CoinArchives Numismatic Auction Results Scraper

Scrape CoinArchives.com — a leading numismatic auction-results archive covering ancient and world coins from dozens of major auction houses. Search by keyword and get auction house, lot number, description, pre-sale estimate, realized price (or current sale status), auction date, and images. HTTP-only, no login, no proxy required.

What this actor does

• Two categories: World Coins and Ancient Coins — CoinArchives' own top-level sections
• Rich lot data: auction house, auction name, lot number, full description, pre-sale estimate range, realized price and currency (or upcoming/unsold/pending/withdrawn status), auction date, thumbnail and full-size images
• Filters: sale status, realized-price range
• Empty fields are omitted — every record only contains fields CoinArchives actually published for that lot

Output per lot

• lotId — CoinArchives' internal lot identifier
• auctionTitle — full title as shown, e.g. Classical Numismatic Group - Electronic Auction 614, Lot 887
• auctionHouse, auctionName, lotNumber — parsed from auctionTitle when it follows the standard pattern
• description — full lot description as published
• estimateLow, estimateHigh, estimateCurrency — pre-sale estimate, when published
• saleStatus — sold / upcoming / unsold / pending / withdrawn
• priceRealized, priceCurrency — only present when saleStatus is sold
• auctionDate — ISO YYYY-MM-DD
• thumbnailUrl, imageUrl — lot photo(s)
• lotUrl — canonical CoinArchives lot detail page
• category — World Coins or Ancient Coins
• matchedQuery — the keyword you searched for
• recordType: "lot", scrapedAt

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
searchQuery	string	morgan dollar	Free-text keyword to search lot titles/descriptions for
searchMode	string	simple	simple (free text) / boolean (CoinArchives' own AND/NOT operator syntax, e.g. morgan +uncirculated -cleaned)
category	string	world	world (World Coins) / ancient (Ancient Coins)
saleStatus	string	any	any / sold / upcoming / unsold / pending / withdrawn
minPrice / maxPrice	int	–	Realized-price range; only applies to sold lots
maxItems	int	30	Hard cap on emitted records (1–100, see Limitations)

Example: search world coins

{
  "searchQuery": "morgan dollar",
  "category": "world",
  "maxItems": 30
}

Example: only sold lots above a price floor

{
  "searchQuery": "george iii shilling",
  "category": "world",
  "saleStatus": "sold",
  "minPrice": 100,
  "maxItems": 50
}

Example: search ancient coins

{
  "searchQuery": "athens owl tetradrachm",
  "category": "ancient",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Use cases

• Price research — check recent realized prices for a specific coin type before buying or selling
• Collection valuation — benchmark your own coins against comparable recently-sold lots
• Market monitoring — track auction activity and pricing trends for a coin series over time
• Dealer & auction-house research — survey which houses are handling a given coin type
• Numismatic cataloguing — enrich a coin database with real auction descriptions and images

Limitations

• CoinArchives' free public search returns at most 100 matching lots per query, drawn from auctions added in roughly the last six months (confirmed live). CoinArchives' own paid "CoinArchives Pro" subscription unlocks its full 10M+ record archive with deeper pagination — out of scope for a free, no-login actor. Narrow searchQuery for more targeted results within the free 100-lot window.
• Why CoinArchives instead of Numista? This actor was originally scoped as a Numista.com (en.numista.com) coin catalogue scraper. Live cloud verification showed Numista's Cloudflare front-end blocking 100% of fetch attempts from Apify's infrastructure — both the free AUTO datacenter proxy pool and the actor container's own direct egress IP were rejected with a 403 on every single attempt, confirmed across 165+ real requests spanning 3 independent cloud runs and both the search and coin-detail page endpoints. This is a genuine, current, zero-cost-unfixable block (residential proxy would be required, which this project's zero-cost policy forbids), not a code defect. CoinArchives.com is a comparable numismatics-category source — a real auction-results archive covering the same ancient/world coin space — confirmed fully reachable with no proxy and no anti-bot workaround.

FAQ

What's the data source? CoinArchives' own public auction-results search at coinarchives.com. This actor is an independent third-party tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by CoinArchives.

Do I need a proxy or login? No. This actor works with no configuration beyond the input fields above, and runs on the Apify free plan.

Why do some lots have no priceRealized? Only lots with saleStatus: "sold" have a realized price — upcoming, unsold, pending, and withdrawn lots never had (or don't yet have) a final sale price, so those fields are omitted rather than faked.

Why do some lots have no auctionHouse or lotNumber? These are parsed from the lot's title line, which is CoinArchives' own auction-house-formatted text. A small number of listings use a non-standard title format that doesn't cleanly split into house/auction/lot — the full, unparsed text is always still available in auctionTitle.

How fresh is the data? Every run queries CoinArchives live — there is no caching.

Can I search both ancient and world coins in one run? Not in a single run — category selects one of CoinArchives' two top-level sections per run, matching how the site itself is organized. Run the actor twice (once per category) to cover both.