My Amazon History

Inspiration

Several months ago, I wanted to share my Amazon Purchase History on LinkedIn. It was a bunch of coding books - and I couldn't find an easy way to share the history. I had to manually copy-paste the Product Names and links, download the images, and then re-upload them to a LinkedIn post. It was a pain and I figured, the process could be automated, and perhaps there are other people out there that also want an easy way to share and chat about their Amazon Purchase History.

What it does

Scrapes Amazon Purchase History.

How I built it

Chrome Extension, NodeJS Server, MongoDB, and a Web GUI in the MERN Stack with NextJS. It fetches the Product Title, Description, Product Reviews and Images. It's using jQuery for selecting elements AngularJS for the Popup UX (that little dropdown thing when you click the Extension Icon in the browser)

Challenges I ran into

Scraping Amazon Data (Amazon doesn't provide an API to fetch a user's purchase history - probably because they don't want users to leave their ecosystem - or they don't want the Social Elements of shopping to be owned by a third-party).

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Following through til the end of the MVP.

What I learned

Don't force yourself to choose a framework because it's "The HOT thing right now". A lot of developers choose overly complex tools for the wrong tasks. Simplicity is beautiful.