The Problem with Web Scrapers

Most developers trying to give AI agents shopping capabilities start with web scraping. It seems obvious — scrape Amazon, scrape Lazada, parse the HTML, done.

But scrapers fail in ways that make them unsuitable for AI agents:

Fragile selectors — change one CSS class and your scraper breaks

Anti-bot detection — IP bans, CAPTCHAs, rate limits

No structured data — parsing HTML into usable product data is unreliable

No cross-market normalization — every site formats prices differently

Maintenance hell — every site you track needs its own scraper

The MCP Server Alternative

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is designed for exactly this: giving AI agents structured, typed access to external systems.…