Is there an Amazon.com API to retrieve product rev

Question

Do any of the AWS APIs/Services provide access to the product reviews for items sold by Amazon? I'm interested in looking up reviews by (ASIN, user_id) tuple. I can see that the Product Advertising API returns a URL to a page (for embedding in an IFRAME) containing the URLs, but I am interested in a machine-readable format of the review data, if possible.

Answer 1

As said by others above, amazon has discontinued providing reviews in its api. Howevever, i found this nice tutorial to do the same with python. Here is the code he gives, works for me! He uses python 2.7

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# Written as part of https://www.scrapehero.com/how-to-scrape-amazon-product-reviews-using-python/      
from lxml import html  
import json
import requests
import json,re
from dateutil import parser as dateparser
from time import sleep

def ParseReviews(asin):
    #This script has only been tested with Amazon.com
    amazon_url  = 'http://www.amazon.com/dp/'+asin
    # Add some recent user agent to prevent amazon from blocking the request 
    # Find some chrome user agent strings  here https://udger.com/resources/ua-list/browser-detail?browser=Chrome
    headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.90 Safari/537.36'}
    page = requests.get(amazon_url,headers = headers).text

    parser = html.fromstring(page)
    XPATH_AGGREGATE = '//span[@id="acrCustomerReviewText"]'
    XPATH_REVIEW_SECTION = '//div[@id="revMHRL"]/div'
    XPATH_AGGREGATE_RATING = '//table[@id="histogramTable"]//tr'
    XPATH_PRODUCT_NAME = '//h1//span[@id="productTitle"]//text()'
    XPATH_PRODUCT_PRICE  = '//span[@id="priceblock_ourprice"]/text()'

    raw_product_price = parser.xpath(XPATH_PRODUCT_PRICE)
    product_price = ''.join(raw_product_price).replace(',','')

    raw_product_name = parser.xpath(XPATH_PRODUCT_NAME)
    product_name = ''.join(raw_product_name).strip()
    total_ratings  = parser.xpath(XPATH_AGGREGATE_RATING)
    reviews = parser.xpath(XPATH_REVIEW_SECTION)

    ratings_dict = {}
    reviews_list = []

    #grabing the rating  section in product page
    for ratings in total_ratings:
        extracted_rating = ratings.xpath('./td//a//text()')
        if extracted_rating:
            rating_key = extracted_rating[0] 
            raw_raing_value = extracted_rating[1]
            rating_value = raw_raing_value
            if rating_key:
                ratings_dict.update({rating_key:rating_value})

    #Parsing individual reviews
    for review in reviews:
        XPATH_RATING  ='./div//div//i//text()'
        XPATH_REVIEW_HEADER = './div//div//span[contains(@class,"text-bold")]//text()'
        XPATH_REVIEW_POSTED_DATE = './/a[contains(@href,"/profile/")]/parent::span/following-sibling::span/text()'
        XPATH_REVIEW_TEXT_1 = './/div//span[@class="MHRHead"]//text()'
        XPATH_REVIEW_TEXT_2 = './/div//span[@data-action="columnbalancing-showfullreview"]/@data-columnbalancing-showfullreview'
        XPATH_REVIEW_COMMENTS = './/a[contains(@class,"commentStripe")]/text()'
        XPATH_AUTHOR  = './/a[contains(@href,"/profile/")]/parent::span//text()'
        XPATH_REVIEW_TEXT_3  = './/div[contains(@id,"dpReviews")]/div/text()'
        raw_review_author = review.xpath(XPATH_AUTHOR)
        raw_review_rating = review.xpath(XPATH_RATING)
        raw_review_header = review.xpath(XPATH_REVIEW_HEADER)
        raw_review_posted_date = review.xpath(XPATH_REVIEW_POSTED_DATE)
        raw_review_text1 = review.xpath(XPATH_REVIEW_TEXT_1)
        raw_review_text2 = review.xpath(XPATH_REVIEW_TEXT_2)
        raw_review_text3 = review.xpath(XPATH_REVIEW_TEXT_3)

        author = ' '.join(' '.join(raw_review_author).split()).strip('By')

        #cleaning data
        review_rating = ''.join(raw_review_rating).replace('out of 5 stars','')
        review_header = ' '.join(' '.join(raw_review_header).split())
        review_posted_date = dateparser.parse(''.join(raw_review_posted_date)).strftime('%d %b %Y')
        review_text = ' '.join(' '.join(raw_review_text1).split())

