What are Amazon ASINs and how do you scrape them?

Amazon ASINs, or Amazon Standard Identification Numbers, are unique 10-character alphanumeric codes that Amazon assigns to each product sold on their platform. ASINs allow Amazon to identify and track inventory across their catalog of over 12 million products.

For sellers, brands, and other businesses, scraping ASIN data can provide valuable insights for product research, competitive intelligence, pricing analysis, advertising, and more. In this comprehensive guide, we‘ll cover everything you need to know about Amazon ASINs, including what they are, why they‘re important, and how to extract them through web scraping.

What is an ASIN?

ASIN stands for Amazon Standard Identification Number. It is a unique 10-digit alphanumeric code that Amazon assigns to each new product listed on their marketplace.

Here are some key facts about ASINs:

The ASIN uniquely identifies each product, similarly to how an ISBN number identifies a book edition.
ASINs always start with "B" followed by 9 digits, for example B08VH8F2SX.
Amazon automatically generates a new ASIN when a product is listed that doesn‘t already have an identifier like UPC, EAN, or ISBN.
The ASIN stays the same for all variations of a product, such as different sizes or colors.
ASINs are universal across all Amazon marketplaces like .com, .ca, .co.uk, etc. The same ASIN will identify the same product on any Amazon site.
ASINs allow Amazon to track product inventory and sales across marketplaces. Each sale is tied to the ASIN.

So in summary, the ASIN is like a product ID number that Amazon assigns to keep track of inventory and catalog data. It‘s fundamental to how Amazon organizes and manages its massive product catalog.

How to find an ASIN on Amazon

Finding the ASIN for any product on Amazon is easy. Here are a few ways to locate it:

Product detail page URL – The ASIN is contained in the product URL on Amazon. For example:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08VH8F2SX

The 10 characters after "/dp/" are the ASIN.

Product details section – The ASIN is listed in the Product Information section of the detail page, under Additional Information.
Amazon cart – When you add a product to your Amazon cart, the ASIN is shown there.
Amazon search – You can search directly by ASIN on Amazon by entering the 10-digit code into the search box.

So the ASIN is readily available on any product listing page or in your cart. For niche products not found on Amazon, there won‘t be an ASIN, and one would need to be created along with the new product listing.

Why are Amazon ASINs important?

ASINs play several important roles for both Amazon‘s business and external sellers/vendors.

For Amazon:

Allows precise catalog organization and management at massive scale.
Enables accurate tracking of inventory and sales data.
Provides unique identification for internal operations like fulfillment and shipping.
Creates a standard reference point for catalog data globally.

For external sellers:

Allows you to list your product accurately on Amazon and have it associated with the correct catalog data.
Lets you retrieve key product details like price, availability, reviews, etc. programmatically via API instead of web scraping.
Enables advertising campaigns and catalog uploads to target the exact right product pages.
Facilitates order management and inventory tracking.

So in summary, ASINs benefit Amazon by streamlining catalog management across marketplaces. For sellers, brands, and developers, they provide a consistent method of targeting, tracking, and integrating with Amazon‘s platform.

Why scrape Amazon ASINs?

Now that you understand the value of ASINs, let‘s look at some of the key reasons businesses scrape ASIN data from Amazon:

Competitive Intelligence

Scraping ASINs allows you to collect and analyze data on competitor products. You can extract details like pricing, ratings, reviews, sales rank, and more. This competitive intelligence helps guide your own product listings, pricing, and marketing.

Product Research

Understanding what products do well on Amazon is crucial for deciding what to sell. Scraping ASIN data lets you identify niches, trends, opportunities, and product gaps you can fill.

Advertising & SEO

With ASINs you can target search or sponsored ads precisely to specific product pages. This helps optimize marketing costs and return on ad spend.

Inventory Management

Scraping ASIN data allows automated tracking of prices, availability, and other inventory details for your own products or for dropshipping purposes.

Aggregating Product Data

ASINs provide a way to gather complete product information from Amazon for use in business systems, databases, or analytics.

Price Monitoring & Optimization

Regularly scraping ASINs enables dynamic price tracking and price gap analysis to optimize pricing strategy and profit margins.

As you can see, there are many business use cases around extracting ASIN identifiers and associated product data from Amazon via scraping. The key is turning this raw data into actionable insights.

Is it legal to scrape Amazon ASINs?

