[amingilani]

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

[jeanlucas]

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?

[amingilani]

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.

[irfan]

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

[chx]

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.)

[amingilani]

You covered it perfectly! :)

[amingilani]

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.

[irfan]

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

[amingilani]

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 :)

[yasoob]

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!

[always_good]

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.

[amingilani]

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.

[amingilani]

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

[jploh]

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.

[dewey]

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

[amingilani]

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

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