I am trying to scrape product prices from ecommerce websites for price comparison project. But my script is getting blocked after few requests. I am using Python with requests library. How can I avoid getting blocked? Is there any way to bypass these restrictions?
Reply by: WebScraper_Pro
You need to make your scraper look like real browser. Add proper headers like User-Agent, Accept, Accept-Language etc. Also add random delays between requests using time.sleep(). If still getting blocked then use rotating proxies. But be careful about legal issues - check website's robots.txt and terms of service before scraping.
Reply by: EthicalCoder_123
Better approach is to use official APIs if available. Many ecommerce sites provide affiliate APIs which give you access to product data legally. Web scraping without permission might violate terms of service and can get you in legal trouble. If you must scrape, use tools like Selenium with undetected-chromedriver which makes detection harder.
Reply by: DataEngineer_Startup
Also consider using scrapy framework instead of requests library. Scrapy has built-in features for handling rate limiting, retries, user agents rotation etc. Much better for large scale scraping projects. And respect rate limits - dont hammer servers with 100 requests per second, thats just rude and will definitely get you blocked.