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. An MCP server is essentially an API adapter that exposes tools to any MCP-compatible client (Claude, Cursor, GPT, OpenCode, etc.).…