Amazon-Wishlists Export & Price-Monitor, v1.6

I have over 60 Amazon wishlists and in some lists sometimes 100 products, mainly books. I often buy used books and checking all current, continuously changing 2nd hand prices against my budget is time consuming. This Amazon-wishlist scraper exports all lists to a XML-file. The XML-file is displayed with all items filtered and re-ordered according to price, priority etc. What's new?

Exported XML (web-browser view)

Requirements

• tested on the GNU/Linux operating system but might work on everything which runs Scrapy
• Python 3
• Scrapy 1.8.0 (Python web crawling framework)
• lxml (Python XML library)
• pip (package installer for Python) to install dependencies (pip is usually available in the package manager of your Linux distribution)

Getting started

GNU/Linux terminal:

$ python -m pip install scrapy lxml  # Install dependencies
$ git clone https://github.com/andre-st/amazon-wishless
$ cd amazon-wishless
$ mv settings.py-example settings.py
$ vi settings.py                     # vi or any other editor

Edit your wishlists settings
Edit your localization settings

$ ./wishlist.sh     # Assumes BROWSER environment variable set, otherwise starts Firefox browser

Observations and limitations

Latest version:

• requires public wishlists on Amazon
• the second hand price shown by Amazon may be low, but the final price is sometimes realized on frivolously high shipping prices. Shipping prices are currently not taken into account
• runtime is okay (53 long lists or 230 requests < 30 seconds)
• if many lists fail with "503 Service Unavailable" you need to increase SCRAPY_SETTINGS.DOWNLOAD_DELAY in settings.py
• Amazon sometimes presents a CAPTCHA instead of single wish lists, while other lists can be read normally in the same run. This is reported as an error in the program output: *** CAPTCHA bot block ***. A program restart 5 minutes later, however, could run through again without any problems

Amazon wishlists without used prices:

• in some countries, Amazon no longer displayed the used prices (Germany in March 2020 but rolled back later):
  
• although invisible, the used price can at least be read for items not delivered by Amazon
• I had played with another program-version that loads prices from the separate Offer-Listing page for each product (which would have included the shipping price too).
  Given the amount of products and requests, this failed due to Amazon's rate limiting (more and more '503 Service Unavailable' errors). Download-delay or faking request headers didn't do much. And the cost to send requests from different IP addresses in sufficient quantity would be inconsistent with the project idea of finding cheap deals.
• unfortunately, if you encounter this situation it will reduce the value of this project, although our viewer still shows more information and is clearer

Firefox 68+ XSLT CORS-issue:

• Firefox doesn't autoload the XSLT file anymore, which was referenced by the XML file and located in the same directory ("Cross Origin" and file URIs). The XSLT transforms the raw XML data into an useful report. Since 1.4.6 the Python script does the transformation itself (using the XLST file).

Customization

Components (uppercase and shaded), their inputs (cells upwards) and outputs (cells to the right):

XSLT is a declarative, Turing-complete language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents (XHTML in this case). XSLT runs queries against the XML-file and feeds the result into templates with placeholders. For your own XSLT-file just change the WISHLISTS_XSLOUTPATH value in settings.py.

Feedback

If you like this project, you can "star" it on GitHub. Report bugs or suggestions via GitHub or see the AUTHORS.md file.

See also

• In-Browser-Filtering of Amazon wishlists using a Javascript Injection browser extension
• Andre's Goodreads Toolbox