Are you looking forward to scraping product data and other data from the Walmart e-commerce platform? Then I would advise you stick to this page to discover how to develop a Walmart scraper or make a choice from about 5 already-made Walmart scrapers that are tested and trusted.
Walmart has been around now for decades and has proven itself to be a kind in the retail business doing more in revenue than any retailer in the world, including Amazon. While Amazon retails its spot as the number one e-commerce store, Walmart can be said to be the next in line when it comes to e-commerce.
Just like Amazon, Walmart does not just sell its own products; it allows other users to sell items in its marketplace. Currently, there are over 35 million products on sale at Walmart. If you consider this number plus the number of sales they make monthly, then it is wise to say that Walmart is a library of data for those interested in scraping product data.
Extracting thousands of product data manually is not an easy task. Aside from the fact that you will waste a lot of valuable time, the whole process is error-prone, repetitive, and boring. To make things worse, Walmart does not offer an easy way for you to extract product data from its platform.
If you must collect product data from Walmart, you must do that using a computer program known as a web scraper. A web scraper is a bot that automates the process of collecting data from websites on the Internet. They send web requests, get the content of the page, parse out the required data, and then store it or use it immediately.
In this article, we would be showing you how to scrape Walmart either by developing your own scraper or by using some of the best Walmart scrapers in the market. Before that, let take a look at what Walmart scraping entails.
Walmart Scraping – an Overview
Walmartscraping means using a web scraper that has the capability to extract data from the Walmart e-commerce platform. While this sounds easy in concept, it is not in practice. That is because Walmart does not allow scraping data from its platform, and as such, it has put in place anti-spam systems that would detect and block web scrapers from accessing its platform. One of the techniques it uses is IP tracking and blocking.
Aside from IP tracking, it also tracks cookies, uses Captchas and other AI-based systems to detect and blocked web scrapers from accessing its content. While this is effective for low-quality web scrapers, there are techniques you can follow to scrape Walmart without getting detected and banned.
Except you will be scraping on a very large scale, your focus would only be on evading IP tracking. If you are able to evade IP tracking, then you should be able to scrape Walmart. However, you should have a Captcha solver integrated into your bot should you need to solve Captchas. For evading IP tracking, we recommend you use rotating residential proxies.
With this kind of proxies, your requests are being routed via devices of real Internet users, which makes them difficult to identify as proxies. By rotating the IP addresses, you are able to exceed the request limits of Walmart without being blocked since the requests are from different IP addresses.
We recommend you use rotating residential proxies from Bright Data, Soax, Smartproxy, or Shifter.
How to Scrape Product Data from Walmart Using Python and Selenium
In the above section, we mentioned that scraping Walmart is not an easy task. However, we also mentioned that it could be done. In this section, we would be focusing on how to get it done using the Python programming language and its associated libraries and tools. If you are not a Python programmer, you can still benefit as the section is not code-heavy – you can use the knowledge to code a Walmart scraper for your chosen programming language.
If you do not have a coding skill, then this section is not for you; you can head over to the next section for recommendations on the best already-made Walmart scraper you can use.
If you take a look at the Walmart online store, you will notice that the website is JavaScript-heavy. In fact, if you turn off JavaScript, you will see a notification telling you it depends on JavaScript to function. This means that you cannot use the web scraping libraries that cannot execute JavaScript, such as Requests and Scrapy. For this, we would be using the Selenium Web Driver.
This tool automates web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and PhantomJS), and you can use it to access Walmart then use its API to access content from the page loaded. Selenium is equally available for other popular programming languages aside from Python. You can learn about the Selenium Web driver for Python here, including how to use it.
Since you will be using a browser to access the service, cookie tracking can come into play. For this reason, you need to look out for cookies and remove them from the browser. Also important is the fact that you should rotate request headers values, change sessions or create new ones at intervals.
This is because, unlike in the case of using Scrapy or Requests that everything is under your control, Selenium uses browsers, and as such, except you override or modify some of the features, it would be easier for Walmart to detect you. Also, it is important you do not log into any account while scraping. Being logged in would reveal your activities easily. You should also use rotating residential proxies (Smartproxy or Bright Data) to hide your IP footprints.
