# Compliance And Failure Modes

This reference is operational guidance, not legal advice. The operator is responsible for making sure a run complies with Amazon terms, robots directives, local law, and account obligations.

## Required Guardrails

- Fetch and evaluate `https://www.amazon.com/robots.txt` before live scraping planned Amazon paths.
- Stop if the effective rules disallow the planned search or detail paths.
- Do not automate sign-in, checkout, cart, wishlist, review submission, customer-review pages, reviewer profiles, or any disallowed path.
- Do not bypass CAPTCHA, bot checks, blocked pages, or access-denied pages.
- Do not print cookies, profile state, session storage, or account/location-specific browser data.

## Allowed Scope

Allowed behavior is bounded read-only product research over search result pages and normalized product detail pages:

- `/s?k=<query>` search results.
- `/dp/<ASIN>` product details.
- `/gp/product/<ASIN>` product details.

Review data is limited to visible summary ratings/counts and visible histogram rows on search/detail pages. Do not navigate to `/product-reviews`, `/review`, `/gp/customer-reviews`, or review AJAX endpoints.

## Failure Modes

Return a structured warning and do not claim success when any of these happen:

- CAPTCHA or bot-check page.
- Sign-in wall.
- HTTP 429 or 503 that remains after the bounded retry budget.
- Robots rules disallow a planned path.
- Product markup changes enough that required fields cannot be found.
- Amazon returns localized, personalized, or ZIP/session-dependent delivery text that cannot be verified.

## Output Rules

- Unknown fields stay unknown.
- Partial extraction is acceptable only when the response includes warnings and missing-field notes.
- Sponsored products can be returned by default but must be labeled.
- Counts above 30 require operator confirmation or batch splitting.