Data Amazon/Etsy E-Commerce Crawler — Automated Data Acquisition

Situation

Collecting e-commerce marketplace data manually was inefficient and difficult to maintain at scale because marketplace pages and data structures can change over time. The system needed to:

• Automate recurring data collection.
• Process large amounts of product information.
• Handle changing page structures and crawling conditions.
• Manage request throttling and anti-bot constraints.
• Avoid duplicate product records.
• Retry failed processing automatically.
• Run scheduled crawling jobs consistently.
• Provide visibility into crawling and processing results.
• Notify operators when system problems occurred.

Task

Build and maintain an automated data-acquisition system for collecting, processing, and organizing e-commerce data from major marketplaces such as Amazon and Etsy. The system was designed to support business and market/product research by automating the collection of product, pricing, and review data.

Solution

Developed an automated crawler and asynchronous data-processing system using PHP, Laravel, Laravel Queue Jobs, MySQL, Vue.js, Linux, and AWS. The system automated the complete pipeline from scheduled crawling through data processing and result presentation. Core capabilities included:

• Scheduled crawling based on categories and keywords.
• Automated web crawling and data extraction.
• Asynchronous queue-based processing.
• Product, pricing, and review data processing.
• Request throttling and rate-limit management.
• Rotating request headers.
• Automatic retry handling.
• Product deduplication using hash keys.
• Crawling status and result monitoring.
• Search and result views.
• Reporting.
• System-problem notifications.
• Production deployment and maintenance.

Contribution

As Freelance Software Engineer, I developed and maintained the crawler and data-processing platform across the technical lifecycle. I:

• Researched crawling and data-acquisition approaches.
• Designed the crawler and processing architecture.
• Implemented scheduled crawling workflows.
• Developed asynchronous Laravel queue jobs.
• Implemented product data extraction and processing.
• Designed rate-limit and throttling controls.
• Implemented request-header rotation.
• Designed product deduplication using hash keys.
• Implemented automatic retry handling.
• Developed search, result, and reporting functionality.
• Implemented monitoring and system-problem notifications.
• Deployed and maintained the production system.
• Monitored crawler execution and data-processing results.
• Adapted the implementation as marketplace behavior and requirements changed.

Technologies

• Languages: PHP
• Frameworks / Libraries: Laravel, Vue.js, Bootstrap
• Data Processing: Laravel Queue Jobs, ETL / ELT, Web Crawling, Data Extraction, Data Processing
• Database / Storage: MySQL
• Cloud / Infrastructure: Linux, AWS
• DevOps: Git, Docker, Cron

Results

• Automated recurring Amazon and Etsy e-commerce data collection.
• Continuously crawled and processed product, pricing, and review datasets.
• Implemented scheduled crawling based on categories and keywords.
• Added asynchronous data processing through queue jobs.
• Implemented product deduplication.
• Added automatic retry handling.
• Provided search and result views for collected data.
• Added reporting capabilities.
• Implemented system-problem notifications.
• Established a production system requiring ongoing monitoring and maintenance.