Amazon recently made a change that blocks their reviews pages to visitors who are not logged-in. After this change we need to use the cookie string from our Amazon account to be able to scrape reviews.
Here's how you can get the cookie string for your Amazon account.
Before proceeding make sure that the Amazon account you are copying the cookie for belongs to the country domain that you want to scrape reviews from.
Login, right-click & inspect
Login to your Amazon account and open developer tools by right clicking anywhere on the page and then clicking on Inspect
Click on Network tab & Doc filter
Navigate to the Network tab within the developer tools window and then the Doc tab within the Network tab
Find Cookie in Request Headers & copy entire string
Go to any Amazon product URL and click on the document request for that page within the Network tab. On the right side of the pane you can see details about the request. Scroll to the Request Headers and copy the entire value of the header with the label Cookie
If you do not see the Cookie header, refresh the page with the network tab open and the value should appear.
Why we need to do this
Amazon made an update to their site earlier this month blocking access to the reviews page (See all reviews) for all products for users who are not logged-in.
This is why we need you to copy the value of the cookie on your Amazon account and pass it to the Amazon Reviews API as described on the API docs page.
We chose this route over saving your Amazon credentials with us, as that is the only 2nd alternative.
Which browser to choose
The above instructions work well for Safari on Mac OSX and Google's Chrome on Windows or Mac OS.
On Firefox, the value of the cookie string is compressed and if you copy and use it with our API it will result in a failure.
Advanced Mode
Copy request as curl
If you only have access to Firefox or if for some reason copying the cookie string directly from the network tab UI isn't working for you, you can also use this alternative method to retrieve the entire cookie string as required by our API. Light developer skills and a simple text editor is needed, however.
Open the Network tab within the developer tools on your favourite browser, we've used Firefox this time, and then under the HTML tab identify the main document request and then RIGHT CLICK on it and select copy as cURL or equivalent.
After that you can paste the request in your favourite text editor and copy the cookie string in its entirety. It's safer to refresh the page and then copy the request to ensure that the entire cookie has been loaded in the request after authentication.
Generate token programmatically
Alternatively, if your application requires a very large of reviews (>2-3k requests per day), we suggest looking into a temporary phone number service to try and generate multiple tokens for passing to the Amazon Reviews API.