Are you looking for the best web scraper to use for scraping product listing and data from eBay? Then come in now and discover the best eBay scrapers you can use in the market right now – and learn how to scrap eBay yourself.
eBay accounts for just a slice of the US e-commerce market, but it remains the third-largest e-commerce, directly behind Amazon and Walmart. And I tell you what; with over one billion products listed on the e-commerce platform and the number of sales they make yearly, there’s no denying that there’s an incredibly among of data you can use on the eBay platform. And this can be seen from the number of people interested in extracting data from eBay. Truth be told, when compared with Amazon, there’s no denying that eBay is far behind, but as a marketer interested in product data, you cannot afford to ignore the huge product data available on eBay.
eBay does not provide a limitless method of accessing the publicly available data on its platform. Also, you will agree with me that extracting data from hundreds and even thousands of products manually is not an easy task and will take a lot of time – with errors introduced. However, with the use of eBay scrapers, which are computer programs written to automate the process of extracting data from eBay. It extracts publicly available data from the platform at speed humans can’t and does so efficiently, making it possible for marketers and business researchers to have access to required product data at a much quicker timing.
eBay Scraping – an Overview
I want you to have it at the back of your mind that web scraping publicly available data is not illegal – at least according to a US Court, you do not need the permission of a website before scraping its publicly available data. Haven said that you also need to know that no reasonable website will allow an army of bots on its site on a mission to scrape its content – and possibly overwhelm its server with requests. eBay has been one of the sites that won’t allow you access to their site through automated means. There has been a good number of cases involving eBay and web scrapers – while it won some of the suits, it losses some.
In your own case, you will most likely not be on their radar except, of course, if you’re trying to scrape big data of the platform. With the right use of anti-scraping system evasion techniques and scraping ethics such as being nice and setting a delay between requests, you will scrape unnoticed without causing any problems to their server.
This requires proper planning and proper execution, especially when you need to scrape at a reasonable scale. If you’re using an already-made tool for the scraping, make sure it is configured correctly. For those that will want to create their own eBay scraper from scratch, the short tutorials below will show you to create your own scraper using Python.
How to Scrape eBay using Python, Requests, and Beautifulsoup
On eBay, the data of interest to web scrapers is either the product details of individual products or the listing of a group of products. Some businesses use web scraping to keep a tab and monitor the pricing of their products of interest – others just scrape the required data ones and never return.
Whichever group you belong, it might interest you to note that you won’t find it difficult scraping eBay. This is because it has a simple interface and does not make use of AJAX that will stand in your way and make scraping difficult for you. This only means that downloading and parsing the pages is easy. But accessing it might be difficult because of the checks in place.
For you to be able to scrape at a reasonable scale, using proxies is non-negotiable. Without using proxies, you will surely get detected forced to solve Captchas, and then blocked after a few more requests. Proxies will help you evade IP tracking and fool the system into thinking your requests are coming from different computers.
Setting header values such as User-Agent is also required and make sure you mimic a popular browser to avoid suspicion. With these in mind, let move to creating a simple eBay scraper that takes a search query as a parameter and scrapes the data of the products listed on the first page – nothing really special, just to show you how it is done.
The Python programming language will be used for building the scraper. The Requests library will be used for sending web requests and returning the response as an HTML string. Beautifulsoup will be used for extracting out the required data, which is details of each of the products on the first page of the search.
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
def add_plus(keywords):
keywords = keywords.split()
keyword_edited = ""
for i in keywords:
keyword_edited += i + "+"
keyword_edited = keyword_edited[:-1]
return keyword_edited
class EbayScraper:
def __init__(self, keyword):
self.keyword = keyword
plusified_keyword = add_plus(keyword)
self.products = []
self.search_url = "https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=" + plusified_keyword
def scrape_products(self):
headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0) AppleWebKit/537.36
(KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.132 Safari/537.36'}
content = requests.get(self.search_url, headers=headers).text
soup = BeautifulSoup(content, "html.parser")
product_list = []
products = soup.find("ul", {"class": "srp-results srp-list
clearfix"}).find_all("li", {"class": "s-item s-item--watch-at-corner"})
for product in products:
div = product.find("div", {"class": "s-item__info clearfix"})
name = div.find_all("a")[0].text
price = div.find('span', {"class": "s-item__price"}).text
product_list.append({
"name": name,
"price": price
})
return product_list
x = EbayScraper("hisense tv")
x.scrape_products()
Read more,
Best eBay Scrapers
eBay presents no unique problem to many of the existing generic web scrapers in the market, and as such, a good number of them can actually scrap it. However, there are still some specialized eBay scrapers out there. Below is a mix of both the generic and eBay specialized web scrapers that have been tested and have proven to work quite well.
