The Best Price Scraping Tools of 2024
The e-commerce industry is very competitive, so real-time access to pricing data can be a game-changer. Price scraping allows you to monitor and analyze product prices across different online stores and marketplaces.
However, getting pricing information isn’t that straightforward. Not all websites have official APIs; if they do, you’ll be limited to data access permissions. Otherwise, e-commerce platforms implement anti-scraping measures to protect their data. So, what are your options? To tackle these challenges, you need advanced web scraping tools that can manage proxies and bypass detection mechanisms.
Whether you’re a small retailer or a large business, our list of top price scraping tools will help you get that pricing data. We’ve tested each tool, compared their features and price.
The Best Price Scrapers of 2024:
1. Oxylabs – premium e-commerce price scraping tools.
2. Smartproxy – performant and affordable price scraper.
3. Bright Data – the most versatile price scrapers.
4. Zyte API – price scraper with a robust parser.
5. ScraperAPI – price scraper with versatile integration options.
What Is Price Scraping?
Price scraping is the process of collecting pricing information from various online stores and marketplaces. This technique uses web scraping tools to gather data on product prices, discounts, promotions, and other related information.
Why Do Businesses Scrape Prices?
- Competitive analysis: businesses gain insights into pricing strategies by scraping prices from competitor websites. You can adjust prices to remain competitive, attract customers, and increase market share.
- Market trends: price scraping helps to identify market trends based on seasonality and consumer preferences.
- Better customer experience: by keeping your pulse on the market, you can offer competitive prices and timely discounts. Competitive pricing also helps to reduce cart abandonment rates.
- Price parity: brands that sell through multiple channels like their own website and third-party marketplaces have to maintain price parity. Price scraping helps to check pricing across all sales platforms, preventing conflicts with retailers and protecting brand reputation.
Challenges When Scraping Prices from E-Commerce Websites
E-commerce websites like eBay and Amazon are among the most protected. They use various anti-scraping measures to safeguard their data, including:
- Rate limiting. It’s the number of requests a user (or bot) can make to the server within a certain time frame. This method is used to prevent overloading the server and automated scraping.
- IP blocks. Popular websites often monitor IP addresses. If they detect an IP making too many requests in a short period, they may block it, suspecting automated scraping activity. This can hinder the ability to gather bulk data quickly.
- CAPTCHAs. They are used to distinguish between human users and automated bots. CAPTCHA challenges are very common when scraping, and your scraper needs to solve the test. But it’s not as easy as you think – you may need to use CAPTCHA-solving services, rotate your IP, and constantly monitor your tool. A third-party service usually takes care of these aspects.
- User-agent filtering. The user-agent string is part of your browser fingerprint. When websites filter your parameters, they look for inconsistencies, and scrapers sometimes use outdated or generic user-agent strings.
Learn more: Main web scraping challenges.
Things to Consider While Choosing a Price Scraping Tool
Many tools are available for web scraping prices from e-commerce sites. But not all are equally suitable for specific project requirements. Knowing what to look for is the same as having a map in a maze. We’ve prepared some essentials for you to consider:
- Documentation and support. Comprehensive documentation will help you set up the scraper; in most cases, you can find answers to common issues and troubleshooting tips. Customer support is equally important – if the service is available 24/7, they can help with more serious roadblocks.
- Scalability. When considering web scraping tools, scalability allows you to handle varying loads by adding or reducing resources as needed.
- Dynamic content rendering. Make sure that the tool can scrape data from websites that require JavaScript to load dynamic content. Look for tools that allow you to customize scraping rules and parameters to fit your specific needs. Keep in mind that some providers charge more for JavaScript rendering.
- Data parsing. If you want to get clean data, the tool should include parsing functionality. Some providers offer parsing functionality only with specific e-commerce platforms, so don’t forget to double-check. A tip: most specialized e-commerce web scrapers come with an in-built parser for major stores.
- Storage options: Check for flexible storage options, such as saving data to CSV, JSON, databases, or cloud storage services.
The Best Price Scrapers in 2024
1. Oxylabs
Robust e-commerce price scraping tools.
Web Scraper API (general-purpose)
- Data parsing: many e-commerce websites
- Locations: 195 with country-level targeting
- Pricing model: based on successful requests
- Free trial: 7-day free trial with 5K results
- Pricing: $49 for 24,500 requests ($2/1K requests)
Oxylabs stands out with its general-purpose scraper that allows you to get price data from major platforms like eBay, Amazon, and Google Shopping.
The scraper integrates as an API. Unlike some other providers, Oxylabs offers an in-built parser that supports over 100 online marketplaces, as well as an AI-powered assistant. The parser can structure data from any product page.
All Oxylabs services come with performant proxies, global locations, extensive documentation, and customer support that’s available 24/7. Since Oxylabs is a premium provider, you’ll also get a dedicated account manager with enterprise plans.
For more information and performance tests, read our Oxylabs review.
