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How to Scrape Data from eBay: A Step-by-Step Guide

Danielius Radavicius

Danielius Radavicius

2023-03-173 min read
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eBay is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms worldwide, serving a wide range of customers to help fulfill their various needs. As such, scraping publicly available data from eBay offers a multitude of benefits, ranging from price monitoring to customer review tracking and many more.

Overall the usefulness of eBay data, especially for someone basing their businesses on e-commerce, is tangible, especially considering the difficulties of conducting effective scraping operations are majorly outweighed by the value they provide. After all, there is a reason why web scraping has become a foundation upon which many competitive strategies and decisions are made.

Challenges with scraping eBay

We’ve mentioned above that scraping eBay is a worthwhile task with benefits that outweigh the challenges. Yet, to successfully extract data from it isn’t easy. Over the years, eBay has introduced multiple anti-scraping measures, meaning that failed jobs and numerous blocks may be common without an effective tool. Thankfully Oxylabs' eBay Scraper API is specifically designed with these difficulties in mind, giving you an all-in-one solution to efficiently and rapidly extract the exact structured data you need.

Structure of an eBay page

1.Search results page

You’ll be presented with the search results page after you put in a specific keyword, in this case let’s use “laptop”.  The page you receive will be similar to the one shown in the picture below.

Crucially, all products listed under “laptop” can be extracted as well as their links, titles, prices, ratings, and images.

2. Product page

A standard eBay page contains a large variety of useful information. Using the laptop product page example shown below, we can see a multitude of categories which can be scraped, such as:

  • Price

  • Availability

  • Product title

  • Product rating

  • Product image

  • Shipping cost

  • Item specifics

Value of scraping eBay

A standard eBay page contains valuable information, such as pictures, prices, availability, page number, URL, status code, and many other crucial features. Combined, extracting data with eBay scraping helps use cases like:

  • Competitive analysis. Extracting data from a target web page lets you see competitors' products, pricing, and sales volume. Such information helps develop strategies that differentiate your products while allowing you to make more competitive pricing decisions.

  • Market research. Enable yourself to see which products are selling well and how often they are being sold.

  • Product development. With eBay scraping, you can extract data to provide insights into what products are in demand. Based on this information, design and development decisions are made.

Having recognized the value extracted data from eBay can provide, let’s begin our brief step-by-step guide for fetching, retrieving, and parsing data from eBay with our API.

Setting up the eBay Scraper API

  1. Start by installing the request library in your terminal/console by writing pip install requests.

  2. Open an IDE of your choice and create a python module file.

  3. In the module file, type in your access credentials.

import requests

username = 'Username'
password = 'Password'

4. Instantiating a new variable, payload, we would define the “source” for our API and the eBay URL to obtain our desired eBay product data. Ensure the value of source is universal_ecommerce.

import requests

username = 'Username'
password = 'Password'
payload = {
  'source': 'universal_ecommerce',
  'url': 'https://www.ebay.com/itm/225313054444',
}

5. The next step is to add in the parser_type and parse parameters to the dictionary to enable us to automatically detect product data and parse the fetched data.

import requests

username = 'Username'
password = 'Password'
payload = {
  'source': 'universal_ecommerce',
  'url': 'https://www.ebay.com/itm/225313054444',
  'parser_type': 'ecommerce_product', #for automatic product data detection
  'parse': True #for parsing data
}

6. We can also specify a geo-location to enable us to fetch localized eBay product data.

import requests

username = 'Username'
password = 'Password'
payload = {
  'source': 'universal_ecommerce',
  'url': 'https://www.ebay.com/itm/225313054444',
  'parser_type': 'ecommerce_product',#for automatic product data detection
  'parse': True,
  'geo_location': 'Canada', #for fetching localized product data
}

7. With the configuration done, we can create a "post" request to the endpoint.

import requests

username = 'Username'
password = 'Password'
payload = {
  'source': 'universal_ecommerce',
  'url': 'https://www.ebay.com/itm/225313054444',
  'parser_type': 'ecommerce_product',
  'parse': True,
  'geo_location': 'Canada', #for fetching localized product data
}

response = requests.post(
url='https://realtime.oxylabs.io/v1/queries',
json=payload,
auth=(username, password),
)

8. To get our eBay product data, we would need to access the content key from the delivered response.

import requests

username = 'Username'
password = 'Password'
payload = {
  'source': 'universal_ecommerce',
  'url': 'https://www.ebay.com/itm/225313054444',
  'parser_type': 'ecommerce_product',
  'parse': True,
  'geo_location': 'Canada', #for fetching localized product data
}

response = requests.post('https://realtime.oxylabs.io/v1/queries', json = payload, auth = (username, password))
eBay_product_data = response.json()['results'][0]['content']

9. Lastly import pprint. Using it we can print our parsed product data in the terminal.

import requests
import pprint

username = 'Username'
password = 'Password'
payload = {
  'source': 'universal_ecommerce',
  'url': 'https://www.ebay.com/itm/225313054444',
  'parser_type': 'ecommerce_product',
  'parse': True,
  'geo_location': 'Canada', #for fetching localized product data
}

response = requests.post('https://realtime.oxylabs.io/v1/queries', json = payload, auth = (username, password))
eBay_product_data = response.json()['results'][0]['content']

pprint(eBay_product_data) #get a pretty-print of the result

Conclusion

And that’s it!

This guide has covered the process of fetching and parsing eBay product data using an eBay Scraper API. The steps outlined are straightforward and easy to follow. If you're interested in learning more about the features of the eBay Scraper API available, you can consult the documentation for additional details.

People also ask

Does eBay allow scraping?

You can scrape eBay if you’re not accessing data behind login walls or personal data without consent. Overall, scraping is not illegal as long as it is done without breaking any applicable rules or laws surrounding the targeted websites or gathered data. Accordingly, we recommend that before engaging in any scraping activities, you should get appropriate professional legal advice regarding your specific situation.

Why do people scrape eBay?

eBay remains one of the biggest e-commerce marketplaces worldwide. As such, scraping is valuable for a plethora of use cases:

  • Price comparison. Scraping eBay allows you to keep track of constantly changing product prices, meaning monitoring and adjusting prices according to the data gathered becomes a simplistic task.

  • Market research. Since millions of products are listed on eBay, gathering and analyzing the data from these listings provides the opportunity to determine product popularity and selling frequency.

  • Competitor analysis. You may want to scrape data on your competitors in order to determine their pricing strategies, product offerings, and sales performance.

Can scraping be detected?

Scraping can be detected. If website owners monitor their server logs, analyze the traffic patterns on their websites, and use tools like web scraping detection software, your scraping efforts may be blocked.

Thankfully our eBay API is specifically designed to counter the above-mentioned anti-scraping measures.

About the author

Danielius Radavicius

Danielius Radavicius

Former Copywriter

Danielius Radavičius was a Copywriter at Oxylabs. Having grown up in films, music, and books and having a keen interest in the defense industry, he decided to move his career toward tech-related subjects and quickly became interested in all things technology. In his free time, you'll probably find Danielius watching films, listening to music, and planning world domination.

All information on Oxylabs Blog is provided on an "as is" basis and for informational purposes only. We make no representation and disclaim all liability with respect to your use of any information contained on Oxylabs Blog or any third-party websites that may be linked therein. Before engaging in scraping activities of any kind you should consult your legal advisors and carefully read the particular website's terms of service or receive a scraping license.

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IN THIS ARTICLE:


  • Challenges with scraping eBay


  • Structure of an eBay page


  • Value of scraping eBay


  • Setting up the eBay Scraper API


  • Conclusion

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