ASIN Scraper

[samirchowd]

Meeting 3/8/21

Discussed several things regarding data collection

• Amazon links are structured in a specific way
• E.g. amazon.com/dp/ASIN where ASIN is the Amazon Standard Identification Number for a given product
• Monopoly game: amazon.com/dp/B01MU9K3XU

Deliverable by Tuesday 3/16/21

• If possible, develop a tool that will crawl Amazon and return a list of ASIN's of different products
• Possible solution:
• • Enter a search string to search into amazon search bar
• • Use a webdriver such as selenium to go take in that search
• • Go through the first page of items, and retrieve the ASIN (should be in the product info section)
• • Store each ASIN and return
• Potential Spinoffs from this solution
• • Create a giant list of different searches
• • • ["Popcorn maker", "Vacuum Cleaner", "Table Lamp", ... ]
• • Iterate through each of these searches and scrape the first page for ASINs
• • Store each page as tuple (search_input, [list_of_ASINs])
• • • E.g. ("Dog collar", ["ASB238138", "BX3892D", ... ] )

[samirchowd]

Interesting thing to note, the ASIN of a book is just its ISBN apparently. Perhaps this is something we could utilize (though zero review books may be more common if we go this route).

[zmz223]

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55534679/scrape-asin-from-amazons-search-page @samirchowd @neil-mosca this might be useful