Are you looking for the best web scrapers to use for scraping Etsy, or are you looking for a guide on how to develop one as a coder? Whichever is the case, the article below caters to your need.
Etsy is a global marketplace for handmade items, vintage, custom, and unique gifts for everyone. The platform has proven to be the market leader, with over 60 million items listed on the platform. With this huge database of product data, it is wise to say that Etsy is a good data source for handmade items, vintages, and unique gifts and as such, you can use it to get product data for these items provided it is listed on the platform. A good number of marketers on Etsy use Etsy for product research and price monitoring, among others.
However, collecting product data (listing, pricing, rating, and review) from Etsy can be difficult. This is because Etsy does not provide an easy method for collecting data from its platform – no official API for reviewing product data open to the public for free. If you must extract product data from the platform, you must do that on your own, and you will agree with me that manually extracting product data from hundreds of pages can be tasking, boring, time-wasting, and even error-prone. However, with Etsy scrapers, you can automate the process, making it not only time-saving but also efficient.
Etsy Scraping – an Overview
Etsy scraping is the process of using automated means to extract publicly available data from Etsy web pages. The tool used in scraping Etsy is known as Etsy scraper or can be regarded broadly as simple a web scraper. This is a computer bot developed to automate the process of collecting data from Etsy. How the tool work is simple – it sends a web request to download the page with the required data, and when that is successful, it parses out the required data from the page and saves it. In theory, it is simple, but in practice, it can be complex and difficult, especially if you are inexperienced.
This is because Etsy does not allow the scraping of its content and has put in place, anti-scraping measures to discourage bot access. If you want to scrape Etsy, then you will need to bypass the anti-scraping systems first; else, you will be blocked after scraping a few pages. Some of the measures put in place by Etsy include IP tracking and blocking, cookie tracking, and other unknown methods. Fortunately for us, the most effective methods for them are IP and cookie tracking, and as such, if you are able to bypass them, then you will scrape without being stopped.
How to Scrape Etsy Using Python, Requests, and Beautifulsoup
This section has been written for programmers. If you do not know how to code and want to scrape Etsy, just head over to the next section where we recommend web scrapers for scraping Etsy. For coders, scraping Etsy has been made easy thanks to the arrays of libraries and frameworks that have been developed which make your tasks easier – that even newbie coders can now scrape. For Python programmers, there are two third-party Python libraries you will need to scrape Etsy – Requests for humans and Beautifulsoup. The Requests library is an HTTP library for sending HTTP requests while Beautifulsoup is for parsing out required data.
If you try visiting Etsy with Javascript turned off, you will see that the page will still open and that is why we could use the duo of Requests and Beautifulsoup. There are content on the page that required Javascript to render them – for such, Requests and Beautiful will not work – you will need a library/framework that renders Javascript and Selenium is the tool for the job. To learn how to use the duo of Requests and beautifulsoup for scraping Etsy, you should read their documentation linked to.
Even after learning how to use Requests and beautifulsoup, you will still have problems and Etsy will block you. Remember, in the section above, we made mention of Etsy having anti-scraping systems – well that is for you and not the using already-made web scrapers with the anti-scraping systems already bypassed. Only when you are able to bypass the blocks would you scrape the product data you want. IP tracking remains the major technique Etsy use and as such, you will need to make use of proxies. For Etsy, you will need rotating proxies that changes IP address frequently so that your requests won’t have the same IP footprint. Other practices to avoid getting blocked include rotating user agent string, set random delays between requests, and use the referrer header with random URLs in it.
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Sample Code For Scraping Etsy Using Python, Requests, and Beautifulsoup
The script below accepts a list of Etsy product URLs as input and return details of each of the products. It has been designed to be an MVP and as such, very simple and minimal – no exception handling or bypassing any anti-scraping technique. You can extend it and make it more robust as a way of learning how to write scripts to scrape Etsy.