        #grabbing hidden comments if present
        if raw_review_text2:
            json_loaded_review_data = json.loads(raw_review_text2[0])
            json_loaded_review_data_text = json_loaded_review_data['rest']
            cleaned_json_loaded_review_data_text = re.sub('<.*?>','',json_loaded_review_data_text)
            full_review_text = review_text+cleaned_json_loaded_review_data_text
        else:
            full_review_text = review_text
        if not raw_review_text1:
            full_review_text = ' '.join(' '.join(raw_review_text3).split())

        raw_review_comments = review.xpath(XPATH_REVIEW_COMMENTS)
        review_comments = ''.join(raw_review_comments)
        review_comments = re.sub('[A-Za-z]','',review_comments).strip()
        review_dict = {
                            'review_comment_count':review_comments,
                            'review_text':full_review_text,
                            'review_posted_date':review_posted_date,
                            'review_header':review_header,
                            'review_rating':review_rating,
                            'review_author':author

                        }
        reviews_list.append(review_dict)

    data = {
                'ratings':ratings_dict,
                'reviews':reviews_list,
                'url':amazon_url,
                'price':product_price,
                'name':product_name
            }
    return data


def ReadAsin():
    #Add your own ASINs here 
    AsinList = ['B01ETPUQ6E','B017HW9DEW']
    extracted_data = []
    for asin in AsinList:
        print "Downloading and processing page http://www.amazon.com/dp/"+asin
        extracted_data.append(ParseReviews(asin))
        sleep(5)
    f=open('data.json','w')
    json.dump(extracted_data,f,indent=4)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    ReadAsin()

Here, is the link to his website reviews scraping with python 2.7

Answer 2

Update 2:

Please see @jpillora's comment. It's probably the most relevant regarding Update 1.

I just tried out the Product Advertising API (as of 2014-09-17), it seems that this API only returns a URL pointing to an iframe containing just the reviews. I guess you'd have to screen scrape - though I imagine that would break Amazon's TOS.

Update 1:

Maybe. I wrote the original answer below earlier. I don't have time to look into this right now because I'm no longer on a project concerned with Amazon reviews, but their webpage at Product Advertising API states "The Product Advertising API helps you advertise Amazon products using product search and look up capability, product information and features such as Customer Reviews..." as of 2011-12-08. So I hope someone looks into it and posts back here; feel free to edit this answer.

Original:

Nope.

Here is an intersting forum discussion about the fact including theories as to why: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1932326

If I'm wrong, please post what you find. I'm interested in getting the reviews content, as well as allowing submitting reviews to Amazon, if possible.

You might want to check this link: http://reviewazon.com/. I just stumbled across it and haven't looked into it, but I'm surprised I don't see any mention on their site about the update concerning the drop of Reviews from the Amazon Products Advertising API posted at: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/detail/main.html

Answer 3

Unfortunately you can only get an iframe URL with the reviews, the content itself is not accessible.

Source: http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSECommerceService/2011-08-01/DG/CHAP_MotivatingCustomerstoBuy.html#GettingCustomerReviews

Answer 4

Here's the official word on the matter:

Dear Product Advertising API Developer,

On November 8, 2010 the Reviews response group of the Product Advertising API will no longer return customer reviews content and instead will return a link to customer reviews content hosted on Amazon.com. You will be able to display customer reviews on your site using that link. Please refer to the Product Advertising API Developer guide found here for more details. The Reviews response group will continue to function as before until November 8 and the new link to customer reviews is available to you now through the Product Advertising API as well.

Answer 5

Here's my quick take on it - you easily can retrieve the reviews themselves with a bit more work:

countries=['com','co.uk','ca','de']
books=[
        '''http://www.amazon.%s/Glass-House-Climate-Millennium-ebook/dp/B005U3U69C''',
        '''http://www.amazon.%s/The-Japanese-Observer-ebook/dp/B0078FMYD6''',
        '''http://www.amazon.%s/Falling-Through-Water-ebook/dp/B009VJ1622''',
      ]
import urllib2;
for book in books:
    print '-'*40
    print book.split('%s/')[1]
    for country in countries:
        asin=book.split('/')[-1]; title=book.split('/')[3]
        url='''http://www.amazon.%s/product-reviews/%s'''%(country,asin)
        try: f = urllib2.urlopen(url)
        except: page=""
        page=f.read().lower(); print '%s=%s'%(country, page.count('member-review'))
print '-'*40

Answer 6

According to Amazon Product Advertizing API License Agreement (https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/detail/agreement.html) and specifically it's point 4.b.iii:

You will use Product Advertising Content only ... to send end users to and drive sales on the Amazon Site.

which means it's prohibited for you to show Amazon products reviews taken trough their API to sale products at your site. It's only allowed to redirect your site visitors to Amazon and get the affiliate commissions.