Scraping public information from Amazon‘s website is generally permitted under most jurisdictions‘ laws, with a few caveats:

You must respect Amazon‘s Terms of Service and operating guidelines, including rate limits. Mass scraping without throttling could potentially run afoul of Amazon‘s acceptable use policies.
Avoid collecting any private customer data like reviews or personal information. Only gather public product details and catalog data.
Don‘t directly copy or republish large portions of Amazon‘s content, as that would violate copyright laws in most countries. Small samples for research purposes are usually acceptable under fair use provisions.
Make sure you are complying with your local laws regarding data collection and usage. Some places like the EU have strong privacy and personal data regulations to consider.

With those factors in mind, judiciously scraping purely public information like ASINs and product details from Amazon is generally not illegal. However, be sure to consult a lawyer if you have any concerns over the legality of your specific scraping activities.

How to scrape ASINs from Amazon

Now let‘s get into the mechanics of how to actually extract ASIN identifiers and associated product data through web scraping. Here are three methods, ranging from manual to fully automated.

Manual Copy-Paste

For one-off manual scraping, you can simply:

Go to the product page on Amazon.com
Copy the ASIN from the URL or product details
Paste it into a spreadsheet
Look up additional data like price and reviews to copy into your sheet

This works for small-scale scraping but is unfeasibly time-consuming at any significant scale with thousands of products.

Custom Scripts

For more advanced users, it‘s possible to write custom web scraping scripts in Python, NodeJS, Go, or other languages to extract ASINs and product data. You would:

Use a library like requests in Python to fetch pages
Parse the HTML with Beautiful Soup to extract the ASIN and other fields
Store the scraped data into CSV, JSON or a database
Add throttling, proxies, and other optimizations

This gives you maximum flexibility but requires solid coding skills and ongoing maintenance.

Web Scraping Tools

Dedicated web scraping tools streamline ASIN scraping without coding:

Configure the tool with one or more ASINs or Amazon URLs containing ASINs
Select the data fields you wish to extract like title, pricing, image URLs, etc
Run the tool, which will crawl the URLs and scrape data automatically
Export the extracted data to CSV, Excel, JSON or integrate via API

This method is fast, scalable, and doesn‘t require technical expertise. However, it lacks the customization options of coding your own scraper.

There are many SaaS scraping tools available, but for Amazon specifically, I recommend ScrapingBee, ProxyCrawl, and ScrapeHero. All have ready-made scrapers to extract Amazon product information at scale.

Scraping ASINs in Action

To demonstrate ASIN scraping, I‘ll walk through an example using the ScrapingBee web scraping API.

Let‘s say we want to collect product data for the following three ASINs:

B07X6C9RMF - Echo Dot smart speaker
B07Q29SCJX - Fire TV Stick
B00IOY8XWQ - Kindle E-reader

Follow these steps to scrape details for these products using the ScrapingBee API:

Sign up for a free account at ScrapingBee to get API credentials.
Create a data object with the list of ASINs to scrape:

{
 "asin_list": ["B07X6C9RMF","B07Q29SCJX","B00IOY8XWQ"] 
}

Make API request to the https://app.scrapingbee.com/api/v1/ endpoint with key amazon_asins to scrape ASIN data:

curl --request POST \
  --url https://app.scrapingbee.com/api/v1/ \
  --header ‘content-type: application/json‘ \ 
  --data ‘{"asin_list": ["B07X6C9RMF","B07Q29SCJX","B00IOY8XWQ"]}‘ \
  --user <YOUR_API_KEY>:

The API returns structured JSON data for each ASIN containing the price, availability, title, ratings, and more.
Process the JSON in your app or export to CSV/Excel for analysis and business use.

And that‘s it! With around 10 lines of code you can leverage ScrapingBee‘s API to extract key Amazon product data from any number of ASINs or product URLs. This is just one example – there are many other tools and libraries to achieve similar ASIN scraping programmatically.

Key Takeaways

ASINs are Amazon‘s internal product ID numbers used to track inventory and catalog data.
Finding ASINs is easy – they are on every product page URL and details.
Scraping ASINs enables price tracking, inventory management, product research, advertising, and other business use cases.
Small-scale manual scraping is possible but automated tools are more efficient at scale.
Follow good practices around throttling, privacy and Amazon‘s Terms of Service when scraping.
With a basic script or web scraping API, you can rapidly extract ASIN data for analysis and competitive intelligence.

ASINs unlock a wealth of Amazon product data through scraping. Whether you need pricing insights, advertising intelligence, or inventory updates, scraping ASINs delivers the goods.