Are you looking forward to scraping AliExpress for product and review data? Then come in now and discover the best web scrapers you can use to scrape AliExpress and how you can develop your own if you are a coder.
E-commerce is a highly competitive scene with many big players and tiny ones too. AliExpress is one of the players in the market with over 100 million products in its inventory, has over 500 million visitors in January 2021, and has recorded over 150 million buyers a month before. What is interesting to us in this article is not the buyer’s statistics but the huge database of information available on the platform.
You can extract product data for affiliate benefits, monitor product pricing and ranking of your own product to remain competitive, as well as discover patterns and carry out analysis using the review data to know what users of certain products think about it which is good for market research.
While you can tell that AliExpress is the hub for product and review data if you are a market researcher or just a marketer, there is one thing you need to know – AliExpress does not offer its data to the public even though it is publicly available for all to see. If you must extract the data on the platform, you must do that without getting any help from the platform. And as you know, manual data extraction from web pages on any reasonable magnitude can be tasking, boring, and error-prone.
That is why web scraping is the best method of collecting data from AlExpress web pages. We would be providing you with recommendations on how best to scrape AliExpress if you are a coder. We also provided recommendations on the best already-made AlExpress scraper you can use if you are not a coder.
AliExpress Scraping – an Overview
AliExpress scraping is the process of using computer bots known as web scrapers or more specifically AliExpress scrapers to extract the publicly available data on the AliExpress web pages. The information can be product information such as the name, description, rating, and even seller info. It could also be buyers’ reviews. In fact, any information publicly available on the platform can be scraped.
The process is actually simple. The web scraper acts as a browser to send a web request for the page with the required data. Unlike in the case of browsers that render the page, the web scraper would parse out the required data in other to store it or use it directly if it is a custom scraper.
Scraping is the number one method you can use to extract data from AliExpress. This is because the platform does not provide a public API you can use to collect all of the information you need from its platform. Interestingly, AliExpress frowns at the scraping of its content.
This is because scraping adds no value to the platform instead, collects its data while sending it an unnatural number of requests within a short period of time. This had made AlExpress develop methods to discourage scraping and only when you are able to bypass the checks would you be able to scrape its content successfully.
How to Scrape AliExpress Using Python and Selenium
If you are a coder, then with the right guidance, you can develop your own custom AliExpress scraper with which you can scrap products and review data from AliExpress. The programming language you are proficient with does not matter. The most important thing is that the language is Turing complete, and provides you a way to send HTTP requests and parse content out of web pages.
In this guide, we would be making use of Python as it is the most popular for teaching web scraping. One thing you need to know about scraping AliExpress is that it can be difficult because of its reliance on Javascript.
Yes, if you turn off Javascript execution, AliExpress web pages won’t render correctly. This means that you cannot use Requests and Beautifulsoup to scrape it. You will need to use a library or framework that renders Javascript. Selenium web driver is the tool for the job if you are a Python coder. Selenium also supports the other popular programming languages.
However, NodeJS developers would be better off using Puppeteer. Selenium web driver automates web browsers – what you do with that power is up to you – in our own case, we would be using it to render the full content on AliExpress web pages so that we can use its API to extract the data on the page. Visit the official Selenium documentation for Python to learn how to make use of it.
One thing you need to know about scraping AliExpress is that you will get blocked after a few pages. This is because AliExpress does not support scraping and has got its anti-spam system set up to block web scrapers. You will need to bypass the anti-scraping measures put in place to succeed. The major technique you will need to implement is using rotating proxies that changes IP address frequently. IP tracking and blocking is AliExpress’s most effective method of detecting and blocking scrapers. When you use rotating proxies, you make it ineffective. I will advise you to buy high-quality residential proxies from Bright Data, Smartproxy, or Soax. Other techniques you need to implement include setting popular HTTP headers, rotating user agent strings, and setting random delay time between requests.
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Sample Code for Scraping AliExpress
To show you how to put the above together into a code that actually works, we would be providing you with a sample script that scrapes product details from the AliExpress website. What this script does is simple, all you need to provide to the AliExpressScraper is the URL of the product and you get the product information scraped.
The script is quite basic and does not handle exceptions. It also does not integrate anti-block features so it is just a proof of concept. You will need to download and place the Chrome driver for your specific Chrome browser version in the same folder (path) as the script below. Download selenium Chrome driver here.
from selenium import webdriver
class AliScraper:
def __init__(self, url):
self.url = url
self.driver = webdriver.Chrome()
def scraped_data(self):
self.driver.get(self.url)
name = self.driver.find_element_by_class_name("product-title-text").text
price = self.driver.find_element_by_class_name("uniform-banner-box-price").text
rating = self.driver.find_element_by_class_name("overview-rating-average").text
return {
"name": name,
"price": price,
"rating": rating
}
urls = ["https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003004628090.html"]
for url in urls:
print(AliScraper(url).scraped_data())
- Playwright Vs. Puppeteer Vs. Selenium: What are the differences?
