How to Scrape Amazon Products Using Node.js and Puppeteer

In other words, collecting Amazon data will give you a competitive advantage and help you create a better eCommerce strategy for market domination.

But how can you collect Amazon data at scale?

In this article, we’ll show you how to scrape Amazon products using Node.js and Puppeteer in two ways:

1. Scrape Amazon products the traditional way (a more time-consuming option)
2. Extract Amazon product data using ScraperAPI (a more accessible and scalable approach)

Building an Amazon Scraper in Node.js (Traditional Method)

Before we start our project, it’s important to remember that this approach is great for small Amazon scraping jobs. Still, without using supportive tools to overcome anti-bot systems, you’ll quickly get blocked if you try to collect Amazon data at scale.

Note: to scale our project to a large data set, we’d have to build an infrastructure capable of bypassing Amazon’s anti-bot system, IP blocks, and parsing acquired data. Don’t want the hassle? Skip to this step and start scraping in minutes.

With this out of the way, let’s review the tools you’ll need to build a simple Amazon product scraper.

Step 1. Check the Prerequisites

Before diving deeper into this tutorial, ensure these tools are installed.

• Node.js 18+ and NPM — Download the newest version if you don’t have one
• Puppeteer — a powerful API to control a Chrome/Chromium instance.

Note: Take a look at our Node.js web scraping for beginners tutorial if you’d like a quick overview of the basics.

Step 2. Set up a Project

Let’s start with creating a folder that will hold the code source of the Amazon web scraper.

	mkdir node-amazon-scraper

Once done, initialize a Node.js project by running the command below:

	cd node-amazon-scraper

	npm init -y

The last command will create a package.json file in the folder. Next, create a file index.js and add a simple JavaScript instruction inside.

	touch index.js

	echo "console.log('Hello world!');" > index.js

Execute the file index.js using the Node.js runtime.

	node index.js

This command will print Hello World! in the terminal.

Step 3. Install Puppeteer for Web Scraping

Puppeteer provides several functions for web scraping. Installing it automatically downloads a recent version of the Chrome browser that can take around 200MB of disk space.

Run the following command to install it:

	npm install puppeteer

We’ll take a screenshot of a web page to see Puppeteer in action.

Let’s update the file index.js with the following code:

	const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

	const PAGE_URL = "https://amazon.com";
	const SAVE_PICTURE_PATH = "./amazon-homepage.png";
	
	const main = async () => {
		const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: true });
		const page = await browser.newPage();
	
		await page.goto(PAGE_URL);
		await page.screenshot({ path: SAVE_PICTURE_PATH, type: 'png' });
	
		await browser.close();
	}
	
	main();

On the code above, we’re telling Puppeteer to:

• Create an instance of the browser
• Open a new page
• Navigate to the Amazon home page
• Take a screenshot of the page
• Store it on the disk

Once done, it closes the browser instance.

If you browse the project directory, you will see the file amazon-homepage.png.

Step 4. Identify the Information to Retrieve on the Amazon Product Page

We will use the Amazon listing results for the “MacBook Pro” search term and retrieve the product title and price.

Navigate to Amazon and search for the term. Then, inspect the page to see the DOM structure. Next, find the selector related to this information.

The picture below shows the location of the product title and price in the DOM.