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Code Sample for Scraping Walmart Products
Below is an example of a Walmart scraper developed to accept a search keyword as an argument and return the details of the first 5 items on the search result.This scraper is quite basic developed using only Python and Selenium. We used the Chrome driver provided by Selenium, and as such, you will need to download the version for your Chrome browser and place it in the same folder as the script.
from selenium import webdriver
class WalmartScraper:
def__init__(self):
self.PATH = "chromedriver.exe"
self.driver = webdriver.Chrome(self.PATH)
self.products = []
defget_products(self, url):
self.driver.get(url)
# Parse data out of the page
products_html = self.driver.find_elements_by_class_name("search-gridview-last-col-item")
for item in products_html:
item = item.find_element_by_class_name("product-title-link").text
self.products.append(item)
search_strings = ["https://www.walmart.com/search/?query=rechargeable%20batteries",]
scraper = WalmartScraper()
for urlin search_strings:
scraper.get_products(url)
print(WalmartScraper.products)
Best Walmart Scrapers in the Market
If you do not have coding skills, you need not worry – you are covered. In this section of the article, we would be providing you recommendations on the best web scrapers you can use to scrape Walmart without writing a single line of code.
Interestingly, their usage is quite easy – even easier than what the developers use because these tools have been developed for everyday people. Let take a look at the top 5 web scrapers for Walmart product scraping.
Data Collector (Brightdata/Luminati)
- Pricing: Starts at $500 for 151K page loads
- Free Trials: Available
- Data Output Format: Excel
- Supported Platforms: Web-based
Data Collector is provided by Bright Data, It is one of the best data collector tools for Walmart. They have got predefined data-sets of all the products and reviews on Walmart that all you need is to requests, and you will get it. You can also get the products in a particular category or a group of products of interest to you.
Interestingly, they also offer a collector for collecting products by categories and another collector for product discovery. One thing you will come to like about Data Collector is that it is easy to use and accessible as a web-based tool. The tool is a paid tool, and pricing is based on the pay-as-you-go model.
Octoparse software
- 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
The Octoparse scraping tool remains one of the best general web scrapers in the market. It has support for Walmart, and you can use it to scrape all kinds of data from Walmart, including product and review/rating data. This tool would convert Walmart product listing into structured data in no time.
It is a visual scraping tool that offers you an easy-to-use point-and-click interface as a data trainer. One thing you will come to like about this tool is that it is built for the modern web, and as such, you can use it to scrape all kinds of websites without getting blocked. It also has a cloud-based platform and has support for schedule scraping. You can also get Walmart data using their done for you professional data service.
Apify Walmart Scraper
- Pricing: Starts at $5 monthly
- Free Trials: 7 days free trial
- Data Output Format: JSON
- Supported Platform: NodeJS library
This one has been added as a bonus. For non-coders, the above 4 are the web scrapers for you. This one is for NodeJS coders that do not want to reinvent the wheel or keep getting blocked as they try to scrape Walmart using their own custom scraper. You can use this Walmart scraper to crawl and extract product data, including description, price, images, brand details, and even variations, among others.
You can specify search terms and categories, among others. For this, I will advise you to use your own proxies and resist the temptation of using the free proxies they provide. The tool itself is quite affordable – $5 monthly. And you can use it for free for 7 days as a new user.
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 another general web scraper you can use to scrape product data from Walmart. This tool has been developed by an ex-Google crawler team. One thing about this tool is that it is Artificial Intelligence-powered which gives it the capability to intelligently identify data without manual operations required. However, for pages, it does not identify data manually, or the identified data is not your data of interest.
You can opt to use their point and click interface – which is quite easy to use. In terms of data export format, ScrapeStormhas support for multiple formats, including CSV, Excel, TXT, HTML, Google Sheets, and databases such as MongoDB, MySQL, and SQL Server, among others. This tool also has cloud and schedule scraping support.
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
If you do not have a budget, but you want to scrape Walmart, there is a tool for you – and that tool is ParseHub. As the name suggests, it is a scraping tool. You can use it to scrape product data not just from Walmart but any other e-commerce platform on the Internet.
The free tier comes with limitations, though. For an unlimited experience, you can opt-in for their paid plan. ParseHub can scrap all kinds of sites, including Ajaxified pages like Walmart. You can download scraped data either as JSON or Excel – and you can even access the data via an API. The service is easy to use, and you require no coding skills.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that Walmart has millions of products you can scrap. However, doing so would not be easy except you are an experienced web scraper, or you make use of an already-made Walmart scraper that has been designed to evade detection.
We have described 5 of the top web scrapers you can use above. One thing you need to know is that you will need proxies, and you should buy high-quality rotating residential proxies – Smartproxy and Bright Data are our recommended providers for Walmart proxies.
