DirectIndustry Industrial Suppliers Scraper

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🎯 What this scrapes

DirectIndustry.com (Aximedia, France) lists manufacturer product catalogs for industrial equipment -- automation, robotics, sensors, machinery, bearings -- aimed at engineers and procurement teams. This Actor walks its category index -> product-type listing (paginated) -> product-detail hierarchy and pulls manufacturer, model, specifications, description, and images for every product it finds, so sales/lead-gen teams, procurement researchers, and competitive-intelligence analysts can build supplier datasets without paging the site by hand.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes so the target sees a browser, not Python.
• 🌐 Residential proxy rotation via Apify Proxy — fresh session and exit IP on every block.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 5xx — up to 5 attempts per page, Retry-After honoured.
• 🧱 Rate-limit-aware pacing — when the target pushes back, we slow down instead of getting banned.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable IDs, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that hit your dataset. No data, no charge.

💡 Use cases

• Supplier sourcing -- build a shortlist of manufacturers and products matching an industrial category.
• Lead generation -- extract manufacturer names and websites for B2B outreach.
• Competitive intelligence -- track catalog breadth and specifications across manufacturers in a category.
• Procurement research -- compare structured specifications across products before requesting quotes.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Fill in the input form — most fields have sensible defaults.
3. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
4. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
categoryUrls	array	yes	['https://www.directindustry.com/cat/automation-A.html', 'https://www.directindustry.com/cat/handling-lifting-S.html', 'https://www.directindustry.com/cat/bearings-linear-guides-F.html']	1-20 DirectIndustry category (/cat/
maxItemsPerCategory	integer	no	50	Cap on rows collected per seed URL, applied independently per seed.
maxPagesPerProductType	integer	no	5	Cap on -_
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{'useApifyProxy': True, 'apifyProxyGroups': ['RESIDENTIAL'], 'apifyProxyCountry': 'US'}	Apify Proxy config. RESIDENTIAL is the safe default for this Cloudflare-fronted target -- never leave this as a bare…

Example input

{
  "categoryUrls": [
    "https://www.directindustry.com/cat/automation-A.html"
  ],
  "maxItemsPerCategory": 3,
  "maxPagesPerProductType": 1,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": [
      "RESIDENTIAL"
    ],
    "apifyProxyCountry": "US"
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
product_url	string	Product detail page URL (crawl target).
product_name	string	Product title -- data-cy="productTitle" H1, falls back to JSON-LD name.
model	string	Manufacturer model/identifier -- JSON-LD identifier.
manufacturer_name	string	Manufacturer name -- data-cy="companyLink" text (boilerplate stripped), falls back to the /prod/
manufacturer_url	string | null	⚠️ Usually null. DirectIndustry renders the manufacturer link without an outbound href on product detail pages, so this came back null on 150 of 150 rows across three categories in our own measured run. We keep the field because the markup does carry a real href on some pages, but do not plan around it — use manufacturer_name to identify the supplier.
category	string	The seed category/product-type URL this row was discovered under (input echo, not scraped).
description	string	Product description -- data-cy="descriptionProduct" text, falls back to JSON-LD description.
specifications	object	Key/value spec pairs from data-cy="specificationsList" (empty object if none).
image_urls	array	Product image URLs from JSON-LD image[].contentUrl (empty array if none).
scraped_at	string	ISO-8601 wall-clock time of the fetch.

Example output

{
  "product_url": "https://www.directindustry.com/prod/advantech/product-12345-987654.html",
  "product_name": "ADAM-3600 Compact PLC",
  "model": "ADAM-3600",
  "manufacturer_name": "ADVANTECH",
  "manufacturer_url": null,
  "category": "https://www.directindustry.com/cat/automation-A.html",
  "description": "Compact modular PLC for distributed I/O control in industrial automation.",
  "specifications": {
    "Type": "compact",
    "Network": "EtherCAT",
    "I/O count": "16"
  },
  "image_urls": [
    "https://cdn.directindustry.com/images/12345/product-front.jpg"
  ],
  "scraped_at": "2026-09-19T14:32:07Z"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.2	One-off warm-up charge per run
result	$0.003	Per dataset item

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $3.20. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

• No keyword/full-text search -- DirectIndustry's search box is client-side JS only; v1 is category-seeded crawl only.
• No pricing or quote data -- DirectIndustry is a catalog, not a marketplace.
• Company/manufacturer profile pages are not a first-class output -- manufacturer fields ship on product rows only.
• No JS-rendered or authenticated content (quote-request forms, gated spec-sheet/PDF downloads).

❓ FAQ

Is this legal?

We only fetch publicly available catalog pages -- no login, no gated quote-request content. Respect DirectIndustry's own terms of service before using the output commercially.

Why did a category return zero rows?

Some categories are genuinely thin. The Actor finishes successfully with zero rows and a status message naming the empty seed rather than failing the run.

Can I mix category and product-type URLs in one run?

Yes -- categoryUrls accepts both /cat/... and /industrial-manufacturer/... URLs in the same list.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

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