Your Amazon scraper is returning mixed currencies and won't tell you
If you scrape Amazon through rotating residential proxies, your price column probably contains dollars, euros and zloty at the same time. Nothing in the markup says which is which, no error is raised, and the mixture changes from run to run. I spent a week measuring what an Amazon scraper actually gets back. Below are the numbers I logged, including one measurement I have not seen published…
Scraper programs that access Amazon prices sometimes return prices in multiple currencies simultaneously, without any indication of which currency corresponds to which price. The markup does not label the currency, and no error is raised when this occurs. Additionally, the mixture of currencies can change from run to run. This issue was discovered after a week-long measurement of an Amazon scraper's behavior.
The scraper's IP address determines the country from which the prices are returned, but the currency symbol is not labeled in the markup. Consequently, prices may appear in a single column without any clear separation or indication of their respective currencies. To address this issue, it is recommended to pin the proxy country to the marketplace being queried, keep the currency symbol, resolve it to an ISO code, and check it against what that marketplace should have returned.
Flagging mismatches instead of silently shipping them can help identify and correct any discrepancies in the data.
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