Is it possible to scrape Amazon reviews?

Can you use AWS for web scraping?

Can you?

Amazon Web Services have been around for quite a while and many people use them for things like Amazon web services. While they are great for things like cloud based software, I would not say that all or even most of those products can be considered as web scraping products.

So lets say that you are running a web crawler. You know this is what you want to do with Amazon Web Services and AWS are the perfect solution. You download a piece of software that runs some tasks on a web server in the cloud, then your website crawls and collects a set of data, which will be stored in your Amazon S3 bucket and the results are sent back to the crawler software.

The whole process has worked well in the past. But is that the case anymore? Well I don't think so. If we look at the list of AWS services there are two main areas where they say that web crawling doesn't work:

S3 - Content delivery system. As of August 2025, S3 does not support indexing and indexing is only supported if you use a custom domain. This is fine and understandable. It is about making money for their customers by providing the content delivery. However, it is important to point out that S3 offers a lot more than what it is commonly thought as a CDN. You can set up custom domains on S3 buckets with a few clicks. This means that you can use S3 for a lot more than just web crawling.

Route 53 - Domain Name System (DNS) service. In the past few years the DNS service has been improved considerably. Now you can create records, check, update and delete zones, verify names, check for name conflicts, and perform advanced queries. It also supports custom records, which can be used in conjunction with your own record sets. But this is not the first time the DNS service has become more than it was intended for. In the past the service was used for something completely different, but it became popular as a web based solution to the problem of domain squatting. This is a situation where somebody registers a domain name that is already taken, then they use the name as a vanity address in the form of an alias for an existing website. They point the domain name to their own website, where the web crawlers go to get the content.

Does Amazon have anti scraping?

Every time it takes me to the Amazon Marketplace (no products, no price, nothing). Is this a way to keep people from scraping?

I'm asking as a customer, not as an employee of Amazon. Just curious how you handle the fact that you are offering a product for sale on your website.

You need to set up a canonical url for this product page. The url should be /s/p/nnnn. Where nnnn is the id of the product. You also need to add the rel="nofollow" attribute to the link. Then you need to remove the referrer link from your index.php file and use a different way of displaying the "product details".

Amazon does not want anyone scraping and there's a pretty good reason for that. You can't sell someone else's product, you have to sell your own.

They would lose a lot of money on the people that were doing it to try to make a buck from it. Amazon wouldn't like it if their own employees were doing it to try to make a buck on selling someone else's products. Also, they don't really want to lose the business of those people who were selling products legitimately but didn't manage to sell them all. They will lose money, but it will be more to the other sellers than it would to the people who were selling it themselves.

You can get away with it, but Amazon won't like it if it gets too far or if they think it's hurting sales or if they feel that the other sellers aren't doing their job and it might be hard to explain to their accountants why you had a sudden increase in sales. So yes, you can sell somebody else's product, but you need to be careful about how much of a profit you make on it. Amazon doesn't like it when people start selling their own product on their own website. It interferes with their ability to make money and they won't let you do it.

At least not without first getting permission from them.