AliExpress is one of the biggest online retailers in the world. If you are in e-commerce, dropshipping or affiliation businesses, there is a good chance that you will end up trying to fetch product data from AliExpress. Luckily, scraping AliExpress is now a piece of cake for Apify users with AliExpress Scraper.
AliExpress Scraper extracts: name, specs, store information, categories, photos, SKU options, prices, and much more!
Setup and usage
Let’s jump to Apify Store, search for “AliExpress Scraper” and click the very first result.
Everything is explained comprehensively and thoroughly on the Actor's page. You can check its source code, example runs, read a detailed explanation of how it actually works, or find out how many CUs (computational unit) it consumes.
To use it, you need to have an account on Apify, so just go ahead and sign up for a free account if you haven’t already got one. Then simply click on the green “Try for free” button.
You'll be redirected to Apify Console, with the Actor ready for you to use. You can run the Actor from here, set up its inputs, and download your extracted data.
There are a couple of options in AliExpress Scraper: “Start URLs”, “Category Start Page”, “Category End Page”, “Description” and “Proxy”.
“Start URLs” are the entrance points for the Actor. These tell the scraper where to start scraping. The URL can be either a category or a product page. AliExpress Scraper will automatically detect which one it is and run accordingly.
The “Category Start Page” and “Category End Page” options enable you to split a task by yourself for big datasets. This can help you run the Actor faster and keep things lean. Read more on this below.
Need a huge dataset or just a data snapshot? No problem.
Sometimes you just need a small dataset rather than a big one. AliExpress Scraper has a smart algorithm that detects if it is given a URL that belongs to a product or a category page.
In the “Start URLs” section, you can add as many products or category URLs as you want. AliExpress Scraper will first detect the type of the page and fetch all the given links. If you want you can also use category and product URLs at the same time.
On the other hand, you might need a huge dataset, but have no idea how to obtain that quickly. With AliExpress Scraper’s “Category Start Page” and “Category End Page” attributes, you can split your Actor into separate runs. Let’s say you need to fetch “dresses” from AliExpress, a category which has over 60 pages. The best and fastest way you can get these products from this category is by splitting the Actor run into several tasks.
Create 6 tasks with sequential “Category Start Page” and “Category End Page” options like; 0–10, 10–20, 20–30, 30–40, 40–50, 50–60. With that, you can split your Actor run into 6 pieces and make your crawl 6 times faster. It is recommended to use this method for categories with many pages.
Tips
AliExpress uses different sales techniques to increase their traffic and sales, such as banners for special pages with discounts and the like. But the page we need is the main search page, which basically lists products with pagination and clickable subcategories. If you want to fetch a subcategory, you can provide its URL.
Also, AliExpress uses different testing methods such as A/B tests. For some users, it changes the website’s appearance or features to test a hypothesis. AliExpress achieves that by using URL parameters. So the best way of providing a link as a “Start URL” is to remove unnecessary parameters from the link.
One last thing to mention is descriptions. Fetching descriptions in AliExpress Scraper adds one more request per product. The reason for this is that AliExpress provides a set of tools to the stores and sellers that allows them to design their product descriptions like web pages. So for every product description, they have a small web page. That’s why description is optional in AliExpress Scraper, as some users might not need it.
P.S. You should always use proxies to get the best results.
Final words
AliExpress Scraper is blazing fast, smart, and can efficiently scrape AliExpress without problems. With an efficient web scraping tool like AliExpress Scraper, you can fetch any products or categories in minutes. If you are a dropshipping store or an AliExpress Affiliate Program member, this Actor must be in your toolbox.
Product Matching AI is out!
Looking to do product mapping for items from AliExpress and another online store? Let the AI do it! Identify exact matches of product pairs using real-time data from web scraping.