BrightData Ebay Collector
- Pricing: Starts at $500 for 151K page loads
- Free Trials: Available
- Data Output Format: Excel
- Supported Platforms: Web-based
The number web scraper we would recommend for you as a non-coder looking forward to scraping product data from eBay is Data Collector. This tool will help you collect accurate product data from eBay. Currently, Data Collector has support for scraping product data based on product URL and barcode.
The tool is one the best when it comes to collecting structured data from e-commerce and social media platforms. One thing you will come to like about Data Collector is that if it does not have support for a collector, you can request for it, and they will develop it.
Apify Web Scraper
- Pricing: Starts at $49 per month
- Free Trials: Fully functional free account with $5 credit every month
- Data Output Format: JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, HTML, RSS
- Supported Platform: Cloud, Desktop
The Apify web scraping and automation platform can be used to scrape any website. If you can manually access a web page from a browser, Apify can automate the process and extract data from it. While Apify Store doesn’t yet have a dedicated ready-made eBay scraper, you can easily customize their all-purpose Web Scraper. The Apify team is always available to offer expert advice or custom solutions.
If you do decide to scrape eBay you will almost certainly need to use proxies. Apify includes its own built-in proxy service designed for web scraping at any scale. The free account comes with a 30-day trial of Apify Proxy and a generous $5 in platform credits every month.
Octoparse
- Pricing: Starts at $75 per month
- Free Trials: 14 days of free trial with limitations
- Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON, MySQL, SQLServer
- Supported Platform: Cloud, Desktop
Octoparse makes web scraping easy for everyone. With this web scraping tool, you can turn web pages into a structured spreadsheet with just a few clicks of the mouse. It has support for extracting data from eBay. Octoparse comes with some advanced web scraping features that help it to scrape even the most advanced and strict websites.
Octoparse as both a desktop application as well as a cloud-based platform. For eBay, you can use the templates already-made templates provided by them. You can even enjoy 14 days free trial from them when you register – with a few limitations to be unlocked after making a monetary commitment.
Helium Scraper
- Pricing: Starts at 99 for one user license
- Free Trials: Fully functional 10 days of free trials
- Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, XML, JSON, SQLite
- Supported Platform: Desktop
Helium Scraper is a general web scraper that you can use to scrape any website you want to extract data from e-commerce sites like eBay. Helium Scraper comes with a good number of features that make it perfect for scraping eBay on a big scale. It has support for SQLite, which could be used for storing up to 140 terabytes. It is perfect for manipulation text and comes with a similar element detection system that makes it detect similar elements.
Helium Scraper does not require you to have a coding skill as it is a visual scraping tool. Helium Scraper is easy to use – thanks to its intuitive point and click interface.
Read more, The Best Web Scraping Software to Extract Data (Desktop application)
ParseHub
- Pricing: Starts at $149 per month
- Free Trials: Desktop version is free with some limitations
- Data Output Format: Excel, JSON
- Supported Platform: Cloud, Desktop
If you do not have a budget, but you still want to scrape eBay product listing and other publicly available data on eBay, then ParseHub is the web scraper of choice. You know why? ParseHub desktop application is free to use but has some limitations that might not be a problem.
You need to setup proxies, and the scraper will take care of IP rotation for you – using rotating proxies is the best, though. ParseHub also makes use of a point and click interface for data point training. ParseHub is easy to use and, at the same time, incredibly powerful and flexible. You can set it up for scheduled scraping.
Proxycrawl Ebay Scraper
- Pricing: Starts at $29 per month for 50,000 credits
- Free Trials: first 1000 requests
- Data Output Format: JSON
- Supported Platforms: cloud-based – accessed via API
Proxycrawl Ebay Scraper is a scraping API meant for scraping product details such as name, title, price, description, availability, and other product-related information. You can also use it to get structured SERP details from the eBay search. With the Proxycrawl Ebay Scraper, you have nothing to worry about as far as handling blocks and Captchas as it is a scraping API. You can even try out a live demo of the scraper and make sure it is returning the expected data. Since it works as an API, all that’s required from you is to send a restful API request, and a JSON containing the required data is returned.
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
ScrapeStorm is an Artificial Intelligence-based web scraping tool that you can use to scrape product data from eBay. Unlike most web scraping tools, ScrapeStorm does not require you to train it on some specific popular sites like eBay – it detects features automatically using its AI-based system, and as such, it is easy to use. ScrapeStorm was developed by an ex-Google crawler team. ScrapeStorm provides multiple options when it comes to data exports, and you can even access it from the cloud.
Conclusion
The list above is not exhaustive; there are many more web scrapers you can use to scrape eBay product listing and other product details. But if what you are looking for is an eBay scraper that does not only work but is also powerful, easy to use, and comes with some advanced features, then any of the above eBay scrapers should work for you.
Related,
