Taobao Category Products Scraper: browse 淘宝 categories and get products as rows

Pick one or more of Taobao's 20 top-level categories and get the products back as a table: title in Chinese, price in CNY, image, product link, SKU id, leaf category id, seller id and shop id. No account, no cookies, nothing to install.

Two things to know before you start, because they decide whether this is the right purchase. There is no search box. Taobao's category feed has no keyword parameter, so you cannot ask it for "red shoes", only for a category. And the pool is finite: across all 20 categories together 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
Output	One row per product
Ceiling	5,000 products per run, but the whole catalogue is about 3,100 unique products
Account needed	None, and nothing to install
Price	$1.95 per 1,000 products, flat on every plan

🛒 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 rather than one after another. 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 come back with both the Chinese and English category names on them, so you can group without keeping a lookup table of your own.

📥 What you give it

{
  "categories": ["industrial", "home", "pets"],
  "maxItems": 200,
  "maxPagesPerCategory": 60
}

Field	Default	What it is
categories	box starts at industrial	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.
maxPagesPerCategory	60	How deep to page inside one category before moving on, 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	leave it alone	Optional, under Advanced. Only if you want the run to go out through a particular network of your own.

Run it with no categories selected and you get one labelled sample row and nothing else.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a recent run, kept in the original Chinese:

{
  "productId": "14694804727",
  "title": "整流二极管快恢复4007等各种型号",
  "price": 2.42,
  "currency": "CNY",
  "productUrl": "https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=14694804727",
  "imageUrl": "https://img.alicdn.com/bao/uploaded/i2/738263294/O1CN01XWMLM81aChmOpZuYi_!!...",
  "skuId": "3807680996276",
  "leafCategoryId": "50018814",
  "sellerId": "738263294",
  "shopId": "68071911",
  "shopUrl": "https://shop68071911.taobao.com",
  "promoBadgeImageUrl": "https://img.alicdn.com/imgextra/i1/O1CN01nRidmm1UAVxdcYMzF_!!...",
  "categoryId": "999999207",
  "category": "industrial",
  "categoryNameZh": "工业用品",
  "categoryNameEn": "Industrial supplies",
  "page": 0,
  "position": 1,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-20T19:16:52.902Z"
}

Field	What it is
productId	Taobao's own product id, and the key to dedupe 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.
skuId	The specific variant the feed is offering, not the whole product.
leafCategoryId	Taobao's deepest category for that product, which is finer than the 20 you picked from.
sellerId, shopId, shopUrl	Who is selling it and where their shop lives.
promoBadgeImageUrl	The promo badge image, when the listing carries one.
categoryNameZh	Empty on the two unlisted feeds, which have no published Chinese name.
page, position	Where the product sat in the feed when it was read.

🧾 Reading the output

Row	How to spot it	Billed
A product	It has a productId	yes
The sample row	_sample: true	no
A diagnostic	It carries an errorCode	no

There is no charged field on these rows. Product rows are the ones with a productId, and that is the filter to use.

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.
BLOCKED	Taobao refused the request for that category.
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.

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

▶️ How to run it

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. Start at 50 or so to see what the rows look like.
4. Open Depth and raise Maximum pages per category if you want a category drained rather than sampled.
5. Click Start, then download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$1.95 per 1,000 products. Flat on every Apify plan, with no volume tiers.

The sample row is not billed, 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.

💡 What people use it for

• Building a price reference for a category in CNY before sourcing, with leafCategoryId giving a finer grouping than the 20 top-level feeds.
• Pulling seller and shop ids for a category, then researching those shops separately.
• Seeing which products Taobao itself pushes into a category feed, which is not the same set as 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 the full price ladder, and not what you would pay after a shop coupon.
• Titles stay in Chinese. Nothing is translated.
• A big run can come back short. Taobao rate-limits hard, and a category it will not serve becomes an uncharged diagnostic row. Only delivered product rows are billed.

🧭 Which Taobao scraper do you need?

If you want	Use
Products from a chosen category	This one
Products from Taobao's own recommendation feed	Taobao Product Feed Scraper
The Chinese words shoppers actually type	Taobao Keyword Suggestions Scraper
Wholesale listings and prices on 1688	1688 Wholesale Scraper
Export suppliers and MOQ on Alibaba.com	Alibaba.com Scraper

❓ Questions people ask

Can I search for a product name? No. The category feed has no keyword parameter at all. The keyword scraper linked above 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 deduping on.

Why is categoryNameZh empty on some rows? Two of the 20 feeds are unlisted and carry no published Chinese name. They still return products.

Can I schedule it? Yes, though given how little the catalogue moves, a daily run will return mostly the same products.

Is this legal? These are public listing pages with no account behind them. Apify's write-up on scraping and the law 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 that one means Taobao changed something on their side and it needs a fix here.