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Lately I have been playing around with the Amazon Product Advertising API, and it made me very curious about how Amazon-price checking sites like Keepa and camelcamelcamel actually work.

For a small number of requests, the Amazon Product Advertising API is quite straightforward. However, even if you are pushing a lot of revenue to Amazon, I don't see how you could pull the amount of data that these sites have based on the published API limits. The relevant docs from amazon imply that the absolute maximum number of requests is about 900,000 (ten per second per day):

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=199771# http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/TroubleshootingApplications.html

The tracking sites, on the other hand, claims that they are pulling daily prices for nearly seven million items, and that they are pulling prices much more frequently for the most popular items.

So how are they doing it? Do they have a sweetheart deal with Amazon, or are they screenscraping or something? Any ideas or insider info?

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  • Could be a automated headless browser to scrap data from the sites itself.
    – mlg
    Commented Dec 7, 2018 at 9:02

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As I can understand from this blog post they split the database in groups of interest and they update products in base of these groups.

Without Ι know more than this blog post, several companies provide the option to contact with them and arrange a different paid package for their API. I don't know if this is the case for Amazon, but why not?

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  • Thanks for that link. It probably is something that needs to be negotiated with Amazon directly.
    – BringMyCakeBack
    Commented Jan 31, 2014 at 0:40

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