How to scrape eBay and extract listings data

Use web scraping to extract structured data from eBay without using the official eBay API. Get product descriptions, prices, images, locations, merchant profiles, product availability, and more.

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Web scraping can let you extract structured data from eBay without using the official eBay API. Scrape and download product descriptions, prices, images, locations, merchant profiles, and product availability. Read on to find out why and how you should scrape eBay.

  1. Is there value in eBay data?
  2. Using an eBay scraper vs. eBay API
  3. How web scraping data is used
  4. Is it legal to scrape eBay?
  5. What structured scraped eBay data looks like
  6. Step-by-step guide to scraping eBay listings
  7. Other e-commerce web scrapers

Is there value in eBay data?

eBay is one of the oldest internet e-commerce sites. Launched in 1995, it now connects over 154 million buyers with 19 million sellers all over the world. That led to $19.5 billion in gross merchandise volume in the third quarter of 2021. And $12.5 billion of that was bought on mobile devices, so smart old eBay isn't being left behind in the shift to mobile.

Those numbers translate into a lot of data, including product descriptions, prices, images, locations, merchant profiles, product availability, and brand presence. If your business uses eBay, accessing that data could give you insights on eBay trending items and product research, help you find best-selling products, learn about your competitors, precisely adjust your prices in real-time to compete, and find opportunities that no amount of manual intelligence gathering can compete with.

But how can you get that data in a format you can easily use? Read on to find out why web scraping is the modern, efficient way to directly pull data from any website, even eBay.

Scraping eBay listings data can give your business a competitive edge
Scraping eBay listings data can give your business a competitive edge

Using an eBay scraper vs. the eBay API

What about using an API to get data from eBay?

If you aren't sure of the meaning of the term API, or application programming interface, first head over to what is an API?

Basically, the ideal API should let you interact with a website as if you were accessing it just like a regular user, but with all the advantages that come with computers interacting directly with each other, such as speed, accuracy, repeatability, and scalability.

eBay APIs can get you some of the information locked in eBay listings, but there is an approval process and there are call limits. If you're not in a hurry and just want to do a little casual scraping, or don't have very demanding use cases, you should be fine with the official eBay APIs.

Web scraping effectively creates an unofficial eBay API to let you extract eBay data at scale whenever you need it. If you haven't come across web scraping before, you should check out our easy-to-understand Beginner's Guide To Web Scraping. It explains everything you need to know about how it works and the advantages and disadvantages of web scraping. If you still have questions, take a look at the pros and cons of web scraping. We also have a quick guide for if you're puzzled by the difference between web scraping and web crawling.

Using web scraping to extract data from eBay means that you have all the advantages of an API, but you also have the flexibility and scalability provided by web scraping.

eBay Scraper · Apify
Unofficial eBay API to extract data from eBay based on keywords or categories. Scrape reviews, prices, product descriptions, images, location, availability, brand, and more. Download extracted data in structured format and use it in reports, spreadsheets, databases, and applications.

How web scraping data is used

Web scraping is increasingly being used in the e-commerce and retail industry to monitor prices across multiple websites in real-time, track competitors, run price comparisons, and carry out extensive market research. Want to find out more: read about the top 8 advantages of web scraping for e-commerce.

Yes, scraping is legal. You do have to understand the boundaries, but we've got you covered with a detailed assessment of the legality of web scraping: Is web scraping legal?

What structured scraped eBay data looks like

You might be wondering what you'd get if you scraped raw data with an eBay scraper. Because scraping is designed to extract structured data, an eBay dataset looks pretty organized and is usable in spreadsheets, applications, and databases right away. You'll get eBay listings with items, prices, and other data neatly displayed in JSON, CSV, XML, or whatever other structured format you need.

Here's an example, including a look at the kinds of charts you can create from the data. We looked at drone sales across different towns and cities in the US. Below is the structured data in a dataset. Note that this is just a partial dataset, as the entire drone category includes hundreds of thousands of products!

Click to download the data in JSON format
Dataset in JSON format

You can download the same dataset in CSV, Excel, and XML formats.

We used that data to explore the number of drones sold according to brand. DJI comes out way on top, but some of the others, such as Ultimaxx and Potensic, are so close that it would be surprising if there weren't ways for a reseller or dropshipper to nudge buyers one way or the other.

Create charts and reports from scraped eBay data
Create charts and reports from scraped eBay data

Breaking the numbers down by location, this kind of insight could be useful not only for marketers and brands, but also for town planners, airport officials, and of course businesses looking for underexplored opportunities.

