How to Scrape Amazon Question & Answer of Free [No Coding Required]
Table of Content
Introduction
How many of you shop online? If you do, I am sure you know Amazon and must have scrolled through its website at least once to shop. But on what basis do you decide if you want to purchase the product or not?
Well, a few of you will say ratings or reviews. However, did you ever notice that Amazon allows customers to ask questions regarding the product? The bonus point is the seller, or any other person can answer this question. Then, the potential customer can decide whether they want to buy the product or not. Isn’t it exciting? It means you get absolute value for your money and no customer feels deceived because all questions are answered like a real shopping experience.
If questions play such a crucial role in the customers’ decision-making, isn’t it essential for the sellers to know about these questions then? In our other blogs, we learned how to scrape ratings and reviews from Amazon. In this blog, let’s see how we can scrape the questions and answers asked on Amazon through ProWebScraper.
But before that, why is it necessary to scrape these questions?
Importance of scraping customer questions on Amazon
Even though the sellers give maximum information about the products, the customers still have queries regarding the products. As it is not offline shopping, they cannot directly ask the seller on the spot and get the answer. But Amazon has tried to build this experience for their customers to remove the friction between the buyer and the seller.
So, any customer can post their doubts, and the seller or any other user of the product can give a reply to that product. Doing this is essential because if your customer isn’t sure about your product details, how will they even buy it?
So, scraping these questions is important for:
- Removing friction from the buying process
When you scrape the questions your customers ask, you get to know what is in their minds. What are they expecting out of your product? Knowing your customer mindset will help you present the correct information to them the next time. Simultaneously, it will help customers make informed buying decisions and choose your brand because the details are precise.
2. Own the conversation with your customers
Only scraping the questions will not let your customers know that you are doing the backend work. You have to let them know that you hear them. So, based on their questions and feedback, you must quickly make any product and packaging decisions.
Moreover, you now know what worries the customers. So, you must quickly update your FAQ list so that your customer knows you have thought through that line and are there for them to answer.
If you find that your customers are confused regarding any products or offerings, clear the chaos without wasting time. While answering your customers, you must ensure that the answers are honest, accurate, and aligned with the brand tone.
After knowing its importance, now we shall know how to scrape these questions so that we can give our customers optimum satisfaction.
How to scrape Amazon questions using ProWebScraper?
As we know that ProWebScraper is a no-code, easy-to-use tool. So, without any hassle, you can easily extract data such as:
- Voted as helpful
- Question text
- Question link
- Answer date
- ASIN
- Answer text
- Author name
Let’s know the process to do this.
Follow this step-by-step guide to scrape questions from Amazon through ProWebScraper.
- Create an account on ProWebScraper.
- Configure the scraper.
- Scrape QA for multiple products
- Download data and add a sample file.
Scrape Q&A data from Amazon
- To make it easy for you to understand and execute the scraping process, we have worked out distinct stages of the process.
- Each stage, as you will see, comprises a few simple steps to follow:
Step 1: Create a free account at ProWebScraper
- Goto prowebscraper.com and create your free account. If you have already created an account, then log in.
- Once you have logged in to your account, you will be redirected to your dashboard.
Step 2: Configure your scraper
- Now you can start configuring your scraper by simply entering the URL of the Amazon product’s Q&A page.
- Once the website loads, you can select the data you want to scrape using ProWebScraper’s easy point-and-click selector feature.
(2.1) Copy and paste the URL
- Copy the Amazon product’s Q&A page such as https://www.amazon.com/ask/questions/asin/B09B17TS7N/2/ref=ask_dp_iaw_ql_hza?isAnswered=true
- Paste this URL into the box, and then click on the ‘Go’ button.
(2.2) Start data selection
- Once the page loads, you can start configuring the scraper.
- All you need to do is click on the page to select that data point from the page, as you can see in the screenshot.
- To extract the data, such as the vote counter, you will need to click on them.
- Let’s see an example to extract the vote counter.
- You may want to name that column as well. Double-click the column name to name this data point or select rename from the column setting.
- To extract other data points such as question text, answer date, etc., you need to click on “Add column” and then click on the page to select that particular data point.
- If you want to scrape the link of a question, you need to enable the “Capture this link’s URL” option from the column setting.
(2.3) Clean Data with a regular expression
While scraping question text, you have noticed that there are “\n” with the question string. ProWebScraper has a solution for this too. You can remove it by applying regular expressions. To apply regular expression, follow the steps mentioned below:
- Go to column setting.
- Click on “Set regular expression.”
- Add “\\n” to the Match field and enable the “Replace with blank” option.
- Click on Apply button.
You can see that now question strings are cleaned.
💡 Reference: You can refer to this tutorial to learn more about “Regular Expression”.(2.4) Select data using a CSS selector.
Scraping some data such as ASIN is slightly different. ASIN can not be scraped merely by clicking on it, as it is not visible on a webpage.
To scrape ASIN, you can use ProWebScraper’s advanced feature “CSS Selector”.
To scrape ASIN, follow the steps mentioned below:
- Go to column setting.
- Click on “Use CSS selector.”
- Then in the “enter selector” field, add this selector string “#a-popover-ask-dpsearch-post-question-modal > form > input.askAsin”
- Add “value” in the “enter attribute” field, then click “Apply”.
- You will see that ASIN got selected.
NOTE:
Using CSS selector, you can scrape answer text and author name too.
Use below CSS selector string to scrape.
Answer Text : div:nth-child(n) > div.a-fixed-left-grid-col.a-col-right > span:nth-child(3)
Author Name : span.a-profile-name
💡 Reference: You can refer to this tutorial to learn more about “CSS Selector”.(2.5) Save and run the scraper.
- Once all the data points have been selected, click the “Save” button to save your scraper.
- It will ask you to enter some names in the “Scraper Name” field. You can enter a name of your choice. And then click “Save and run”.
Step 3: Scrape QA for Multiple products
By now, you have learned how to scrape data for one product. Now let’s see how to scrape data from multiple products.
To scrape data for multiple products, you do not need to create a new scraper for every product. You can scrape data with a current scraper.
- You need to add product URLs to the scraper.
- To do this, follow the steps mentioned below.
- Go to “Manage Inputs”
- Click on “Import URLs”
- From the popup, browse the file.
- Click on “Upload URL list.”
- You can see that all URLs are added to the input box.
- When you save and rerun scraper, it’ll scrape data from all your imported product URLs.
You can download a sample file with the product URL from here “Amazon Product URLs.csv”.Step 4: Download data in JSON or CSV
Once the scraper run gets finished, you can see the data preview and download data in JSON or CSV format.
Sample Data
Conclusion
Looking at the steps above, you already understand that it is an easy process. You only have to provide your requirements, and the scraper can handle the rest. So, do you think you need to be a technician to use ProWebScraper now? No! Only with a bit of computer knowledge you can easily scrape data through ProWebScraper and know the mindset of your customers.
