML Content

Now, parse the HTML content of the page with Beautiful Soup and print it out:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text, 'html.parser')
print(soup.prettify())

Step 5: Extract ASIN and Price

To extract the ASIN, you can use Beautiful Soup’s find() function to find the data-asin attribute:

asin = soup.find("div", {"id": "dp"})['data-asin']
print(asin)

To extract the price, find the span element with the id of priceblock_ourprice:

price = soup.find("span", {"id": "priceblock_ourprice"}).text.strip()
print(price)

Conclusion

By following these steps, you can extract ASIN and pricing data from Amazon products for analysis or other purposes. Keep in mind that Amazon’s website structure may change over time, so make sure to adjust your scraping strategy accordingly. Be respectful and make sure to comply with Amazon’s robots.txt file and terms of service when scraping.

keywords: ASIN, price, Amazon, data extraction, web scraping, Python, Beautiful Soup

Please note that this blog is for educational purposes only. Web scraping should be done responsibly and in accordance with the terms of service of the website.

About Saturn Cloud

Saturn Cloud is your all-in-one solution for data science & ML development, deployment, and data pipelines in the cloud. Spin up a notebook with 4TB of RAM, add a GPU, connect to a distributed cluster of workers, and more. Join today and get 150 hours of free compute per month.