Taobao Category Products Scraper

Pick from Taobao's 20 top-level categories and get the products back as rows: the Chinese title, price in yuan and in US dollars, image, product link, SKU id, leaf category id, seller id and shop id. No account, no cookies.

The rows are made for price benchmarks by category, the seller and shop ids behind a category, and a map of Taobao's leaf categories. Two things decide whether this is the right purchase. There is no search box: Taobao's category feed takes a category and nothing else, so you cannot ask it for "red shoes". And the pool is finite. Across all 20 categories there are roughly 3,100 unique products, and the same ones come back run after run. This is a catalogue you browse, not a search engine you query.

Input	One or more of Taobao's 20 category feeds, with an optional price range, sub-category list and price sort
Output	One row per product: title, price in CNY and USD, image, link, SKU id, leaf category, seller and shop ids
Ceiling	5,000 products per run, but the whole catalogue is about 3,100 unique products
Account needed	None
Price	$1.95 per 1,000 products on the Free plan, a little less on paid plans. The free plan's $5 a month covers about 2,500

🔍 What Taobao Category Products Scraper does

You choose categories from a fixed list of 20, from Industrial supplies 工业用品 (the biggest, around 982 products) down to Digital services 数字生活 (about 12). The picker shows the rough size of each one next to its name, so you can see what you are buying before you run it.

Selected categories are worked side by side. Each one is paged until it stops producing products you have not already seen, then the run moves on. Categories never overlap, so a product from Pet supplies will not turn up again under Home & living, and you are never charged twice for the same product inside one run.

Rows carry both the Chinese and the English category name, so you can group them without keeping a lookup table of your own.

📋 What data you get from each Taobao product

What you get	Field
Product id, title and link	productId, title, productUrl
Price and currency, always CNY	price, currency
The price in US dollars, with the rate used and its date	priceUsd, usdRate, usdRateDate
Image and promo badge	imageUrl, promoBadgeImageUrl
The variant on offer	skuId
Taobao's deepest category for the product	leafCategoryId
Who sells it and where their shop is	sellerId, shopId, shopUrl
The category you picked, by id, slug and name in Chinese and English	categoryId, category, categoryNameZh, categoryNameEn
Where it sat in the feed	page, position

▶️ How to scrape Taobao products by category

1. Open Taobao Category Products Scraper and click Try for free.
2. Tick the categories you want under Taobao categories. The rough size of each is printed next to it.
3. Set Maximum products. 50 or so is enough to see what the rows look like.
4. If you want them, open Filters and sort for a price range, a list of sub-categories or a price sort, and Depth to drain a category rather than sample it.
5. Click Start, then download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel.

Run it with no categories selected and you get one labelled sample row, free.

💰 How much does it cost to scrape Taobao products by category?

$1.95 per 1,000 products on the Free plan. Paid plans pay a little less: $1.93 on Starter, $1.91 on Scale and $1.89 on Business. On the free plan, the $5 Apify gives you each month covers about 2,500 products, which is most of the catalogue.

The sample row and diagnostic rows are not billed, and a category that comes back empty produces no billed rows. Duplicates are dropped before they reach the dataset, so the same product is never billed twice inside one run. Products your filters leave out are not billed either; the status line counts them.

📥 What you give it

{
  "categories": ["home", "pets"],
  "maxItems": 200,
  "maxPriceCny": 100,
  "sortBy": "priceAsc"
}

Field	Default	What it is
categories	none	Which category feeds to browse, picked from the list of 20. Choose as many as you like.
maxItems	200	Hard cap on products across every category selected, 1 to 5,000. Ask for more than a category holds and it simply stops early.
minPriceCny	none	Leave out products cheaper than this many yuan. While a price bound is set, products the feed shows no price for are left out too. Empty or 0 means no minimum.
maxPriceCny	none	Leave out products dearer than this many yuan. Empty or 0 means no maximum.
leafCategoryIds	none	Keep only these sub-categories: the leafCategoryId values from an earlier run, for example 50015322. A sub-category only turns up inside the category it belongs to.
sortBy	feed	feed writes products as they arrive. priceAsc and priceDesc hold the run's products until the categories are done and write them cheapest or dearest first, unpriced ones last. A sort orders the products this run picks up, so to sort a whole category set maxItems above its size.
maxPagesPerCategory	60	How deep to page inside one category, 1 to 200. A page returns 7 to 25 products and the deepest categories need 40 to 70 pages to bottom out. Raise it for a full drain, lower it for a quick look.
proxyConfiguration	none	Optional, under Advanced. Leave it alone unless you want the run to go out through a network of your own.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a run on 17 October 2026 in Home & living, kept in the original Chinese:

{
  "productId": "641093244922",
  "title": "【耐用金刚PRO】强磁防蚊门帘",
  "price": 66,
  "currency": "CNY",
  "productUrl": "https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=641093244922",
  "imageUrl": "https://img.alicdn.com/bao/uploaded/i2/2096632076/O1CN01uncTbWN3WWF2vH2e_!!...",
  "skuId": "6307957594425",
  "leafCategoryId": "50001866",
  "sellerId": "2096632076",
  "shopId": "111289736",
  "shopUrl": "https://shop111289736.taobao.com",
  "promoBadgeImageUrl": "https://img.alicdn.com/imgextra/i1/O1CN01nRidmm1UAVxdcYMzF_!!...",
  "categoryId": "999999103",
  "category": "home",
  "categoryNameZh": "家享家居",
  "categoryNameEn": "Home & living",
  "page": 0,
  "position": 6,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-17T04:31:43.648Z",
  "priceUsd": 9.87,
  "usdRate": 0.149561,
  "usdRateDate": "2026-10-16"
}

