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I’m sure these are trade secrets, but how do these sites get all the data? Is it just scraping?

No trade secret here, it is indeed simple web scraping.

Although as noted, Amazon does provide a product API, if you qualify with 3 sales, which I did, and was then promptly ejected from the affiliates program by Amazon. I'm honestly not sure I'd want to build my product on top of their API as they then have you by the short and curlies.

I'd be interested to see how all these other "copy cat" sites fare with the Amazon policies?

Wait. So you weren't ejected until you tried to use the API? Were you earning anything from your affiliate links prior to getting access to the API?

I guess we’ll see. I took the scraping route, for both reasons - didn’t have the 3 sales to qualify, and I don’t like the idea of coming cap-in-hand to Amazon for access to their API. Easier to just scrape what I need.

BUT we’ll see what happens when/if I try to get a few bucks back from the affiliate links ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://webservices.amazon.com/paapi5/documentation/#overvie...

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