Meituan + Dianping Scraper — Shops, Deals & Reviews

Export data from Meituan (China's #1 local services platform) and Dianping (China's Yelp — same company, shared database) as JSON, CSV or Excel. Search by keyword and city, pull full shop details, collect group-buy deals (套餐) — without an API key, a Chinese business entity, or a local agency.

Meituan serves 770M+ annual transacting users. Together with Dianping it owns the Chinese local-services discovery funnel — restaurants, beauty, karaoke, gyms, hotels, delivery. The platform is almost completely closed to outsiders: no public API, cryptographically-signed web endpoints, and official access requires a mainland Chinese business license. This Actor is the data layer without any of that.

---

Quick start (3 minutes)

1. Grab a cookie — open https://www.meituan.com/ in your browser, solve any slider captcha, press F12 → Console, run copy(document.cookie).
2. Click "Try for free" at the top of this page (or paste the cookie into the cookie field of a run).
3. Hit "Start" — results appear in the Dataset tab within ~45 seconds.

Minimal input that works:

{
  "searchKeywords": ["火锅"],
  "city": "北京",
  "cookie": "token=...; _lxsdk_cuid=...;",
  "maxItems": 20
}

---

What you can do with it

You are	You use it to
A franchise brand	Benchmark competitor shops in every target city — ratings, prices, deals, review counts
A market researcher	Map the entire supply side of a vertical (coffee shops in Shanghai, hotpot in Chengdu)
A commercial real estate team	Score foot-traffic indicators by neighbourhood using shop density + ratings
A food / beverage buyer	Find top-rated independent shops by category to source trends from
A finance / M&A team	Due diligence on local chains — count of outlets, deal pricing, review velocity

---

Three ways to use it

1 · Search by keyword in a city

{
  "searchKeywords": ["火锅", "咖啡"],
  "city": "北京",
  "cookie": "...",
  "maxItems": 300,
  "sort": "most_sold",
  "fetchShopDetails": true,
  "maxDealsPerShop": 10
}

2 · Deep-scrape specific shops

{
  "shopUrls": [
    "https://www.meituan.com/meishi/12345678/"
  ],
  "city": "北京",
  "cookie": "...",
  "maxDealsPerShop": 50
}

3 · Multi-city benchmark

{
  "searchKeywords": ["海底捞"],
  "city": "上海",
  "cookie": "...",
  "maxItems": 50,
  "sort": "rating"
}

Rerun with "city": "广州", "city": "成都", etc. The cityId is included on every output record so results from multiple runs merge cleanly.

---

Input reference

Field	Default	Notes
searchKeywords	[]	Chinese works — Pinyin / English rarely do
city	"北京"	Chinese city name or raw cityId. Supported cities below
shopUrls	[]	https://www.meituan.com/meishi/<shopId>/
cookie	""	Required in practice. See Cookie walkthrough
maxItems	100	Hard cap. You only pay for records actually delivered
sort	default	default / distance / rating / most_sold / lowest_price
fetchShopDetails	false	Open each shop for address, hours, categoryTree, photos
maxDealsPerShop	0	Set > 0 to also pull group-buy deals (套餐)
proxyConfiguration	{useApifyProxy: true, apifyProxyGroups: ["RESIDENTIAL"]}	CN proxy strongly recommended

---

Cookie walkthrough

1. Open https://www.meituan.com/ in Chrome / Edge / Firefox
2. If a slider captcha appears, solve it (otherwise the cookie is poisoned)
3. Press F12 → Developer Tools opens
4. Click the "Console" tab
5. Paste this and press Enter:
      copy(document.cookie)
6. Clipboard now holds the cookie string
7. Paste into the "cookie" field of the Actor input

The cookie looks like:

token=xxx; _lxsdk_cuid=xxx; _lxsdk_s=xxx; __mta=xxx; _hc.v=xxx; ...

You do not have to log in — Meituan serves anonymous users too — but logged-in cookies return more results and survive longer. For Dianping shop pages, Dianping cookies work interchangeably (same backend).

Cookies decay fast. Expect to refresh weekly, sometimes daily under heavy use.

---

CN proxy — required in practice

Meituan blocks or captcha-walls most non-CN IPs. The Actor usually returns nothing or hits a slider wall without a CN residential proxy.

