UPCItemDB Barcode Lookup Scraper

Look up any product by its barcode — UPC-A, UPC-E, EAN-8, EAN-13, GTIN-14, ISBN-10 or ISBN-13 — or run a free-text product search, using the public UPCItemDB catalog. Get back product titles, brands, categories, dimensions, weight, historical pricing, images and live merchant offers. No API key, no cookies, no login required.

What this actor does

• Barcode lookup — paste one or many UPC/EAN/GTIN/ISBN codes and get full product details for each, in a single call
• Keyword search — search by product name, brand or description across UPCItemDB's catalog
• Brand, category, title & model filters — narrow search results to a specific brand, product-category path, title keyword or model number
• Match mode — choose between UPCItemDB's best-match (fuzzy) or strict (all-keywords) search matching
• Automatic pagination — the actor pages through search results until your maxItems cap is reached
• Merchant offers — every product includes live pricing from the retailers currently listing it, with shipping, condition and availability
• Clean, omit-empty output — fields that UPCItemDB has no data for (including its own literal N/A placeholders) are dropped rather than shipped as noise

Output per product

Field	Description
upc	The canonical UPC/EAN code UPCItemDB has on file
ean	EAN-13 form of the code (zero-padded)
isbn	ISBN of the title, for books
barcodeType	Detected barcode family: UPC-A, UPC-E, EAN-8, EAN-13, GTIN-14, ISBN-10 or ISBN-13
title	Product title
description	Full product description
brand	Brand / manufacturer name
publisher	Publisher name, for books
model	Model number / name
color, size	Variant attributes, when available
dimension, weight	Physical dimensions and shipping weight
category	Full category path, e.g. Food, Beverages & Tobacco > Beverages > Soda
currency	Currency code associated with recorded pricing
lowestRecordedPrice, highestRecordedPrice	Historical price range UPCItemDB has recorded for this product
images[], primaryImage, imageCount	Product images gathered from listing merchants
offers[]	Current merchant offers — see below
offerCount	Number of offers returned
asin	Amazon ASIN, when matched
ebayListingId	eBay listing ID, when matched
sourceUrl	Canonical UPCItemDB product page
searchQuery	The query that matched this product (mode=search only)
matchedBarcode	The barcode you supplied that resolved this product (mode=lookup only)
recordType	Always product
scrapedAt	UTC timestamp of when the actor fetched this record

Offer object fields (offers[])

Field	Description
merchant	Retailer name
domain	Retailer domain
title	The product title as listed by this merchant
currency	Offer currency, when specified
listPrice	Original / list price, when discounted
price	Current selling price
shipping	Shipping terms
condition	New, Used, Refurbished, etc.
availability	Stock status, when reported
offerUrl	Link to the merchant listing
updatedAt	When this offer price was last recorded

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	select	lookup	lookup (by barcode) or search (free-text)
barcodes	string	012345678905	Barcodes to look up (mode=lookup). Separate multiple codes with commas, spaces or new lines
searchQuery	string	diet coke	Free-text search phrase (mode=search)
brand	string	–	Optional brand filter (mode=search)
category	string	–	Optional category filter (mode=search)
titleFilter	string	–	Optional title-keyword filter (mode=search)
model	string	–	Optional model-number filter (mode=search)
matchMode	select	best	best (fuzzy match) or strict (all keywords must match), mode=search
maxItems	integer	20	Cap on emitted product records (1–200)

Example: look up multiple barcodes at once

{
  "mode": "lookup",
  "barcodes": "012345678905, 049000028911, 9780261103573"
}

Example: search with brand + category filters

{
  "mode": "search",
  "searchQuery": "shave cream",
  "brand": "Kyoku",
  "category": "Health & Beauty",
  "maxItems": 30
}

Example: search with title + model filters and strict matching

{
  "mode": "search",
  "searchQuery": "iphone 6",
  "titleFilter": "64gb",
  "model": "MG5A2LL",
  "matchMode": "strict",
  "maxItems": 20
}

