Are you looking forward to scraping e-commerce sites and need a recommendation on the best e-commerce web scrapers? Then you are on the right page, as I discuss below, the top e-commerce scrapers in the market.
E-commerce sites are some of the busiest sites on the Internet. And they are also a huge library of data for products and their associated data, such as user reviews and ratings. There are a good number of e-commerce sites ranging from big sites like Amazon, Walmart, AliExpress, and eBay to smaller sites of specific brands.
Each of these has specific data points you can get from them. If you are interested in scraping any of these sites, you will need to make use of a web scraper to get that done. Web scrapers for scraping e-commerce websites for e-commerce data are known as e-commerce scrapers. Some are meant for a specific site, while others have been developed to support more than one site.
There are a good number of e-commerce scrapers in the market. However, not many of them will get the job done for you with ease. In this article, I will be recommending some of the top e-commerce scrapers you can use to scrape e-commerce websites.
Table Of Contents
1. Bright Data eCommerce Scraper — Overall Best E-Commerce Scraper
Bright Data is a leading data scraper and provider and is also known for its high-quality proxy networks. The service does offer an eCommerce Scraper as part of its much larger Web Scraper IDE. With this, you can collect data for products from numerous websites. While it does have a single scraper known as the eCommerce Scraper that supports multiple websites, it does have specific scrapers for some websites.
Some of the websites supported include Amazon, AliExpress, eBay, BestBuy, Alibaba, Etsy, Taobao, Shopify, Adidas, Flipkart, Home Depot, and Newegg, among others. One of the use cases of this eCommerce scraper is for competitive analysis.
With this scraper, you do not need to worry about getting blocked or your target website changing its structure, as it has been developed to be robust and scrape regardless of the change made to the structure of the page. This makes it one of the best web scrapers available to you for scraping product data from e-commerce platforms.
2. Smartproxy eCommerce Scraping API — Best Alternative to Bright Data Scraper
The Smartproxy service also offers an eCommerce Scraper in the form of an API, just like what Bright Data offers. And this can be said to be its best alternative. As in the case of Bright Data, it does have support for a good number of e-commerce sites. In fact, Smartproxy’s scraper does have support for more websites than Bright Data.
One other thing you will also come to like about Smartproxy is the fact that, as a new user, you can use the tool for 1 month for free (3K requests). Smartproxy is also a proxy service and does have a scraper API. So, you do not need to worry about getting blocked or your target site's website structure changing.
All you need to do is send an API request and get back the response. The service is quite robust, and you only get to pay for successful requests. The pricing for Smartproxy eCommerce scraper is considered cheap.
3. Apify E-Commerce Web Scrapers — Modular e-Commerce Scraper for Specific Data Points
Apify is quite popular among web scrapers. It is a platform for web automation and scraping where both the service and third-party developers create and host their web scrapers and other automation tools. Apify does have a specific section on its platform where you can find e-commerce scrapers of any type. From this section, you can get an Amazon Product Scraper, Amazon Review Scraper, and even Google Map Review Scraper.
There are over 100 e-commerce scrapers available for you to use. For you to make use of this platform, you need to have their library installed, which is available for only NodeJS and Python. The cost of using the specific web scrapers known as actors on the platform varies, and the developers for the specific actor set the price. Apify also adds its own cost, and you also need to purchase proxies too. However, even with all of these, it is still very cheap to use as there are no request limits set.
4. ScrapeStorm — Best No-Code for e-Commerce Scraping
All of the 3 web scrapers mentioned above have one thing in common — they require you to have coding skills to use them effectively. However, not everyone interested in e-commerce data has that. If you are one of such persons, then the ScrapeStorm web scraper is here for you. With ScrapeStorm, you get a visual-based web scraper that provides you with a point-and-click interface for identifying data of interest on a page.
However, if your target is an e-commerce site, you wouldn’t even need to do much in that regard. This is because ScrapeStorm is powered by an AI system that will automatically identify the important data points on a page, reducing the time it takes to set up the tool for use. This web scraper is quite advanced and can be used for scraping all kinds of websites. To protect yourself against getting banned, I recommend you make use of high-quality rotating residential proxies from Bright Data or Smartproxy. ScrapeStorm is a paid tool, but there is a trial option for new users to try out.
5. WebScraper.io Extension — Best Free Web Scraper for e-Commerce Sites
The WebScraper.io service is one of the best cloud-based web scraping platforms out there. This platform offers a free browser extension you can use to scrape data from the Internet. The WebScraper.io extension is free to use, but it is quite powerful and designed to be modular, thereby helping you scale up your scraping game. You can use this web scraper to scrape data from your e-commerce site of choice, and it will get that done for you with no hassle, provided you set up a high-quality proxy.
This web scraper s built for the modern web and such, renders Javascript perfectly. This makes it possible for you to scrape e-commerce data hidden behind Javascript easily. The web scraper is fast and does have some other advanced features ranging from pagination handling, the page scrolls down, and infinite scroll perfect for Amazon customer review scraping, and being able to navigate a page at all levels.
FAQs
Q. Can I Use One Web Scraper for all e-commerce Sites?
The web scrapers mentioned above can be used for scraping more than one e-commerce website. There are other web scrapers for e-commerce sites that are meant for a specific site, such as Amazon. Generally, there are millions of e-commerce sites in the world, and no one scraper can scrape them all. However, you should seek to make use of the one that can scrap as many popular e-commerce scrapers as possible. You should only go for a scraper that can scrape only one store if the store is not popular and, as such, the popular web scrapers do not support it.
Q. Is Scraping E-Commerce Websites Legal?
The issue of the legality of web scraping is tied down to your area of jurisdiction, and what is legal in the US can be illegal in the UK in terms of web scraping. But on a general note, web scraping is considered legal, provided you scrape publicly available data and do not cause any harm to your target server. Also, unless you know what the laws say about scraping personal information, avoid doing that on the e-commerce platform. And on no account should you scrape private data — the ones hidden behind login.
Q. What is the Best e-Commerce Scraper in the Market?
Currently, the best e-commerce scrapers are provided as a scraper API. And the e-commerce scraper provided by Bright Data and Smartproxy are the best ones out there. The reason I choose these is because of the number of sites they support, the ease at which you can integrate them into your service, and the success rate you will get from using them. For these two, you do not need to pay to get a starter. If you are a business, you can get a free trial from Bright Data. Smartproxy is more flexible in this regard, as you can get a 3K request trial regardless of whether you are a business or not.
Conclusion
As you can see above, there are just about 5 e-commerce scrapers on the list. However, there are many more scrapers out there that you can use for scraping e-commerce platforms. Many of these might not really go well with what you want if you need a web scraper that you can use easily on a good number of e-commerce sites. But the web scrapers mentioned above are some of the best we got after a series of tests, and you can be sure they will work for you.