Amazon Data Extractor

[Gill Bates]

Can someone suggest an easy to use program to extract from Amazon some of the lesser used fields such as Date First Available or Days in Top 100? Lots of programs out there to pull Product Name, Price, etc but not the lesser fields.
Thanks

[dnlashrafi]

azon hot deal finder
asinspector
amasuite v4

[Gill Bates]

dnlashrafi,
Thanks for the suggestions. I have Amasuite v3 but it doesn't include the First Date Available that I want. Azon Hot Deal Finder does allow me to sort by release date so that should be a great help. Thanks and Happy New Year!

[moonbeam]

You might be able to to it with the SEOTools for Excel plugin, or with Screaming Frog SEO Spider, or Scrapebox. I do not see a "first date available" listed on any of the product pages I checked. If you can show me where that appears, I might be able to test if it can be scraped or not.

The SEOTools for Excel plugin can scrape pretty much any page element based on it's XPath, which can be found by highlighting something on the page, right clicking on it, and choosing "Inspect" then "Copy" and "Xpath". The plugin adds a bunch of new functons to Excel, one of which is called Xpathonurl, which you just need to provide two pieces of information - the url of the page you want to scrape something from and the Xpath of the page element.

Screaming Frog and Scrapebox can do similar, but they can also scrape a page element by the HTML it's wrapped in. You basically specify the unique HTML that comes before what you're trying to scrape and the unique HTML that comes after it. They can also scrape by Xpath, and Regular Expressions too. I am not very fluent with RegEx though.

I've also seen some examples with the SEOTools plugin where they pointed to some sort of XML file as the URL, and were able to scrape data from that - maybe that "first date available" is available via some XML url? Or through their API?

[Gill Bates]

Thanks for the help.
Using this link as an example, look for the Product Description and on the right side, you will find the Date First Available. (September 21, 2015).
http://www.amazon.com/HP-11-r010nr-11-6-...ds=laptop.
Amazon use to give you a choice of Sorting by Newest when viewing items.

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Sorry, I meant Product Information, not Product Description.

[moonbeam]

(01-12-2016 08:25 PM)Gill Bates Wrote:  Thanks for the help.
Using this link as an example, look for the Product Description and on the right side, you will find the Date First Available. (September 21, 2015).
http://www.amazon.com/HP-11-r010nr-11-6-...ds=laptop.
Amazon use to give you a choice of Sorting by Newest when viewing items.

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Sorry, I meant Product Information, not Product Description.

Ok, I tried this with the SEOTools plugin for Excel. You can sort of do what you're looking for, but the main issue is the way the function works, using XPath, it doesn't catch all of the dates - only some. The reason being the Xpath to that date on each product page is not always the same. Amazon's product pages don't necessarily follow a consistent format. Some product pages don't have that date listed at all. And those that do, put it in a different location from time to time.

I'm also trying it out with Scrapebox, which in theory should work better, since you can just specify the unique HTML that comes before and after the date. But right now it's not working for me. I think it's because I had Scrapebox set to too many simultaneous connections at once, and Amazon may be temporarily blocking me as a result. I'll try again in a few hours.

[Gill Bates]

Moonbeam,
I appreciate the effort.
It seems someone should develop software that can capture more fields on Amazon. Information like when a product was first available or it's rank even if it is 23,223 in Best Sellers could be useful. Especially if you can run it every day and see if something is moving up the charts quickly.
Once again, Thanks

[ramzes12]

jungle scout

[Gill Bates]

Thanks for the suggestion about Jungle Scout. I did previously check it out but it really doesn't do what I want and I feel the $99/month is too expensive.

[ramzes12]

unicorn smasher