How to Scrape eBay in 2024: A Beginner's Guide

Python, How to's, Nov-21-20245 mins read

eBay is one of the world’s largest online marketplaces, hosting millions of products across various categories. Scraping eBay can be invaluable for tasks like:

Price Comparison
Market Analysis
Tracking Product Trends

In this guide, we’ll show you how to create a simple Python script to search for a keyword, extract product details like title, price, currency, availability, reviews, and ratings, and save the data into a CSV file. This tutorial is great for beginners who want to learn web scraping the right way, with tips on respecting terms of service and using proxies responsibly.

Skip the Explanation? Here's the Full Code

If you’re just looking for the full implementation, here’s the complete Python script for scraping product details from eBay using proxies. Copy and paste it into your environment to get started:

import re
import csv
import time

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

proxies = {
    "http": "http://username:[email protected]:6060",
    "https": "http://username:[email protected]:6060",
}

def get_product_information(product_url) -> dict:
    r = requests.get(product_url, proxies=proxies)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text, features="html.parser")

    product_title = soup.find("h1", {"class": "x-item-title__mainTitle"}).text
    product_price = soup.find("div", {"class": "x-price-primary"}).text.split(" ")[-1]
    currency = soup.find("div", {"class": "x-price-primary"}).text.split(" ")[0]

    # locate the element that holds quanity number of product
    quantity_available = soup.find("div", {"class":"x-quantity__availability"})
    if quantity_available is not None:
        # Using regex check if we can locate the strings that holds this number
        regex_pattern = r"\d+\savailable"
        if re.search(regex_pattern, quantity_available.text) is not None:
            quantity_available = re.search(regex_pattern, quantity_available.text).group()
            # After string is located we extract the number by splitting it by space and selecting the first element.
            quantity_available = quantity_available.split(" ")[0]
        else:
            quantity_available = "NA"

    total_reviews = soup.find("span", {"class":"ux-summary__count"})
    if total_reviews is not None:
        total_reviews = total_reviews.text.split(" ")[0]
    else:
        total_reviews = "NA"

    rating = soup.find("span", {"class":"ux-summary__start--rating"})
    if rating is not None:
        rating = rating.text
    else:
        rating = "NA"

    product_info = {
        "product_url": product_url,
        "title": product_title,
        "product_price": product_price,
        "currency": currency,
        "availability": quantity_available,
        "nr_reviews": total_reviews,
        "rating": rating
    }

    return product_info

def save_to_csv(products, csv_file_name="products.csv"):

    # Write the list of dictionaries to a CSV file
    with open(csv_file_name, mode='w', newline='') as csv_file:
        # Create a csv.DictWriter object
        writer = csv.DictWriter(csv_file, fieldnames=products[0].keys())

        # Write the header (keys of the dictionary)
        writer.writeheader()

        # Write the rows (values of the dictionaries)
        writer.writerows(products)

    print(f"Data successfully written to {csv_file_name}")

def main(keyword_to_search: str):
    products = []

    r = requests.get(f"https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw={keyword_to_search}", proxies=proxies)

    soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text, features="html.parser")
    for item in soup.find_all("div", {"class": "s-item__info clearfix"})[2::]:
        item_url = item.find("a").get("href")

        product_info: dict = get_product_information(item_url)
        print(product_info)
        # Adding a 1-second delay between requests to avoid overloading the server and reduce the risk of being blocked
        time.sleep(2)

        products.append(product_info)
    # save data to csv
    save_to_csv(products)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    keywords = "laptop bag"
    main(keywords)

Please remember to update the proxies variable with a new username and password before using them.

How We’ll Scrape eBay

Our method simplifies the process, focusing on four key functions:

Searching a Keyword: Discover products by entering a search term (e.g., “laptop bags”) to fetch relevant items.
Extracting Product URLs: Collect URLs of listed products on the search result's first page to streamline data collection.
Extracting Product Information: For each product URL, we will navigate to the product page to retrieve vital information.
Saving Data: Save the extracted data into a CSV file for efficient access and analysis.

Prerequisites

Starting with the right tools is crucial. You'll need to:

Install Python:

Here's a helpful guide to installing Python.

Set Up Your Development Environment:

Select the directory you want to place this project on. Set up a virtual environment to maintain clean, isolated dependencies.

mkdir ebay_scraping
cd ebay_scraping
python -m venv venv
source env/bin/activate  # On Windows use: venv\Scripts\activate
pip install requests bs4

Proxies Setup:

In this example we will be using rotating Proxyscrape Residential Proxies in order to maintain anonymity and protect the private ip from being blacklisted.

Script Explanation

Step 1: Importing Libraries and Proxies

We start by importing necessary libraries for this web scraping project which include:

CSV: this module provides classes to read and write tabular data in CSV format. It lets programmers easily write data in Excel's preferred format or read data from files generated by Excel without knowing the precise CSV format details.
Requests: this module allows you to send HTTP requests using Python.
BeautifulSoup4 is a powerful html parser designed to extract the information you need from an html structure.