Find opportunities and understand sales trends by location
Find opportunities and understand sales trends by location

Getting this dataset and creating those charts took minutes. Once extracted, the data can be used and reused as needed, and it can be extracted repeatedly - on-demand and at scale.

Already have an eBay scraper in Scrapy? Migrate it to Apify with our Apify Python client -> https://blog.apify.com/apify-python-api-client/

Step-by-step guide to scraping eBay listings

So let's get to the business of extracting data from eBay with eBay Scraper.

1. Go to the scraper's page, and click the Try for free button. You will be redirected to Apify Console, which is your workspace to run tasks for your scrapers. If you already have an Apify account and are logged in, go to Step 3.

screenshot of eBay Scraper page on Apify Store
eBay Scraper's page on Apify Store

2. If you are not signed in, you’ll find yourself on the sign-up page (if you are already signed in, skip to Step 3). Sign up using your email account, Google, or GitHub. You will be redirected to the scraper’s page on your Apify Console.

screenshot of Apify Console's sign-up page
The sign up page on Apify Console

3. Click the Start your free trial button to start using the actor. You don't need a credit card and the free plan gives you $5 in platform credits every month. Note that eBay Scraper is a premium paid actor, with top-notch maintenance and support, so you'll get a 14-day free trial, but then it will cost $50 per month to rent the scraper.

screenshot of eBay Scraper's input page on Apify Console
Start your free trial to try eBay Scraper

4. Now you can fill in the input fields. Let's use our drone example and scrape some eBay drone data. First, you need to tell the scraper what you want to scrape. So you need a start URL.

For this tutorial, we don't want to scrape an entire category. That could take a long time. So let's go to ebay.com and look through the categories until we get to the "camera drones" category. Click on the category and you'll be directed to a page. On that page, you should see the DJI brand sub-category. Let's narrow it down even further and get data about the DJI Mini 2. So click on DJI Mini 2. That's about the right amount of data for this tutorial.

The URL of the page is the category you want and you can use it as your start URL. For the DJI Mini 2, the URL is https://www.ebay.com/b/DJI-Mini-2/179697/bn_7117623239

So just copy that URL from your browser and head back to Apify Console.

screenshot of DJI Mini 2 product page on eBay
Narrow down the category you want to scrape so that the run goes faster
screenshot of a filled out input page for eBay Scraper
Ebay Scraper on Apify Console

5. Now just click the green Start button at the bottom of the page. eBay Scraper will start running. This means that it's successfully scraping eBay. You'll see detailed output telling you how it's progressing.

This could take about 10 minutes, but, hey, even scraping a small part of eBay is a lot of data!

While you wait, you could check out how Apify helped a leading manufacturer use web scraping for price monitoring. Or go and get a cup of coffee while the bot does the work ☕🦾

screenshot of an actor run log on Apify Console
eBay Scraper running and scraping eBay

6. When you come back, the scraping run should have succeeded.

screenshot of a successful actor run with log
eBay Scraper's run succeeded

7. And the last step is to access your data! Just click on the Dataset tab. That will give you access to all your data in multiple structured formats. You can download the data in JSON, CSV, XML, and more. You can also preview the data from the Dataset tab to make sure you've scraped the right information.

screenshot of Dataset tab with various dataset export options
View your results in the Dataset tab

Other e-commerce web scrapers

Scraping eBay is just one way that e-commerce retailers, dropshippers, and brands can boost their businesses. Web scraping can turn any website into an API. Check out the e-commerce section of Apify Store for hundreds of web scrapers dedicated to extracting data from product listings.

Here's a quick list of some of our most popular e-commerce scrapers. You might also like to check out top 5 web scraping tools to help you gather retail analytics.

If you want to scrape eBay, but don't want to configure and run the scraper yourself, you can also request a custom solution.

Need to do product mapping for eBay and another online store?

Try our newest AI Product Matcher, an advanced AI model for e-commerce designed to compare two items from different online stores and determine whether they are identical. Fueled by the product data scraped from the web stores daily, this tool scan for matches practically in real-time, enabling you to stay updated with the latest information about products.

Use it to monitor exact product matches across the industry, get realistic estimates for upcoming promotional campaigns, monitor changes in your competitors’ offerings, and complement or even replace the time-consuming process of manual mapping.

Product matching AI: scraping for pricing intelligence
Data extraction meets AI for scalable product matching.
David Barton
David Barton
Apifier since 2016 so learned about web scraping and automation from the experts. MSc in Computer Science from TCD. Former game designer and newspaper production manager. Now Head of Content at Apify.

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