Mercado Libre Search Results Scraper

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🎯 What this scrapes

Mercado Libre is the dominant LatAm marketplace, and this Actor searches its .mx search-results pages by keyword, writing one normalized row per organic listing: title, seller, rating, sale/list price, discount percent, installments text, and shipping promise. Built for price monitoring and catalog research on a target that requires a real residential-backed browser to clear.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🛡️ We clear the challenge once per run — a dedicated Camoufox context absorbs the proof-of-work check, then every page in the run reuses it.
• 🌐 We rotate proxies and sessions through Apify Proxy on every block — fresh session ID, fresh exit IP.
• 🔁 We retry with exponential backoff and rotate to a fresh context on recoverable refusals.
• 🧱 We fail loud, not silent — a hard block surfaces a clear status message instead of a quietly empty dataset.
• 🧊 We keep the dataset clean — Pydantic-validated rows, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable IDs.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that hit your dataset. No data, no charge.

💡 Use cases

• Price monitoring — track competitor and marketplace price or discount changes on target products over time.
• Catalog research — build a normalized dataset of listings for a category or keyword for market sizing and assortment analysis.
• Competitor price tracking — watch specific sellers' pricing, discount depth, and installment terms.
• Deal and discount hunting — surface the listings with the steepest discount percentages for arbitrage or resale.
• Dropshipping sourcing — vet MX supplier candidates on price, shipping promise, and seller reputation before you commit to a listing.

⚙️ 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
query	string	yes	'laptop'	Search keyword to look up on Mercado Libre Mexico. Required, non-empty.
tld	string	no	'mx'	Mercado Libre country domain. Only .mx (Mexico) is supported in v1.
maxItems	integer	no	100	Hard cap on dataset rows for this run. Defaults above one page (48 rows) so pagination is always exercised.
maxPages	integer	no	3	Page cap for pagination (48 rows/page), hard-capped at 9 — the proven depth ceiling.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{'useApifyProxy': True, 'apifyProxyGroups': ['RESIDENTIAL']}	Apify Proxy configuration. Defaults to RESIDENTIAL — required, not optional, for this target.

Example input

{
  "query": "laptop",
  "tld": "mx",
  "countryCode": "MX",
  "maxItems": 100
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
itemId	string	Mercado Libre item identifier, e.g. MLM1234567890.
title	string	Listing title, verbatim from the search-result card.
seller	string	Seller/store name shown on the card.
rating	['number', 'null']	Average review rating (0-5), null if absent.
listPrice	['number', 'null']	Previous (pre-discount) price; null when not discounted.
salePrice	number	Current listed price.
discountPercent	['integer', 'null']	Discount percentage; null when not discounted.
installmentsText	['string', 'null']	Verbatim installment-payment text.
shippingText	['string', 'null']	Verbatim shipping-promise text.
itemUrl	string	Canonical product URL, tracking fragment stripped.
currency	string	Currency code for the TLD searched, e.g. MXN.
query	string	Echoes the query input for this row.
page	integer	1-indexed source page this row was scraped from.
scrapedAt	string	ISO-8601 UTC wall-clock time of row extraction.

Example output

{
  "itemId": "MLM1234567890",
  "title": "Hp Omnibook Core Ultra 7 32gb Ram 1tb Ssd Laptop Gamer",
  "seller": "Global-Laptops",
  "rating": 4.6,
  "listPrice": 30960.0,
  "salePrice": 24799.0,
  "discountPercent": 19,
  "installmentsText": "15 meses sin intereses de $1,653",
  "shippingText": "Llega gratis mañana",
  "itemUrl": "https://www.mercadolibre.com.mx/hp-omnibook-.../p/MLM1234567890",
  "currency": "MXN",
  "query": "laptop",
  "page": 1,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-19T00:00:00Z"
}

💰 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	$0.005	Per dataset item

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $5.20. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

• .mx (Mexico) only in v1 — other Mercado Libre country domains aren't supported yet.
• Search-results rows only — no product detail pages, images, Q&A, or full reviews.
• No public JSON API path exists anymore; Mercado Libre retired it, so this Actor is browser-only by necessity.
• Sponsored listings and recommendation carousels are excluded — organic results only.
• Depth capped at page 9 (offset 385) — the proven ceiling; not marketed as unlimited.
• No seller storefronts, price-history tracking, or keyword-less browsing.

❓ FAQ

Why does this need a browser instead of a fast API call?

Mercado Libre retired its public JSON search API — it returns a 403 on every proxy tier we've tested, so a direct HTTP call simply does not work anymore. The HTML search pages are additionally fronted by a proof-of-work challenge that only clears from a real, adequately-resourced browser on a residential exit. We run that browser and absorb the challenge once per run so your dataset arrives clean without you touching any of it.

Which Mercado Libre country domains are supported?

.mx (Mexico) only in v1. Other country domains — Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and the rest — need their own recon and aren't wired up yet.

Are sponsored or ad listings included?

No. We extract only from the organic result-grid anchors and drop sponsored placements and recommendation-carousel items, so every row is a real organic search match.

What happens if my search has zero results?

The run succeeds with zero rows and a status message naming the query. A narrow search that genuinely matches nothing is not a failure, and there's no per-row charge when there are no rows to charge for.

How current is the data?

Every row is scraped live at run time and stamped with an ISO-8601 UTC scrapedAt timestamp — there's no cache or stale snapshot anywhere in the pipeline.

How deep can I paginate?

Up to page 9 (offset 385), the proven depth ceiling for this target. maxPages is hard-capped there in v1 — we don't market depth we haven't measured.

💬 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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