stef-openclaw-skills/skills/amazon-shopping/references/compliance-and-failure-modes.md

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.