Best Web Scrapers
In a hurry?
The best eBay scraper in 2023, as found in our independent testing, is ScraperAPI!
If you have been searching for the best eBay scraper for scraping product data, you came to the right place.
We have compiled a list of the very best eBay scrapers that can get you all the customer insight and buying behavior details.
Of course, all the information is available to the general public for viewing.
Many web scrapers are generally made to be used for any websites that have data that can be collected.
Other scrapers are dedicated for any particular website.
Even though there are frequent new additions to the world of eBay web scrapers, the following are the ones that give the best results.
Best eBay Scraper in 2023
Here’s a quick look at the best eBay scrapers:
- ScraperAPI – 🏆 Winner!
- Oxylabs
- Bright Data’s eBay Collector
- Apify
- Octoparse
- ProxyCrawl
- Helium Scraper
1. ScraperAPI
The starter plan for this software is completely free, but it comes with certain limitations. The monthly payment for the paid version begins at $49.99.
It provides complete support for the desktop platform. The output data can be received in many formats such as Google Sheets, Excel, TXT, JSON, CSV, MySQL, etc.
Most web scrapers expect the user to train the tool for popular websites, but ScraperAPI does not require the user to do any such thing.
It has an Al-based system that automatically detects the required data and makes the tool very easy to use.
It is a flexible tool that provides many options for data export, and it is even accessible through the cloud.
2. Oxylabs
If your budget ties you up, but still want the goldmine of eBay scrape data, then Oxylabs is the software for you.
With the famous point and click interface, Oxylabs is perfect for data point training.
It is a versatile scraping tool that is extremely user-friendly and flexible.
You can even use Oxylabs to schedule scraping at a later time. The full version for this tool is available at a starting price of $99, which is a monthly payment.
When you scrape product data from eBay using Oxylabs, you can get the resulting data in Excel and JSON formats.
3. Bright Data’s eBay Collector
Bright Data will enable you to collect product data according to the product’s barcode and URL.
This eBay scraper tool provides free trials to get an idea of what you will get with the whole package.
If you are not good at coding, this is the best choice of eBay scraper for you.
The main reason for scraping is to get data in a structured form that can be used ahead for further research or product development, etc.
This tool will provide you with precisely that.
Bright Data will help you obtain structured data from various social media platforms and e-commerce websites.
If they do not have support for a particular website, you can just send them a request, and they will provide it for you.
Pricing for Bright Data begins at $500 for every 151K page loads. It supports web-based platforms.
The data that will be available to you after scraping will be in the Excel format.
4. Apify
To use the full version of Apify, you will have to pay $49 every month. However, it also provides a free account that is fully functional, for which there is a monthly credit of $5.
It is an automation and web scraping platform that can help you scrape data from any website.
If you have manual access to a website through a browser, then Apify can easily automate that process and help you extract data from that web page.
Proxies are needed when you use a software for web scraping on any website.
Apify does not have a completely dedicated eBay scraper, but it provides full support for it through its all-rounder web scraper.
Apify has a team that is available around the clock to offer detailed advice and customized solutions.
Apify has a built-in proxy of its own that can be used during web scraping. If you opt for the free account, it includes a trial for the Apify proxy.
The trial lasts for 30 days. You will also get a $5 credit for the platform every month.
5. Octoparse
This is the software that makes eBay scraping easy for all its users. You can easily turn an entire web page into a spreadsheet with just a few clicks.
It includes advanced features that can help users in scraping even the strictest of websites.
Even though it is a general web scraper, it provides complete support for eBay product data scraping.
It is available as cloud-based software and has a desktop application as well.
In the case of eBay, it provides ready-made templates which you can use while scraping data.
Octoparse provides 14 days long free trial during which you can give it a try and decide if it is the software for your scraping needs.
The trial has limited features, but it can still give you a good idea of the web scraper.
You have to pay $75 every month for the full version of Octoparse. It gives output in multiple data formats such as MySQL, JSON, CSV SQLServer, and Excel.
6. ProxyCrawl
You can purchase 50,000 credits of this tool for $29. The free trial includes the initial 1000 requests. It is a cloud-based platform that can be accessed through API.
ProxyCrawl is a scraping API. It can scrape product details such as price, name, availability, title, brand name, etc.
This tool can gain access to SERP details in a structured form. With this software, you will not have to worry about any scraping block mechanisms that websites may use.
You can even check out a live demo to ensure that the tool is scraping the required data.
Since it is a scraping API, you will have to send an API request so that JSON holding the requested data is returned.
7. Helium Scraper
A single-user license costs $99 for Helium Scraper. They give a 10 day free trial to their users with no limitation on the included features.
This web scraper is not dedicated to eBay alone.