# import both Requests and Beautifulsoup
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
class EtsyProductScraper:
def __init__(self, url):
self.url = url
self.download_page()
def download_page(self):
# method for downloading the hotel page
self.page = requests.get(self.url).text
def scrape_data(self):
#method for scraping out product name, description, and price
soup = BeautifulSoup(self.page, "html.parser")
product_name = soup.find("h1", {"id": "listing-title-small"}).text
product_description = soup.find("div", {"id": "wt-content-toggle-product-details-read-more"}).text
product_price = soup.find("div", {"data-buy-box-region": "price"}).find("p", {"class": "wt-text-title-03 wt-mr-xs-2"}).text
return {"name": product_name,
"description": product_description,
"price": product_price
}
urls = ["https://www.etsy.com/listing/847369766/leather-drawer-pullsship-from-us-drawer?ref=hp_disco-0-1",]
for url in urls:
x = EtsyProductScraper(url)
print(x.scrape_data())
Read more,
- How to Extract Product Data with Requests, and BeautifulSoup
- How to Scrape Yelp data with Python (Yelp scraper added)
- How to Scrape Product Data from Amazon with Python
Best Etsy Scrapers in the Market
In this section, we would be recommending already-made Etsy scrapers for those that either does not have the skill to create one or do not want to reinvent the wheel. If you do not have coding skills, this section has been written for you. However, we would also recommend a web scraper that is specifically for developers here too.
Bright Data’s Data Collector
- Pricing: Starts at $500 for 151K page loads
- Free Trials: Available
- Data Output Format: Excel
- Supported Platforms: Web-based
Bright Data, the popular proxy provider is also one of the providers of web scrapers that you can use for scraping Etsy. The name of this data scraper is Data Collector and using this tool, you can collect data from a good number of popular websites.
Data collector does not require you to write a single line of code and you do not even need to do anything to prevent blocks. Everything is done for you and the tool is accessible as a web-based tool. For Etsy, it does have support for scraping product details – all you need to provide is either the product ID or URL.
You can even upload a CSV file with the URL of the products you want to scrape their data. Pricing for Data Collector is based on the pay-as-you-go model and can be said to be quite affordable.
Apify Etsy 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
With this tool, you can collect details such as descriptions, images, seller details, and other product details. The tool is not free – it will cost you $5 monthly but you can enjoy a one-week free trial as a new user. The scraper is built on top of the Apify platform and as such, it is meant only for NodeJS developers.
ParseHub
- Pricing: Free with a paid plan
- Free Trials: Free – advance features come at an extra cost
- Data Output Format: Excel, JSON,
- Supported Platform: Cloud, Desktop
ParseHub is another web scraper you can use to scrape product data from Etsy. the web scraper is not specifically meant for Etsy – it is a general web scraping tool that you can use to scrape all kinds of websites. One thing you will come to like about ParseHub especially if you are not a coder is that it does not require you to have any coding skills.
It provides you a point and clicks interface which you would use in identifying the data you want. ParseHub is a paid tool but does have a basic free tier that you can use for scraping Etsy. However, going for their paid license would give you advanced features, including scheduling scraping tasks.
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
ScrapeStorm is an easy-to-use web scraper for extracting products and all kinds of data publicly available on the Etsy platform. This tool requires no programming whatsoever – all tasks are visual operations. One thing you will come to like about ScrapeStorm is that it is AI-powered and has support for automatic element identification.
For data that do not get automatically identified, you can use the provided point and click interface. Scrapestorm is designed for the modern web and has one of the best support in terms of file export format including databases. This tool is an enterprise-grade tool and they even got a free tier too.
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
Last on the list of web scrapers for Etsy is Octoparse. Unlike in the case of ScrapeStorm and ParseHub, Octoparse does not have a free tier. Instead, all it has is a 14 day free trial for new users. Just like the other two mentioned, Octoparse is also a visual scraping tool that provides you points and clicks – so, it is geared towards non-coders too.
Octoparse has support for a good number of advanced features including cloud scraping and schedule scraping. One thing you will come to like about this web scraper is that the team behind it offers a professional web scraping service for those that wouldn’t want to use a web scraper directly.
Conclusion
The 5 web scrapers discussed above are just a few of the web scrapers you can use to scrape Etsy. there are many other ones in the market and you can even develop a custom one for your project if you have coding skills.
It is important you know that even though you do not get blocked because of the undetectable nature of your web scraper, you should be nice to the web server you scrape from.
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