Drakes AU Grocery Product Scraper

Extract Drakes Australia products, store-specific prices, visible discounts, categories, product details, and live store metadata. Use the scraper for grocery price monitoring, local assortment research, competitor tracking, and automated retail data workflows.

This is an unofficial Actor and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Drakes.

Quick start

The default input performs a small live search against Drakes Online Findon:

{
  "operation": "search",
  "shop": "079",
  "query": "bananas",
  "limit": 10,
  "proxyMode": "direct"
}

Results are written to the default Dataset. OUTPUT contains the run status, available and published counts, proxy route, charge state, and actionable errors.

Supported operations

Operation	Required input	Useful optional input	Result
stores	None	query, limit	Live Drakes store and shopping-host metadata
search	query	shop, page, limit	Store-aware product search results
item	itemSlug or itemId	shop	One detailed product
categories	None	shop, topOnly, limit	Current category tree
category	categorySlug or categoryId	shop, page, limit	Products in one category

The Console displays the union of all fields. Inputs unrelated to the selected operation are ignored.

Store-aware data

Prices and assortment can vary by Drakes online store. Run stores before monitoring a new location instead of guessing shop codes:

{
  "operation": "stores",
  "query": "findon",
  "limit": 5
}

Store rows can include the shop code, catalogue URL, shopping URL, address, state, postcode, phone, and directions URL. Shop code 079 currently maps to Drakes Online Findon.

Product examples

Search:

{
  "operation": "search",
  "shop": "079",
  "query": "milk",
  "limit": 10
}

Category snapshot:

{
  "operation": "category",
  "shop": "079",
  "categorySlug": "fruit-vegetables",
  "limit": 10
}

Detailed product:

{
  "operation": "item",
  "shop": "079",
  "itemSlug": "bananas-cavendish"
}

Top-level category map:

{
  "operation": "categories",
  "shop": "079",
  "topOnly": true,
  "limit": 100
}

Ready-made Saved Tasks

• Banana Price & Assortment Monitor — collect a bounded store-aware search for recurring price and availability comparisons.
• Exact Product Price & Detail — retrieve one rich product record for enrichment or change detection.
• Fruit & Vegetables Category Snapshot — monitor a known category without publishing an unbounded page.
• Drakes Store Discovery — find live shop codes and location context before starting regional monitoring.

Duplicate a task and replace the query, product slug, category slug, shop, or limit with your own target.

Output fields

Product rows can include:

• unique_id, id, item_slug, name, brand, barcode, gtin
• source_url, image, images
• price, discount_price, price_info
• availability, description
• category, product_category, category_path
• store context in shop, shop_name, or attributes

Category and store operations return structured rows suited to CSV, Excel, Google Sheets, databases, and automation platforms. Empty optional fields are omitted where practical.

Proxy strategy

Direct access is the cheapest verified route and is the default.

• direct: no proxy; recommended
• auto: use the source-aware fallback strategy
• apify: use an Apify Proxy configuration
• custom: use user-provided proxy URLs

Datacenter, residential AU, and tested special Apify proxy groups also work, but they add no benefit while direct access remains healthy. Browser automation is not required.

Use with n8n or Make

A practical workflow is:

Drakes Actor → Dataset → n8n/Make → Google Sheets, Telegram, email, or CRM

An importable n8n example is included in examples/n8n-drakes-search-to-google-sheets.json.

Start a synchronous search through the API:

curl -X POST \
  "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/Na0FIK690t99CVcqq/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"operation":"search","shop":"079","query":"bananas","limit":10}'

For asynchronous workflows:

1. Start an Actor run.
2. Wait until its status is SUCCEEDED.
3. Read defaultDatasetId from the run.
4. Download Dataset items.
5. Compare price or availability with the previous snapshot and send changes to Sheets, Telegram, email, or your internal system.

Limitations

• Price, availability, and assortment reflect the selected public online store.
• Product and category slugs can change when the upstream catalogue changes.
• A result page can contain more products than requested; the Actor publishes only the bounded limit.
• Visible promotions are normalized when present, but there is no separate weekly-specials operation.
• Source HTML and protection rules can change over time.