It is a general web scraper. But it provides a multitude of features that enable its users to scrape a large amount of product data from eBay.
It supports SQLite, which can store 140 terabytes of data. It has an element detection system that enables it to detect elements that are similar in nature.
You do not need any coding skills for a scraping tool.
It has a point-and-click interface. It supports a desktop platform which is convenient for most users.
The output data can be received in many formats such as SQLite, JSON, XML, Excel, and CSV.
What Is Web Scraping?
The world wide web is full of data that companies can extract and use for further research or enhancement of their respective businesses.
All this data has been put out in the virtual world by users themselves.
Web scraping is when you use software or coding to get structured data off a website.
All of this data is the kind that is already available for the public to view but scraping provides it to you in a systematic and structured format so that it becomes easy to use
All web scrapers are not the same. Some are versatile tools that provide complete support for data extraction from any website.
Some are only restricted to particular websites. All in all, you have to pick and choose the most suitable to your needs and requirements.
Moreover, free trials always come in handy when you need to make such decisions because they can give you an idea of the experience of using that tool before making the complete payment.
If you have ever copied data from any website then you have scraped the web on a very tiny minuscule scale.
Web scraping provides you with data that can be put to many uses, such as lead generation, news monitoring, price monitoring, and market research.
This process is carried out by those businesses that require all this data to make smart decisions for the future.,
Web scraping provides a shortcut from the never-ending and mundane task of manually copying data from websites.
Web pages like eBay and Yelp have tons of data that can prove to be very useful for many businesses, and it is only fair that they get to use all the data that is available to the public anyway.
What Is eBay Scraping, And Why Is It Useful?
eBay is a relatively small chunk of the e-commerce industry in the US. However, it is still the third-largest website right after Amazon and Walmart.
There are over one billion different products listed on the website, and the huge number of sales that they generate, leaves a huge bulk of data that can be extracted from eBay.
As a marketer or researcher, the data derived from eBay can be of great use to you, even if the platform itself is much smaller than Amazon.
eBay does not provide a variety of ways to extract this data, but you can use web scrapers.
Manual scraping is not an easy task, and it can take months instead of the mere seconds that scraping will take.
Manually extraction also includes a huge number of errors as the data will not be structured or run through.
Web scrapers carry out this task at an incredibly fast speed that humans can never meet. The data collection is free of errors because computer programs do it.
According to the US courts, scraping publicly available data is not illegal, so technically, you are not breaking any laws when you opt for web scraping for data collection.
That being said, no well-known website will allow a computer program to scrape its user data and overload its servers.
The data that is extracted can also be put to use for any illegal tasks, in which case the website will be scared of its reputation being dragged through the mud.
eBay is one such website that does not allow automated web scraping. It has even sued certain web scrapers in the past and has even ended up winning some cases.
However, if you use a good web scraping tool that has the skills to go undetected or counter the defense mechanisms of websites, you will easily be able to scrape the data you need.
Another thing that you need to take care of is scraping ethics. You have to be nice and keep a delay between making requests for content extraction.
All this requires thorough planning and immaculate execution, especially if you need to extract a reasonably large amount of content.
Moreover, when using a scraping tool you need to make sure that it is configured and trained correctly.
If you do not have access to a tool, or you do not want to pay for any scraping tool, you can make a scraper for yourself using a programming language like Python.
How to Scrape eBay Data & Products Using Python
Many businesses make use of web scraping in order to keep a check on the price fluctuations of rival products.
Some just scrape the data once and never bother again.
When it comes to data extraction from eBay, there are two major kinds of details that users mostly require; a list of products and product details.
However, no matter your intentions, it might be of interest to you that scraping eBay is not that difficult. eBay does not use AJAX as a defense mechanism against web scraping.
This does simplify the overall process quite a bit. Overall, accessing the data is difficult, but downloading and processing it is not that tricky.
If you plan to scrape data from eBay without using any professional software, you will need the help of eBay proxies.
Proxies from Bright Data or Proxy Seller will enable you to hide your actual IP address, so the website will be tricked into thinking that the scraping requests originated from multiple different computers.
Without using these proxies, you will end up getting detected by eBay. As a result, you will have to solve Captchas.
Setting is also required so that it looks like you are mimicking a well-known browser so that no suspicion is created.
Python is a commonly used programming language for scraping purposes. You can make use of BeautifulSoup to make the final extraction of data.
Here is a piece of sample code:
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()Conclusion
eBay scraping will be life-changing for you if you are someone who needs data that can give you great insights into products and their details.
Such data can be rarely found anywhere else except for other e-commerce websites, but not all websites are easy to scrape.
Any of the best eBay scrapers mentioned above can help you extract data that can be of great use to you.
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Written by Jason Wise
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