If you've ever found yourself struggling to bypass an Amazon CAPTCHA, you're not alone.
While the concept of extracting public data from an e-commerce website might seem straightforward, sites like Amazon actively employ CAPTCHAs, which pose a significant web scraping challenge. However, by employing advanced techniques, you can effectively bypass these obstacles.
In this tutorial, we'll provide a step-by-step guide, including a proven solution for bypassing CAPTCHA challenges while scraping Amazon.
Can You Bypass Amazon CAPTCHA?
Short answer: Yes!
CAPTCHAs are security measures designed to distinguish between human and bot traffic. Amazon uses them to mitigate automated access, ensuring that only human users interact with the Amazon website.
Therefore, to bypass an Amazon CAPTCHA, your scraper request must completely mirror that of a natural user.
Before we go any further, let's take a step back to understand how the Amazon CAPTCHA works.
This CAPTCHA quietly tracks visitors' behavior and only activates when it detects suspicious activities, such as excessive requests and bot-like patterns. If triggered, it presents a textual, visual, or audio puzzle requiring users to prove they're human.
While it mostly appears to be a solvable challenge, in reality, the CAPTCHA effectively blocks your scraper.
Let's try to scrape Amazon to verify this in real-time.
Building a Scraper for Amazon
In this section, we'll scrape Amazon to see if our scraper will run into any CAPTCHAs or blocks. We'll use Python and the popular Requests library to demonstrate this scraping attempt.
Without further ado, let's dive in!
Here's a basic Amazon scraper to retrieve the full HTML of an Amazon product page using the Python Requests library.
This scraper makes a GET request to the target URL using custom headers and attempts to retrieve the page's HTML.
# pip3 install requests
import requests
# define custom headers
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.0.0 Safari/537.36',
'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9',
'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.9',
'Accept-Encoding': 'gzip, deflate, br'}
# specify the target URL
url = ( 'https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-G502-Performance-Gaming-Mouse/dp/B07GBZ4Q68/'
)
# send a get request to the target url
response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
# get the page html content
html_content = response.text
# print the html content
print(html_content)
This script outputs the target page's HTML on the first attempt, as shown below.
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en-us" class="a-no-js" data-19ax5a9jf="dingo">
<head>
<!-- ... -->
<!-- DNS Prefetch to improve loading speed of images -->
<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com">
<!-- ... -->
<title>Amazon.com: Logitech G502 HERO High Performance Wired Gaming Mouse, HERO 25K Sensor, 25,600 DPI, RGB, Adjustable Weights, 11 Programmable Buttons, On-Board Memory, PC / Mac</title>
<!-- ... -->
</head>
<body>
<!-- ... -->
Omitted for brevity
</body>
</html>
However, when we made multiple attempts, Amazon detected our scraper and presented a CAPTCHA challenge, as seen in the image below.
It's important to note that this CAPTCHA is part of Amazon's firewall. This firewall employs various detection techniques, including advanced machine learning and graph neural networks, to identify and block bot traffic.
Therefore, implementing any CAPTCHA-solving technique, at this point, will prove futile, as Amazon will still be able to detect and block your scraper.
In the past, rotating IPs and User Agents were some of the best practices for avoiding CAPTCHAs, but nowadays, that's not enough to bypass Amazon's strong anti-bot measures.
All this brings us back to emulating natural user behavior, the only way to bypass Amazon CAPTCHAs.
The next section introduces a solution that can help you achieve that.
Use ZenRows' Amazon Scraper API to Bypass CAPTCHA
The ZenRows' Amazon Scraper API enables you to scrape Amazon data without restrictions or limits by making simple API requests.
This tool provides everything you need to emulate natural browsing behavior, handling all the technicalities behind the scenes and allowing you to focus on retrieving the necessary data.
It's a complete toolkit for navigating any anti-bot challenge. It also bypasses CAPTCHAs with a very high success rate.
Some of its features include premium proxies, JavaScript rendering, geo-located requests, fingerprinting evasion, actual user spoofing, request header management, and everything else you need for reliable web scraping.
What's more, using ZenRows' Amazon Scraper API requires zero configuration, and you get ready-to-use structured data in JSON format, among other benefits.
Here's a step-by-step guide on how to avoid CAPTCHAs using ZenRows.
To follow along with this example, sign up and visit the Amazon Product Information Builder page.
Input your target URL and click the Create Code button. This will generate your Amazon scraper code, which is displayed on the right.
Copy this code to your editor for testing.
# pip3 install requests
import requests
url = 'https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-G502-Performance-Gaming-Mouse/dp/B07GBZ4Q68/'
apikey = '<YOUR_ZENROWS_API_KEY>'
params = {
'apikey': apikey,
'url': url,
}
response = requests.get('https://ecommerce.api.zenrows.com/v1/targets/amazon/products/', params=params)
print(response.text)
This code bypasses Amazon CAPTCHAs, retrieves the full HTML, and automatically parses the response to return valuable data in JSON, as seen below.
{
"amazon_choice": true,
"availability_status": "In Stock",
"badge": "Amazon's Choice",
"brand": "Logitech G",
"buybox_seller": "Amazon.com",
"category_breadcrumb": [
"Video Games",
"PC",
"Accessories",
"Gaming Mice"
],
# ... omitted for brevity ... #
"product_name": "Logitech G502 HERO High Performance Wired Gaming Mouse, HERO 25K Sensor, 25,600 DPI, RGB, Adjustable Weights, 11 Programmable Buttons, On-Board Memory, PC / Mac",
# ...
}
Congratulations! You're now well-equipped to scrape Amazon at scale.
ZenRows also provides the Amazon Discovery API for scraping Amazon search results and category pages. Check it out to further streamline your web scraping.
ConclusionÂ
CAPTCHAs present a significant challenge for web scrapers. However, using tools like ZenRows that emulate natural browsing behavior, you can bypass them.
Let's do a quick recap of what you've learned so far. You now know:
- How Amazon CAPTCHA works.
- You must emulate natural browsing behavior to avoid CAPTCHAs.
- ZenRows easily bypasses CAPTCHAs, handling all the technicalities of emulating natural users.
Sign up now to try ZenRows for free today.