- Web Scraping Using Selenium and Python: The Step-By-Step Guide for Beginner
Best AliExpress Scrapers
If you do not want to create a custom scraper or you do not even have the skill to do such, it does not matter – you can still scrape AliExpress – thanks to the already-made scrapers in the market that you can use for such. Some of them are meant for coders while others are specifically for coders. We would be recommending 3 AliExpress scrapers for non-coders and 2 AliExpress scrapers for coders.
Data Collector
- Pricing: Starts at $500 for 151K page loads
- Free Trials: Available
- Data Output Format: Excel
- Supported Platforms: Web-based
Bright Data, a market leader in the proxy market is the owner of the Data Collector collector tool which has proven to be one of the best for scraping AliExpress. This tool takes away the technicalities of web scraping as you do not need to deal with proxies or any system. All you need is to access via any web browser and get the data you want. There are basically 2 collectors for AliExpress.
The first one is the AliExpress product search for collecting product data by URL and the second one is the AliExpress discovery for collecting all the categories pages from AliExpress.
This tool has been geared towards non-coders and it is arguably one of the easiest you can use if you do not have coding skills. It is a paid tool and the pricing model is the pay as you go model.
Apify AliExpress Scraper
- Pricing: Starts at $49 per month for 100 Actor compute units
- Free Trials: Starter plan comes with 10 Actor compute units
- Data Output Format: JSON
- Supported OS: Cloud-based – accessed via API
Are you a NodeJS developer looking forward to avoid building an AliExpress scraper from scratch? Then you can simply make use of this scraper on the Apify platform. The AliExpress Scraper on the Apify platform has been developed to help you extract product details such as images, descriptions, prices, questions, and feedback, among others.
You will need to import the Apify module in your script to use this tool. Another thing you need to know is that unlike in the case of the Data Collector above, you will need to add proxies and I would recommend you use residential proxies from either Bright Data or Smartproxy. The pricing for running actors on the Apify platform is quite affordable and as a new user, you can claim their free trial to make sure it works for you before making payment.
Proxycrawl Scraper API
- Pricing: Starts at $29 per month
- Free Trials: Free trial available
- Data Output Format: JSON
- Supported Platforms: Web API
The Proxycrawl Scraper API is a scraper meant for developers. You can see it as a scraper API that helps you handles proxies and browsers while acting as a parser too. With this tool, you would not need to install any application in other to scrape AliExpress. All you need to do is send web requests to get access to the data you want.
The Scraper API has got support for a good number of popular websites including AliExpress. For AliExpress, it does have support for scraping its product details such as product availability, images, reviews, prices, and shipping summaries, among other details. It also provides you with structured SERP data from AliExpress. This web scraper is accessible as a web API and you get results in JSON.
WebHarvy
- Pricing: Freemium
- Free Trials: Freemium
- Data Output Format: CSV, XLSX, and JSON
- Supported Platform: Browser extension (Chrome and Firefox)
Are you comfortable installing software on your computer? Then you can as well try out the WebHarvy scraping tool for scraping AliExpress product details. This tool is a generic web scraper that has been designed for scraping all kinds of sites including modern Ajaxified websites. Being a generic web scraper, you can use it to scrape AliExpress. WebHarvy even provides an easy-to-follow guide on how to scrape AliExpress using the WebHarvy web scraper.
WebHarvy looks quite simple but is incredible at scraping. You do not require any coding skills to use it. All you need is the skill of pointing and clicking data of interest which every computer operator has. This tool comes with advanced features includes support for scraping scheduling, proxy, and intelligent pattern detection, among others.
ScrapeStorm
- Pricing: Starts at $49.99 per month
- Free Trials: Starter plan is free – comes with limitations
- Data Output Format: TXT, CSV, Excel, JSON, MySQL, Google Sheets, etc.
- Supported Platforms: Desktop, Cloud
The Scrapestorm scraping tool is another web scraper you can use to scrape AliExpress. It is also one of the visual scrapers you can use to scrape AliExpress without the need to have any coding skills. The tool provides you with an intuitive point and clicks interface for defining the data of interest.
One thing you will come to like about this tool is that it is powered by an AI and can automatically identify data of interest on a page. If it identified the data of interest correctly, you will not have the need to even make use of its point and click interface. This tool is powerful and even has support for enterprise scraping. It also has cloud account support, making all of your scraping tasks saved to the cloud server which removes the fear of losing your scraping tasks.
Conclusion
Looking at the above, you can see that there are many options available to you if you want to scrape AliExpress. You can either use an already-made scraper which many are available in the market or simply develop a custom one if you have coding skills. Fortunately for us, scraping publicly available data is still legal and as such, you aren’t breaking any law if you scrape AliExpress but it pays to be polite to web servers you scrape from.
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