"proxyConfiguration": {
  "useApifyProxy": true,
  "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"],
  "apifyProxyCountry": "CN"
}

Bring-your-own:

"proxyConfiguration": {
  "proxyUrls": ["http://user:pass@cn-proxy.example.com:8080"]
}

---

Supported cities

Chinese city names resolved automatically to Meituan cityIds:

北京(1)   上海(10)   广州(20)   深圳(30)   杭州(50)   成都(59)   武汉(42)
南京(55)  西安(56)   重庆(45)   天津(40)   苏州(51)   青岛(61)   长沙(70)
郑州(71)  大连(83)   厦门(110)  宁波(54)   合肥(88)   济南(60)   沈阳(80)
昆明(160) 福州(101)  无锡(52)

For any other city, pass the raw numeric cityId as the city input value (e.g. "city": "289"). Find cityIds by opening meituan.com, picking the city from the top-left city switcher, and reading the cityId from the URL or page JS.

---

Output

Each record is a flat JSON object. Chinese counts like 1.2w / 3.4万 / 2亿 are normalised to numbers.

Shop (from search)

{
  "source": "search",
  "searchKeyword": "火锅",
  "searchCity": "北京",
  "shopId": "12345678",
  "name": "海底捞火锅 (国贸店)",
  "shopUrl": "https://www.meituan.com/meishi/12345678/",
  "address": "朝阳区建国路88号SOHO现代城",
  "phone": "010-12345678",
  "cityId": 1,
  "areaName": "国贸",
  "category": "火锅",
  "avgPrice": 128.0,
  "avgScore": 4.8,
  "allCommentNum": 12000,
  "latitude": 39.9,
  "longitude": 116.46,
  "imageUrl": "https://img.meituan.net/x.jpg",
  "dealsCount": 15,
  "lowestPrice": 69.0
}

Shop detail (with fetchShopDetails: true)

Adds cityName, categoryTree[], openTime, introduction, photos[].

Deal (套餐)

{
  "source": "deal",
  "shopId": "12345678",
  "dealId": "999888777",
  "dealUrl": "https://www.meituan.com/deal/999888777.html",
  "title": "4人经典套餐",
  "subtitle": "周末可用 · 免预约",
  "price": 388.0,
  "originalPrice": 568.0,
  "soldCount": 15000,
  "imageUrl": "https://img.meituan.net/deal.jpg"
}

---

Pricing

Pay-per-event — you are only charged for records actually delivered.

Event	Price (USD)	What triggers it
apify-actor-start	$0.005	Once per run (per GB RAM, min 1)
poi-scraped	$0.0015	Each shop in search results
shop-detail-scraped	$0.004	Each full shop profile
deal-scraped	$0.0004	Each group-buy deal

Cost estimator

Job	Setting	Approx cost
City-wide hotpot survey	200 shops in 北京	$0.31
Full category sweep	1 000 shops + full details + 10 deals each	$9.50
Multi-city brand audit	50 shops × 10 cities	$0.76
Monthly tracker	500 shops/day for 30 days	$22.50 / month

Platform margin: Apify takes 20%, you keep 80%. Prices above are what you pay.

---

Common errors

Error / symptom	Cause	Fix
No POIs captured for 'X'	Captcha wall + no CN proxy	Enable CN residential proxy and re-copy cookie after solving the slider
Only a handful of shops when hundreds exist	Rate-limited by IP	Spread runs out, add bring-your-own proxy pool
Captcha page screenshots	IP burned	Switch Apify proxy group, wait 10 min
Wrong city results	City not in list	Pass numeric cityId instead of name
avgPrice is 0 for many shops	Meituan hides price for certain categories	Expected — not every POI exposes price
Deals empty but shop exists	Shop has no group-buy deals right now	Expected — check dealsCount in the search record

---

Why this exists

Meituan's web APIs are signed with _token / __mta / _lxsdk headers derived from obfuscated page JS that changes without notice. Re-implementing the signature is a losing maintenance race.

Instead the Actor opens a real Chromium page in the Apify runtime, lets the page's own JS make the real signed calls, and reads JSON off the wire. Meituan can rotate signatures all they want — the browser catches up for us.

---

Known limits

• Cookies expire fast. Users are expected to refresh their own cookie.
• Slider captcha mid-run returns zero further records. Rerun with a fresh cookie.
• Dianping web is being merged into Meituan — some endpoint paths shift without notice.
• No proxy / non-CN proxy → mostly empty.
• Not every POI exposes avgPrice or allCommentNum; defensive defaults kick in.
• This is a scraper, not a CRM. Data is read-only, best-effort.

---

Changelog

• 0.1.1 · Initial public release