wheeljacklab-scraper

Scrapes Wheeljack's Lab's for-sale vintage toy/action-figure catalog (G1 Transformers, Star Wars, He-Man, DC, and more — 14,000+ live items, online since 1999), via the site's own real embedded structured data. No login required.

Contents

• Key features
• Output
• Input
• Input examples
• Incremental (delta) mode
• FAQ

🔑 Key features

• A real, rich per-item condition score. Every item's free-text condition writeup includes the site's own "Rated N" grading (1-100 scale: 100 = mint-flawless, 95 = near-mint, 90 = excellent) — parsed out separately as condition_score, a genuinely sortable/filterable number, not just prose.
• A genuinely rich specifics panel, well beyond a typical price/title/description record: brand, franchise, character, genre, scale, country of origin, manufacture year, and more — kept as an opaque specifics label:value dict since the label set varies by item type (an action figure vs. a die-cast car vs. a lot of loose parts don't share the same labels), with brand/franchise pulled out as convenience top-level fields.
• Full image galleries, not just a thumbnail — every item's complete set of full-size photos.
• Delta mode built in. Every run classifies each item as new, changed, unchanged, or delisted against a persisted baseline — pay for what changed, not a full re-scrape every time.
• Confirmed-dead listings are never re-fetched. A removed item returns a plain HTTP 404 on this site — tracked in a persisted registry so a future run skips it without a wasted request.
• maxItems defaults to 50 — a fast, cheap preview, and what keeps an unconfigured run within Apify's automated 5-minute QA check. Clear it (null) for a full crawl (~14,234 items as of this build).

📋 Output

One dataset item per catalog item — see .actor/dataset_schema.json for the full field list.

Example record:

{
  "source": "wheeljacklab",
  "external_id": "237303",
  "url": "https://wheeljackslab.com/shop/237303-great-mazinga-100-complete-shogun-w",
  "title": "Great Mazinga 100% Complete Shogun Warriors 1979 Mattel Jumbo 24\" Action Figure",
  "description": "Box Condition: The box has some wear... Condition: Rated 85 with light wear...",
  "condition_score": 85,
  "price": 400,
  "currency": "USD",
  "availability_status": "InStock",
  "stock_text": "1 in stock",
  "stock_quantity": 1,
  "brand": "Mattel",
  "franchise": "Shogun Warriors",
  "specifics": {
    "Dimensions": "26 in × 12 in × 10 in",
    "Weight": "4 lbs",
    "Brand": "Mattel",
    "Character": "Mazinga",
    "Country of Origin": "Japan",
    "Franchise": "Shogun Warriors",
    "Genre": "Science Fiction",
    "Type": "Action Figure",
    "Vintage": "Yes",
    "Year Manufactured": "1979"
  },
  "image_url": "https://ebay.wheeljackslab.com/images/237303/0_$_32.JPG",
  "image_urls": ["https://ebay.wheeljackslab.com/images/237303/0_$_32.JPG", "..."],
  "sku": "237303",
  "change_type": "new"
}

🔧 Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
startUrls	array	—	Specific item URLs to scrape directly instead of the full catalog.
maxItems	integer	50	Stop after pushing this many items. Set to null for a full crawl.
mode	string	auto	auto / full / incremental — see Incremental mode.
concurrency	integer	20	How many item detail pages to fetch in parallel.
impersonate	string	chrome	curl_cffi TLS-impersonation target.
proxyConfiguration	object	off	Apify Proxy config — not needed; no anti-bot friction found.

📥 Input examples

Default preview (50 items):

{}

Full catalog crawl:

{ "maxItems": null }

Specific items only:

{ "startUrls": ["https://wheeljackslab.com/shop/237303-great-mazinga-100-complete-shogun-w"] }

🔁 Incremental (delta) mode

auto mode does a full scan the first time it runs, then only pushes new/changed items on later runs — including price changes and stock/sold-out transitions (price/availability_status/ stock_text are the watched fields). Only an uncapped, unscoped run (no maxItems limit reached, no startUrls, no item errors) can detect delistings or update the baseline.

❓ FAQ

Why isn't this discovered via the site's own sitemap.xml? A real finding while building this Actor: the site's only declared sitemap indexes a separate collector identification/reference-guide section (/toys/...), not the actual for-sale catalog — sample pages there carry a $0.00 price and "sold and is no longer available" text. The real 14,000+ item catalog lives at /shop/... and isn't listed in any sitemap at all, so this Actor discovers it by paginating the site's own /shop listing pages instead.

Why is franchise sometimes missing? A real gap in the site's own data, not a scraping gap — not every item (a lot of loose parts, for example) carries a Franchise label in its specifics panel. Check specifics for whatever labels that specific item does carry.

Does this need a proxy? No — no anti-bot friction was found while building this Actor (robots.txt is fully permissive, no crawl-delay, no bot exclusions). Only a light concurrency smoke-test was run, though — watch for errors at real full-catalog scale and lower concurrency if you see any.