Example: plain keyword search

{
  "mode": "search",
  "searchQuery": "wireless mouse",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Use cases

• Retail & inventory systems — resolve barcode scans to full product metadata in bulk
• Price monitoring — pull current merchant offers and historical price ranges for a product catalog
• Catalog enrichment — backfill missing titles, images, categories and dimensions from a UPC/EAN list
• Competitive research — search a category or brand to see which merchants are actively selling it and at what price
• E-commerce onboarding — auto-fill new listings from a supplier's barcode list
• Data validation — confirm a barcode is registered and see what product it's mapped to before shipping inventory

FAQ

What barcode types are supported? UPC-A (12 digits), UPC-E (6–8 digits), EAN-8, EAN-13, GTIN-14, and book ISBNs (ISBN-10 and ISBN-13). Dashes and spaces in the barcode are stripped automatically.

Can I look up more than one barcode per run? Yes — separate barcodes with commas, spaces or new lines in the barcodes field. UPCItemDB's public trial endpoint only resolves 2 codes per underlying API call, so the actor automatically batches your list into chunks of 2 (with a short pause between chunks) until every barcode has been looked up or maxItems is reached.

Why do some products have no brand, color or size? UPCItemDB only returns fields it actually has data for. When the upstream catalog literally reports N/A or unknown for a field, the actor treats that as "no data" and omits the field rather than shipping a placeholder.

Why is lowestRecordedPrice sometimes missing? UPCItemDB records this as 0 when it has no confirmed historical low price. The actor omits 0-valued price fields since they represent "no data," not a genuine free price.

Does the search support pagination? Yes — the actor automatically pages through search results (in batches of a few products per request) until it reaches your maxItems cap or runs out of matches.

How do brand, category, title and model filters work in search mode? All four are passed to UPCItemDB's search as narrowing filters and are also re-checked against each result's brand/category/title/model fields (case-insensitive substring match) before the record is emitted.

What does matchMode do? best (the default) asks UPCItemDB to return its closest matches even when no single result matches every keyword in your query. strict requires every keyword in searchQuery to match.

Is there a rate limit? Yes, the public UPCItemDB endpoint used by this actor is rate-limited. If the quota is exhausted mid-run after some products have already been emitted, the actor stops cleanly and its status message reports exactly how many products it emitted and that the run was cut short by the quota — it never fabricates placeholder records to make up the difference.

Why does my search query return 0 results even though the product exists? UPCItemDB's public search endpoint only searches a small curated demo subset of its catalog (mostly common grocery/consumer items), not the full database — this is a limitation of their free trial tier, and returning 0 for an unindexed query is UPCItemDB's genuine answer, not a failed request. mode=lookup by exact barcode always checks the full database and is unaffected.

How fresh is the data? UPCItemDB continuously crawls merchant catalogs, so pricing, offers and images reflect what merchants were reporting at the time the product was last indexed.

Is this affiliated with UPCItemDB? No, this is a third-party actor using the public UPCItemDB API/website.

Limitations

• offerUrl reliability — sourceUrl (the canonical UPCItemDB product page) and images[] are consistently reachable from any client. offerUrl is UPCItemDB's own affiliate-tracking redirect link, which chains through third-party affiliate networks to the merchant's page. Some merchant destinations enforce referer/session checks that reject a bare programmatic request even though the same link resolves normally when opened in a browser. Use offerUrl as a reference/attribution link rather than a guaranteed-200 deep link.
• mode=search covers a limited demo catalog, not UPCItemDB's full database — UPCItemDB's free public search endpoint only indexes a small curated sample of products (well-known grocery/consumer items like diet coke, milk, banana, cereal) rather than their complete catalog. Many everyday queries (e.g. laptop, headphones, batteries) will genuinely return 0 results — this is an upstream trial-tier restriction, not an actor bug. mode=lookup by exact barcode is not affected and resolves against the full database.