Taobao Category Bestsellers Scraper

Find what really sells on Taobao before you stock it, source it or compete with it. Point at any category and get its sales-ordered bestsellers — rank 1 is the product the site itself ranks first by sales — with price, promotions, shop and images attached. Spot trends early, validate a niche, or pull a ranked shortlist of winning products. No account and no login are needed.

What you can do with it

• Find winning products. Sales-ordered category lists are the raw material of product research: what leads, at which price, from which shops.
• Validate a niche. Compare the leaders across neighboring categories before committing stock or ad spend.
• Track trends. Re-run weekly and watch products climb or fall out of the ranking.
• Map the competition. Every row carries its shop, so a category scan doubles as a competitor map.
• Feed a spreadsheet or dashboard. Every field is a plain column — export to Excel, Google Sheets, CSV or JSON in one click.

What you get

One row per product, in sales-rank order. Abridged real example:

{
  "categoryId": "50064014",
  "categoryName": "礦泉水/純淨水",
  "rank": 1,
  "itemId": "842645269114",
  "title": "【經典原味】泰國進口泰象（Chang）蘇打水325ml*24瓶 曾舜晞同款",
  "url": "https://world.taobao.com/item/842645269114.htm",
  "price": 88,
  "promoLabel": "特價秒殺",
  "currency": "CNY",
  "shopId": "67597230",
  "shopName": "天貓超市",
  "shopUrl": "https://world.taobao.com/dianpu/67597230.htm",
  "serviceScore": 4.88,
  "imageUrl": "https://img.alicdn.com/imgextra/O1CN017nsCWl27j76ab4paI_!!6000000007832-2-yinhe.png",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-21T00:00:00.000Z"
}

Input reference

Field	Type	Default	What it does
categories	list of text	(example category)	Category links (world.taobao.com/category/…) or bare numeric category IDs. Up to 20 per run.
maxResultsPerCategory	number	20	How many bestsellers to collect per category, in sales-rank order (maximum 20).
minPrice	number	—	Keep only collected bestsellers at or above this price, in yuan. Leave empty for no floor.
maxPrice	number	—	Keep only collected bestsellers at or below this price, in yuan. Leave empty for no ceiling.
maxConcurrency	number	3	How many categories to work through at the same time (1–5).

Output fields

Field	Type	Description
categoryId, categoryName	text	The category these ranks belong to.
rank	number	Sales-rank position inside the category (1 = the site's top seller).
itemId	text	The product's identifier on the site.
title	text	Product title.
url	text	Direct link to the product.
price, promoPrice, promoLabel, currency	number / text	Selling price in yuan (always CNY) plus promotion details when advertised. promoPrice stays empty when the promotion matches the selling price.
onPromo	true/false	Whether the site advertises a promotion on the product.
shopId, shopName, shopUrl	text	The shop behind the product and its link.
freeShipping	true/false	Whether the product ships free.
serviceScore	number	The seller's description-match score, as the site publishes it.
imageUrl	text	Main product picture.
scrapedAt	text	When the row was collected.

Pricing

You pay per ranked product returned — nothing else, and nothing for a category that comes back with nothing.

What you pay for	Price
Each bestseller row	$1.20 per 1,000

Worked example. Ten categories × 20 bestsellers each = 200 rows = $0.24 for the run. A daily trend watch on five categories costs about $0.12 per run.

Limits & what this actor cannot do

• Each category returns the site's own sales-ordered first screen — 20 products. Ranks are the site's ordering, reported exactly; per-product sales totals are not published on this surface, so ranks are returned and totals are not.
• Rankings are a snapshot at the moment of collection. The order keeps shifting afterwards, so two runs days apart can order the same products differently.
• Price bands narrow the collected ranking to matching products; ranks are then the order within that narrowed list.
• A category ID that does not exist returns nothing, costs nothing, and is reported as empty in the run summary.
• Speed depends on the size of the job and on the source site's own response times; no fixed throughput is promised.
• The source site's terms govern automated access. You are responsible for using the data lawfully and in line with those terms, and for handling any personal data in line with applicable privacy law.

FAQ

Do I need a Taobao account? No. Nothing is signed in to and nothing is bought.

How do I find a category ID? Open the category on the site and copy the number from its page address — or just paste the whole category link.

Is rank 1 really the top seller? It is the product the site ranks first in its own sales ordering at the moment of collection. Re-run on a schedule to see how stable the top spots are.

Can I track a category over time? Yes. Save the categories as a task and run it on any schedule Apify supports, then compare rankings week by week.