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

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.