2. Smartproxy
Performant and affordable price scraper.
eCommerce Scraping API
- Data parsing: Amazon
- Locations: 195 with country-level targeting
- Pricing model: based on successful requests
- Free trial: 7 days
- Pricing: starts from $30 for 15,000 requests ($2.00/1,000 requests)
Smartproxy also offers a specialized e-commerce scraping tool that allows you to collect prices from Amazon. If you want to scrape other online marketplaces, you can pass a universal e-commerce parameter by providing the full URL of the site.
You can integrate the scraper as a proxy server to receive results over an open connection. Alternatively, you can use it as an API to either receive real-time data or fetch results in batches once the job is done. In terms of performance, Smartproxy reached a perfect success rate during our tests, and the scraper was the second fastest.
The scraper has wide location coverage – you can target any country from 195 locations. There’s also an API playground to test your queries, customer support available whenever needed, and great documentation.
For more information and performance tests, read our Smartproxy review.
3. Bright Data
The most versatile price scrapers.
Web Scraper API (e-commerce templates)
Web Scraper IDE (general-purpose)
Ready-made datasets for e-commerce websites
- Data parsing: several e-commerce websites
- Locations: global with city & country targeting
- Pricing model: based on successful requests
- Free trial: 7 days free trial for business clients.
- Pricing:
– Web Scraper IDE: $4/1K requests (standard domains) or $8/1K requests (premium domains)
– Dataset: $0.001/record
Bright Data has a vast arsenal of tools that can be used to scrape prices, including dedicated products for many e-commerce websites.
First, you can get its Web Scraper API that comes with custom endpoints for various e-commerce targets, such as Amazon product pages. They accept batch URLs and let you fetch the data as soon as the job is done.
If you don’t want to do any scraping yourself, Bright Data offers ready-made datasets for many e-commerce or other websites. You can buy the whole dataset or get a custom subset, with the ability to modify the data points.
And that’s not all. If you want to scale up your game, you can opt for its most powerful product – Web Scraping IDE. It’s a cloud-based environment with pre-built scraping functions and code templates. The tool is designed to handle large-scale scraping tasks, and customize scraping tasks to fit your specific requirements
In a nutshell, Bright Data’s tools are very performant. However, the service is pretty difficult to use and comes with prices that are above the average.
For more information and performance tests, read our Bright Data review.
4. Zyte API
Price scraper with robust parser.
Zyte API (general-purpose)
- Data parsing: any e-commerce website
- Locations: 150 with automatic country selection
- Pricing model: based on optional features
- Free trial: $5 credit
- Pricing: custom
Zyte is a popular provider in the web scraping world, especially if you need e-commerce data.
The provider primarily targets developers, but it also has a no-code interface. If you need to structure data, there’s an AI parser for e-commerce product pages.
What’s more, Zyte API can render pages like a browser, with features including element interaction, waiting, and scrolling. Enterprise clients also get access to a cloud-hosted Visual Studio Code environment for writing full automation scripts.
Zyte is another provider with an API playground that generates code snippets based on your selected parameters. However, the documentation is much more comprehensive for advanced usage.
You won’t find fixed price rates with Zyte’s service – the provider calculates the price dynamically based on multiple factors: for example, the target website or the use of headless browsers. All in all, if you don’t need to render JavaScript, Zyte is an affordable provider for scraping prices.
For more information and performance tests, read our Zyte API review.
5. ScraperAPI
Price scraper with versatile integration options.
ScraperAPI (general-purpose)
- E-commerce websites: three
- Locations: 12 (50+ available upon request)
- Pricing model: based on successful requests & optional features
- Data parsing: yes
- Free trial: 7 days with 5,000 requests
- Pricing: starts from $49/100,000 API credits
ScraperAPI offers a general-purpose web scraper with structured data endpoints for Amazon, Google Shopping, and Walmart.
If you’re not sure whether the product is worth your money, you can use a free plan with 1,000 API credits/month or try a 7-day free trial period with 5,000 free requests.
Instead of charging for successful requests, ScraperAPI uses a credit-based pricing system. Scraping well-protected e-commerce websites often necessitates features like JavaScript rendering or premium proxies, which consume more credits. You can use the API playground to gauge the price per request.
6. Crawlbase
Easy to use price scraper.
Web Scraping API (general-purpose)
Smart Proxy (general-purpose)
- Data parsing: four e-commerce websites
- Locations: 30
- Pricing model: based on successful requests & optional features
- Free trial: 1000 requests
- Pricing: starts from $49/100,000 API credits
– Crawling API: $0.3/1 request or $0.6/1 request if you enable JS
– Smart Proxy: $99/ month for 200K credits
Crawlbase has two web scrapers for getting price information: Crawling API and Smart Proxy.
Crawling API is an HTTP API. It comes with parsers for several e-commerce websites (eBay, AliExpress, Amazon, and Walmart) with an option to manually extract particular CSS elements. The provider also offers Smart Proxy, a proxy API with the same parameters as the Crawling API. Although it’s more affordable, certain features are only accessible with higher-priced plans.
Crawlbase was relatively fast during our tests but failed to return as many successful requests as other providers. Moreover, the tool is pretty easy to use and comes with 24/7 customer support.
Crawling API and Smart Proxy charge based on successful requests, but you will need to pay double for JavaScript rendering. The first 1,000 requests are free of charge.
