How does one find prices from Amazon's site programmatically?

Question

So Amazon has lots of different APIs for different things, and it's hard to find the one I'm looking for.

I have a client that sells things and checks Amazon's lowest price to know where to price their things (slightly under the lowest thing there). They want functionality integrated into their inventory system that would automatically find the product's lowest price on Amazon and display that. I was wondering which AWS service is best suited to this task.

I see the Product Advertising API, and that looks like the closest thing right now. Is that so?

I don't really want to rely on a scraper when Amazon provides a programmatic interface to this information somewhere, which I know they do because many other products have this. Some say that they can just download a dump of Amazon's products and use that locally -- I'm open to that option too if anyone can point me in its direction.

Answer 1

You can use the Amazon Marketplace Web Service (api, description)

This service can group all of the available offers into ‘buckets’ and shows the lowest price from each bucket bucket.

Each bucket has a unique combination of:

• Sub-Condition (New, Like New, Very Good, Good, Acceptable)
• FulfillmentChannel (FBA or Merchant-Fulfilled)
• ShipsDomestically (True, False, Unknown)
• ShippingTime (0-2 days, 3-7 days, 8-13 days, 14 or more days)

• SellerPositiveFeedbackRating (98-100%, 95-97%, 90-94%, 80-89%, 70-79%, Less than 70%, Just launched)

  

Someone made a really cool demo of the API here

Answer 2

I wrote that small python module to achieve such a task: https://github.com/iMilnb/awstools/blob/master/mods/awsprice.py

Basically, it fetches the prices from Amazon's website and convert them to a nice and parsable python dict.

I wrote two example functions that show how to use the resulting dict to dump an instance price on various terms along with a CSV converter.

Answer 3

We cannot get the entire amazon products using API.They had made certain restrictions to the usage of API such that it would be more relevant to advertising use case only.

Answer 4

Yes, the technically appropriate API is the Product Advertising API, using the ItemLookup/ItemSearch operations or the Seller* operations.

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/detail/main.html

I would also advise you to check the licensing agreement for this API, notably clause 4 (i).

Answer 5

There is a reply to a similar question which lists all the .js files containing the prices, which are barely JSON files (with only a callback(...); statement to remove).

Here is an exemple for Linux On Demand prices : http://aws-assets-pricing-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/pricing/ec2/linux-od.js

(Get the full list directly on that reply)