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Comment by amingilani | Hacker News Reader

Scraping Amazon is fun and all, but when you start overdoing it they rate-limit your IP and show you my worst nightmare: the Dogs of Amazon (a 500 page with pictures)

Why do I know this? Because I'm the CTO at Nazdeeq.com where we let users buy Amazon products from countries where they don't ship easily, like Pakistan.

Edit: totally open to partnerships in more countries

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I'm from Brazil and what you said made me curious, not sure why, but Amazon here didn't catch. How did you solve problems like logistics and interest from the public?

I'm sorry, I have trouble understanding your question but if you mean how we ship from Amazon to Pakistan, and how we got people to use our service: we worked out a pipeline to get products from the US to Amazon, and advertising + word-of-mouth. Also:

+ There's no direct way to buy 90% of products from Amazon since they don't ship to Pakistan

+ Our service is the only in the country that gives a fixed price at checkout in PKR

+ Our customer service is excellent

+ We're one of the cheapest options available, as long as the competition imports products legally.

I disagree with the last point. Services like MyUS, Viabox etc. are cheaper than Nazdeeq in many cases.

I do not know Nazdeeq but parent claims they deal with importing and last I checked neither MyUS nor any other random package forwarder deal with customs which can be a real PITA. (I have some experience with importing things into ... legally interesting ... countries, from 1990 till I left in 2006 I, as an individual have imported a lot of computers and parts into Hungary. It was ... fun.)

You covered it perfectly! :)

Hey Irfan! I'm sorry you feel that way, but as someone else here pointed out, we handle everything from clearing customs to last-mile delivery (to your doorstep), which is why our pricing may seem expensive because we declare all costs upfront.

A lot of our customers have similar horror stories where their goods get stuck in customs because they didn't realize clearing is a thing.

Ok I had my first horror story with custom clearance today. Going to give nazdeeq.com a try next time :-)

Haha, we'd love to have you! Throw my name at the support channel, and I should appear to help you out if you have any trouble :)

Hi Amin, your platform seems nice. Just wanted to give you a heads-up that your website is being classified as ["phishing" by Avast](https://i.imgur.com/SmuuRfD.png). I think if you replace "Amazon" in the url with something else it should work fine. Best of luck!

Reminds me of how nobody could see one of my user's avatars because the url (a hash) had started with an "ad" segment (for bucketing), as in "/avatars/ad/ad3adb33f". So adblockers blocked it.

My protest against such a ridiculous heuristic was to not fix it.

It makes sense why you would choose to do that and I can certainly empathize, but in the interest of user experience I try to fix these problems because my customers deserve a good user experience.

Thank you Yasoob! Dammit, again? I already had them white-label our site once but I'll look into this again. Thank you!

In the Philippines there's something quite similar called Galleon. They've been recently acquired but I think they might be open to partner. They've expanded to Thailand, if I'm not mistaken.

Are you using the API or web scraping? We never really had problems with IP banning if the traffic looks like a real user.

Neither, actually, we're using a heavily configured reverse-proxy.

This means that, unfortunately, all the traffic has to go through our own servers.

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