MachineryTrader Equipment Scraper

---

🎯 What this scrapes

MachineryTrader.com is the largest US heavy-equipment marketplace, listing hundreds of thousands of excavators, cranes, dozers, loaders, and other machines for sale. It publishes no public API. This Actor walks its search-results pages by keywords and/or manufacturer, pulling every listing card's title, manufacturer, category, price (or "Call for Price"), meter hours, model year, location, seller, phone, and listing URL — paginated up to whatever maxItems / maxPages cap you set.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🛡️ We rotate browser fingerprints (curl-cffi impersonation — Chrome / Firefox / Safari) so the target sees real-browser TLS, not Python.
• 🌐 We rotate residential proxies through Apify Proxy on every block — fresh session_id, fresh exit IP, pinned to the US.
• 🔁 We retry with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 5xx and honour Retry-After. Up to 5 attempts per page.
• 🧱 We back off when the target rate-limits. Partial successes surface with a clear status message; we never silently return empty datasets.
• 🧊 We keep the dataset clean — Pydantic-validated rows, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable listing IDs.
• 💰 You pay only for results that land. No data → no charge beyond the small actor-start warm-up fee.

💡 Use cases

• Dealer inventory monitoring — track new listings and price changes for a manufacturer or keyword across runs.
• Market research — benchmark asking prices by category, manufacturer, year, and hours across the used heavy-equipment market.
• Fleet buyer sourcing — build a shortlist of machines matching a keyword search, with seller contact info attached.
• Price-trend datasets — feed structured listing data into your own valuation or comp-analysis models.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Set keywords and/or manufacturer — most fields have sensible defaults.
3. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
4. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
keywords	string	no	"excavator"	Free-text search term, maps to Keywords=.
manufacturer	string	no	null	Manufacturer filter, maps to Manufacturer= (e.g. "CATERPILLAR").
maxItems	integer	no	150	Total rows to collect across pages, across the whole run.
maxPages	integer	no	6	Safety valve on page count; pagination stops at whichever of maxItems/maxPages is hit first.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{"useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"], "apifyProxyCountry": "US"}	Standard Apify proxy editor, pinned to RESIDENTIAL + US.

Example input

{
  "keywords": "excavator",
  "manufacturer": null,
  "maxItems": 150,
  "maxPages": 6,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"],
    "apifyProxyCountry": "US"
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
listing_id	string	Listing ID from the card wrapper.
title	string	Listing title, e.g. "2015 GROVE GHC130".
manufacturer	string	Equipment manufacturer / brand.
category	string	Equipment category.
price	integer | null	Asking price in whole currency units. null for "Call for Price".
currency	string	ISO-4217 currency code, e.g. "USD".
hours	integer | null	Recorded meter hours, when published.
year	integer | null	Model year.
location	string	Listing location.
seller	string	Seller / dealer name.
phone	string | null	Seller phone number, when published.
url	string	Absolute URL to the listing detail page.
scraped_at	string	ISO-8601 UTC timestamp of the fetch.

Example output

{
  "listing_id": "258197815",
  "title": "2015 GROVE GHC130",
  "manufacturer": "GROVE",
  "category": "Telescopic Boom Crawler Cranes",
  "price": 725000,
  "currency": "USD",
  "hours": 9930,
  "year": 2015,
  "location": "Ottsville, Pennsylvania",
  "seller": "PKF-MARK III INC",
  "phone": "+17243827465",
  "url": "https://www.machinerytrader.com/listing/for-sale/258197815/2015-grove-ghc130",
  "scraped_at": "2026-09-18T14:32:07Z"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.20	One-off warm-up charge per run
result-scraped	$0.004	Charged once per listing row pushed to the dataset

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $4.20. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account free trial credit.

🚧 Limitations

Search cards carry the fields above but not full detail-page specs (photo galleries, financing calculators, extended spec sheets) — that's out of scope for v1. There is no category-facet filter in this version; only keywords and manufacturer are supported. "Call for Price" listings return price: null by design, and non-metered equipment returns hours: null.

❓ FAQ

Do I need a MachineryTrader account or API key?

No. MachineryTrader publishes no public API. This Actor scrapes the public search-results pages.

Can I filter by equipment category?

Not in this version — see Limitations. Use keywords (e.g. "crane", "dozer") to narrow results instead.

Why did my run return fewer rows than maxItems?

Either the search ran out of matching listings before hitting your cap, or a page hit a rate limit and the run reported a partial result rather than failing outright — check the run's status message.

What currency are prices in?

Whichever currency the listing publishes — almost always USD for MachineryTrader.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

---