If you are in e-commerce, then there is one website that rules them all and that is Amazon.
As the world’s largest e-commerce company, Amazon is the go to place to buy products online and with an estimated 50% of all web scraping targeting Amazon, it is also the #1 target of web scrapers globally.
However, with huge popularity comes greater challenges.
Boasting some of the most sophisticated anti-bot countermeasures, scraping Amazon data at scale can be very difficult and costly for any web scraping team.
Here at ScraperAPI we scrape over 7 billion pages per month from thousands of websites and have tested every proxy provider you’ve ever heard of (and a lot you haven’t heard of) to find the best proxies to ensure our users can scrape Amazon at scale with +98% success rates.
So in this guide, we’re going to walk you through the best rotating residential and data centers proxies we’ve found that will make scraping Amazon a breeze for you.
1. ScraperAPI
We couldn’t do a list of the best rotating proxy solutions for scraping Amazon without mentioning ScraperAPI. Not only because it is us, but because ScraperAPI is truly one of the best proxy solutions available for scraping Amazon. Not only do we average over a 98% success rate with Amazon but we do so at a fraction of the cost of other proxy providers on this list.
In comparison to proxy providers like Luminati, OxyLabs and GeoSurf who charge anywhere from $6,000 to $7,000 to scrape 3M Amazon pages per month (or 750GB of bandwidth), with ScraperAPI our Business Plan will allow you to scrape 3M pages for only $299. That is a saving of over 95%.
Because we’ve built anti-bot bypasses straight into the API, ScraperAPI enables you to scrape the most difficult websites at scale at a fraction of the cost of using residential proxies.
Not only that, by simply adding extra parameters to your API requests you can enable additional functionality such as IP geotargeting (&country_code=us) for over 50 countries, javascript rendering (&render=true), JSON parsing (&autoparse=true), and more, that greatly simplifies the web scraping process.
Better yet, ScraperAPI is extremely simple to use. Simply send your requests to our single API endpoint or our proxy port and we will return to you the successful HTML response.
But don’t just take our word for it. You can sign up to a free trial here where we will give you 5,000 free requests with all extra features enabled so you can test the API for yourself.
And if you need more than 3M requests per month or want more concurrency, then contact our sales team here who can scope out a custom plan for you here and set you up with an Enterprise trial.
Pros: Simple to use proxy API that takes the hassle out of scraping websites at scale. Great reliability and functionality at a great price.
Cons: We know this might sound cocky, but there aren’t any! Try the API for free and see for yourself.
2. Luminati
Next on our list is Luminati, perhaps the most common backup proxy option. When developers run into issues scraping a website at first they will try to tune their proxy pools or attempt to bypass an anti-bot directly, however, if all else fails they normally turn to residential IPs. A very common occurrence amongst developers scraping Amazon.
If you want to get high-quality residential proxies for Amazon then Luminati is a great option. Being the biggest residential proxy provider on the market and boasting the most features, Luminati is a great option for residential proxies.
Residential proxies have a lot of benefits: great country and city level geotargeting, higher success rates on difficult to scrape websites, and the ability to access some sites that have banned data center IPs.
However, they are not without their flaws. Residential IPs are inherently more unstable, expensive and slower than data center proxies.
Price is also a huge factor to consider when using residential IPs for your web scraping as they are often 10-100 times more expensive than using data center proxies. And oftentimes they don’t give a meaningful increase in performance.
Here at ScraperAPI we use data center proxies for over 98% of our 7 billion requests per month and still achieve a 98% average success rate at a fraction of the cost of a similar plan from Luminati.
Pros: High-quality residential proxies, and lots of features.
Cons: Extremely expensive if you need to scrape large amounts of Amazon data.
3. OxyLabs
OxyLabs is another great residential proxy provider that prides themselves on being able to supply proxies for any country in the world.
When scraping e-commerce sites like Amazon, having the ability to use IP addresses from specific countries is very important as they often display different product pricing and availability data depending on where they think you are. With residential proxies from over 100 countries, OxyLab is sure to have a proxy option for you.
However, as with Luminati using OxyLabs residential proxies for scraping Amazon at scale can get extremely expensive very fast. As an example, to monitor 100,000 products per day it would cost you about $6,000 per month with OxyLabs.
Pros: Good residential proxies with great geotargeting capabilities.
Cons: Very expensive when scraping at scale.
4. Crawlera
Similar to ScraperAPI, Crawlera is a proxy rotator that uses their network proxy servers to route requests through IPs in a way to avoid IP bans. It’s one of the oldest web scraping IP rotation services, and also one of the few that offer a rotating proxies free trial.
Although, they were one of the first to develop a smart proxy rotator Crawlera doesn’t have the same level of functionality as ScraperAPI or other newer proxy rotators. You still need to use your own headless browser if you want to render javascript and a lot of functionality like custom user agents and residential IPs are only available on Enterprise plans that require a 12-month commitment.
Plus, recent price increases have made them the most expensive proxy rotator on the market, however, their performance levels aren’t the best.
Pros: Simple to use and highly scalable.
Cons: More expensive than other proxy rotators, and doesn’t have the same level of functionality or performance as others.
5. Smartproxy
With both residential and datacenter proxies, is a good option for those who want to build their own proxy infrastructure for scraping Amazon.
Although building and maintaining your own proxy system is a lot more resource-intensive than using a done-for-you proxy solution like ScraperAPI, using high-quality proxies from Smartproxy will certainly make the task easier.
With proxies located in more than 195 locations, they are ideal if you need to geotarget your Amazon request to ensure you are always scraping the correct pricing and supplier data.
However, as a raw proxy solution, you will need to do a lot of the heavy lifting yourself like developing the rotation, ban detection, and geotargeting logic.
Pros: Datacenter and residential proxy plans to suit everyone, starting at $50 per month. Dedicated datacenter proxies from the US, code integrations in 6 programming languages, 3-day money guarantee. X Browser, Smart Scraper, Firefox and Chrome browser extensions, Proxy Address Generator – these are all for free.
Cons: Requires you to build the proxy management logic.
6. GeoSurf
Offering residential proxies at premium prices, Geosurf is a premium proxy provider who’s proxies do work for most Amazon scraping use cases.
While Geosurf definitely isn’t the ideal proxy provider for those on a tight budget or who are looking to scrape Amazon at scale they do provide high-quality residential IPs that do achieve good success rates.
They also offer special pools of proxies for certain use cases, such as Craigslist proxies, ad verification proxies, and more if you require some customization.
Another cool thing about their service is that they offer IP addresses in a few countries that many other services don’t like China and Iran, so if you need proxies from those countries you may want to check them out.
Pros: Good quality residential IPs, with good geotargeting capabilities.
Cons: Premium IPs with premium prices, so they can get expensive fast.
And there we go. We’ve just talked through 6 of the top rotating proxy providers for scraping Amazon. There are many more, but these six are the best of the best and should be your first choice when looking to scrape Amazon.
If you want to know more about how to scrape Amazon product data, you should read this related article.
Hopefully one of these top proxy providers is a fit for your web scraping needs, but if you still have questions and would like to discuss your particular use case with us, you can contact us here. Happy scraping!