Field	How to read it
productId	Taobao's own product id, and the key to de-duplicate on between runs.
title	The listing title as the seller wrote it, in Chinese. Nothing is translated.
price	The promotional price the feed carries, as a number. Always CNY.
priceUsd	That price in US dollars, at usdRate: the European Central Bank's reference rates of usdRateDate, its dollar rate divided by its yuan rate. The ECB publishes these rates free on its website, for information rather than for payments. Empty when the rate could not be read that run.
skuId	The specific variant the feed is offering, not the whole product.
leafCategoryId	Taobao's deepest category for that product, finer than the 20 you picked from.
promoBadgeImageUrl	The promo badge image, when the listing carries one.
categoryNameZh	Empty on the two unlisted feeds, which have no published Chinese name.

🧾 Reading the output

Row	How to spot it	Billed
A product	It has a productId and no _sample or _diagnostic key	yes
The sample row	_sample: true, only when no category was selected	no
A diagnostic	_diagnostic: true, ok: false and an errorCode	no

Product rows carry no charged flag; the sample and diagnostic rows carry charged: false. The sample row has a productId too, so to keep only products, drop every row with _sample or _diagnostic.

Code	What it means
EMPTY_CATEGORY	That category's first page came back with nothing on it.
UNKNOWN_CATEGORY	A category value that is not one of the 20.
NOT_SERVED	This product was not served this run. Re-run it later. Until 12 October 2026 this code was called BLOCKED.
CATEGORY_FAILED	That category could not be finished. The others keep going.
TAOBAO_API_CHANGED	Taobao answered in a shape this actor does not recognise, so the run stops rather than guess. Worth reporting if you see it.
TIME_LIMIT	The run reached its time limit before it was done. The products that came back are kept and billed; this row is free. Give the run more time to get the rest. The run ends as FAILED only when the time limit stopped it before any product came back.

A run that returns no products at all ends as FAILED, on purpose, so an empty result is loud instead of looking like a quiet success. You are not billed for products you did not get.

💡 What people use it for

• Building a price reference for a category before sourcing, in yuan and dollars, with leafCategoryId giving a finer grouping than the 20 top-level feeds. Run once, note the leaf ids you care about, then rerun with leafCategoryIds and a price range to pay only for those.
• Pulling the seller and shop ids behind a category, then researching those shops separately.
• Seeing which products Taobao itself pushes into a category feed, which is not the same set a keyword search would give you.
• Feeding Chinese product titles into a translation or classification step of your own.

🚧 What it does not do

• No keyword search. The feed takes a category and nothing else. If you need "red shoes", this is the wrong tool however cheap it is.
• No product detail. No description, no specs, no images beyond the one thumbnail, no reviews, no sales volume, no stock. Those live on the product page, which this does not open.
• The catalogue is small and repeats. Roughly 3,100 unique products across all 20 categories, so a second run mostly returns the first run's products again.
• 20 categories, and they are fixed. You cannot point it at an arbitrary Taobao category id.
• Prices are the feed's promotional price, not a price ladder, and not what you would pay after a shop coupon. The dollar figure is a conversion for comparing, not a quote.
• No shop names, no Tmall flag, no shipping details. The feed carries shop and seller ids only.
• Titles stay in Chinese. Nothing is translated.
• A big run can come back short. A category Taobao will not serve becomes an uncharged diagnostic row. Only delivered product rows are billed.
• It is not an official Taobao tool. Dami's Studio is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Taobao or Alibaba, or by any other company named on this page.

🧭 Which Taobao scraper do you need?

If you want	Use
Retail products in a Taobao category	This one
Whatever Taobao's homepage feed is recommending right now	Taobao Product Feed Scraper
The Chinese words shoppers type into Taobao	Taobao Keyword Suggestions Scraper
Second-hand Xianyu listings, from links you already have	Goofish Scraper
1688 offers by search term: unit price, MOQ and the quantity price ladder	1688 Wholesale Scraper
Export products, MOQ and suppliers on Alibaba.com	Alibaba.com Scraper

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need a Taobao account?

No. Nothing to register and no cookies to paste.

Can I search Taobao for a product name with this?

No. The category feed has no keyword parameter at all. The keyword suggestions scraper gives you what shoppers type, but not products.

Why did my run come back with fewer products than I asked for?

Because the category ran out. Each feed holds a finite pool and stops producing new products once you have seen them all.

Will a second run give me new products?

Mostly not. The pool is largely the same between runs, which is why productId is worth de-duplicating on.

Where does the US dollar price come from?

From the European Central Bank's reference rates. The ECB quotes both currencies against the euro, so the rate is its dollar rate divided by its yuan rate. Every row carries the rate and its date, so you can redo the sum or use a rate of your own.

Can I call it from code or connect it to an AI assistant?

Yes. The API tab has ready-made code for Python, JavaScript and the command line. For Claude, ChatGPT or another MCP client, connect https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,dami_studio/taobao-category-products-scraper. Either way the run happens on your Apify account at the same price.

Is scraping Taobao legal?

These are public listing pages with no account behind them. Apify's write-up on the legality of web scraping is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the categories you selected and the run ID. If you saw a TAOBAO_API_CHANGED row, say so, because it means Taobao changed something and it needs a fix here.