Required Imports:

import csv
import time
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

Proxy Setup:

In order to keep your ip private thus minimizing the chances of getting your ip blacklisted from specific websites it is recommended to perform web scraping activities under the shield of proxies, as mentioned above we will be using rotating Proxyscrape Residential Proxies for this tutorial but you can use other proxies or no proxies at all.

proxies = {
   "http": "http://username:[email protected]:6060",
   "https": "http://username:[email protected]:6060",
}

Step 2: Getting Search Results

Let's begin by explaining the search process we'll use in this tutorial. We'll query the eBay URL with a “laptop bag” keyword, as shown in this picture:

We will use the queried URL to send a request with request.get(). Once we receive a response, we'll parse the HTML content using BeautifulSoup (bs4) to extract each product's URL. The image below shows where each product URL is located within the HTML.

The product link is found within a <div> element with the class s-item__info clearfix. To extract these links, we use BeautifulSoup (bs4) to search for all <div> elements with this specific class. Once we've located these elements, we iterate through each one to find <a> elements and extract the href attribute, which contains the product URL.

def main(keyword_to_search: str):
   products = []

   r = requests.get(f"https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw={keyword_to_search}", proxies=proxies)

   soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text, features="html.parser")
   for item in soup.find_all("div", {"class": "s-item__info clearfix"})[2::]:
       item_url = item.find("a").get("href")

       product_info: dict = get_product_information(item_url)
		# Adding a 1-second delay between requests to avoid overloading the server and reduce the risk of being blocked
       time.sleep(1)

       products.append(product_info)
   # save data to csv
   save_to_csv(products)

Step 3: Extracting Product Information

Introducing the get_product_information function. This function takes a product URL as input, sends a request to that URL, and then utilizes BeautifulSoup (bs4) to parse product information using specific rules and regex patterns.

def get_product_information(product_url) -> dict:
   r = requests.get(product_url, proxies=proxies)
   soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text, features="html.parser")

   product_title = soup.find("h1", {"class": "x-item-title__mainTitle"}).text
   product_price = soup.find("div", {"class": "x-price-primary"}).text.split(" ")[-1]
   currency = soup.find("div", {"class": "x-price-primary"}).text.split(" ")[0]

   # locate the element that holds quanity number of product
   quantity_available = soup.find("div", {"class":"x-quantity__availability"})
   if quantity_available is not None:
       # Using regex check if we can locate the strings that holds this number
       regex_pattern = r"\d+\savailable"
       if re.search(regex_pattern, quantity_available.text) is not None:
           quantity_available = re.search(regex_pattern, quantity_available.text).group()
           # After string is located we extract the number by splitting it by space and selecting the first element.
           quantity_available = quantity_available.split(" ")[0]
       else:
           quantity_available = "NA"

   total_reviews = soup.find("span", {"class":"ux-summary__count"})
   if total_reviews is not None:
       total_reviews = total_reviews.text.split(" ")[0]
   else:
       total_reviews = "NA"

   rating = soup.find("span", {"class":"ux-summary__start--rating"})
   if rating is not None:
       rating = rating.text
   else:
       rating = "NA"

   product_info = {
       "product_url": product_url,
       "title": product_title,
       "product_price": product_price,
       "currency": currency,
       "availability": quantity_available,
       "nr_reviews": total_reviews,
       "rating": rating
   }

   return product_info

Finally, we organize the parsed product entities into a dictionary, which is then returned by the function.

Step 4: Saving Results

It's time to store these results in a CSV file using Python's native csv library. The save_to_csv(products) function accepts products as an input, which is a list of dictionaries containing product details as previously described. This data is then saved into a CSV file named after the csv_file_name argument, which defaults to "products.csv".

def save_to_csv(products, csv_file_name="products.csv"):

   # Write the list of dictionaries to a CSV file
   with open(csv_file_name, mode='w', newline='') as csv_file:
       # Create a csv.DictWriter object
       writer = csv.DictWriter(csv_file, fieldnames=products[0].keys())

       # Write the header (keys of the dictionary)
       writer.writeheader()

       # Write the rows (values of the dictionaries)
       writer.writerows(products)

   print(f"Data successfully written to {csv_file_name}")

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we demonstrated how to scrape eBay by building a Python script that searches for a keyword, extracts product details, and saves the data into a CSV file. This process highlights essential scraping techniques like handling HTML elements, using proxies for anonymity, and respecting ethical scraping practices. This script can be further improved by incorporating pagination functionality and the ability to process multiple keywords.

Always remember to scrape responsibly, adhere to website terms of service, and use tools like rate limiting to avoid disruptions. To make your scraping tasks more reliable and efficient, consider exploring our high-quality proxy services at ProxyScrape. Whether you need residential, datacenter, or mobile proxies, we’ve got you covered. Check out our offerings to take your web scraping projects to the next level!

Happy scraping!

By: ProxyScrape