Hoogvliet Category Scraper — Map the Full Hoogvliet.com Category Tree

Discover Hoogvliet's entire category structure (hoogvliet.com) as clean, structured JSON or CSV: every category and subcategory with its name, the link you need to address it, its parent category, its depth in the tree, and a flag telling you whether it holds products — one tidy record per category node.

This is the map of the store, not the products on the shelves. The output is the ideal input for the Hoogvliet Product Scraper: pipe the category links straight in and let it pull the products. Use it on its own to analyze site structure, or as the first step of a two-stage pipeline. No login, no HTML wrangling — and you are never billed for failed requests.

Good to know: this Actor runs through a Dutch residential proxy — already pre-selected in the input, just keep it enabled.

Why this Actor

• The whole tree in one run. Every node Hoogvliet exposes — top-level departments down to the deepest subcategories — flattened into one record per category. No clicking through menus.
• The exact link you need to fetch products. Bare category ids simply 404. Each record carries the working uri — the single thing the product scraper needs to read a category's products.
• Know which categories actually hold products. Every record has a hasOnlineProducts flag, so you can feed the product scraper only the leaves that carry products instead of crawling the whole tree blindly.
• Reconstruct the hierarchy. parentId and level let you rebuild the tree exactly — breadcrumbs, navigation, a category picker, or a coverage report.
• The perfect companion to the product scraper. Run this once to get the map, then drive the Hoogvliet Product Scraper with the links — or schedule it to catch new categories as Hoogvliet adds them.
• You never pay for failures. Timeouts and other transient errors are reported in the run summary — not written to your dataset and not billed.
• Fast and browserless. No headless browser — so a full run finishes in seconds and compute stays minimal.

Problems this Actor solves

What data you get

Each category node becomes one dataset record:

Example output

{
  "id": "100495",
  "externalId": "100495",
  "name": "Verse zuivel",
  "uri": "org-webshop-Site/-/categories/schappen/100/100495",
  "parentId": "100",
  "level": 1,
  "hasOnlineProducts": true,        // a leaf — feed this link to the product scraper
  "hasOnlineSubCategories": false,
  "categoryUrl": "https://www.hoogvliet.com/...&/categories/schappen/100/100495",
  "source": "hoogvliet-category-scraper",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-06-18T08:30:00+00:00"
}

Categories or subtrees that could not be fetched are not written to the dataset (and never billed). They are listed in the run's SUMMARY record in the key-value store —

{ "failures": [ { "input": "…", "source": "hoogvliet-category-scraper", "error": "…" } ] }

How to use it (60 seconds)

1. Click Try for free / Start.
2. Choose what to map:
   • The whole tree (default): leave Category URIs empty to emit every category in the entire tree.
   • A subtree: add one full category URI per line under Category URIs (e.g. org-webshop-Site/-/categories/schappen/100) to emit only those categories and everything beneath them.
3. Keep the Dutch residential proxy enabled (required — see above).
4. Click Save & Start. Download results as JSON, CSV, Excel, or via API from the Dataset tab; check Key-value store → SUMMARY for run totals and any failed requests.
5. Next step: copy the uri values (filter on hasOnlineProducts if you only want product-bearing ones) and paste them into the Hoogvliet Product Scraper.

Input reference

Pricing — what a run costs

This Actor uses transparent pay-per-event pricing with a built-in volume discount: a small Actor-start fee, a fixed price per category record for the first results of a run, and a cheaper rate for every result beyond a high threshold. No subscription, no minimums, and failures are never charged. The exact per-result rate is shown on the Actor's Pricing tab.

• A category map is small and cheap. Hoogvliet's whole tree is a few hundred categories, so a full run is a tiny, predictable cost — and it is the input that unlocks the much larger product scrape.
• Failed requests are free. Timeouts and other transient errors are reported in the summary, never billed.
• Bigger runs cost less per item. The volume-discount tier resets per run (though most category runs stay well under it).
• Try it free: an Apify free account includes $5 of monthly platform credit — more than enough to map the tree before paying anything.
• Stay in control: set Max items and Apify's maximum charge per run; the Actor stops gracefully at your cap, keeping everything already scraped.

Compared to the alternatives

Integrate the data

• Feed the Hoogvliet Product Scraper (the main use case). Run this Actor, take the uri field from each record (optionally filter on hasOnlineProducts == true to scrape only product-bearing categories), and pass those URIs as the category input to the Hoogvliet Product Scraper. That two- stage pipeline — map the tree, then scrape the products — is exactly what these two Actors are designed for.
• Exports: JSON, CSV, Excel, XML from the Dataset tab — or fetch programmatically:

  GET https://api.apify.com/v2/datasets/{datasetId}/items?format=json
  

• Run on a schedule: use Apify Schedules to refresh the category map periodically, and webhooks to push finished runs into your pipeline (or to trigger the product scraper automatically).
• From code: call the Actor with the Apify API or SDKs (Python / JavaScript) and read the dataset when the run finishes.
• Run summary: every run writes a SUMMARY record (key-value store) with totals, successes, failures, and billing counts — ideal for monitoring automated pipelines.

FAQ

Is this the product scraper? No — this Actor maps the category tree (one record per category). To get the products themselves, use its companion, the Hoogvliet Product Scraper, and feed it the category URIs this Actor produces.

Do I need a Hoogvliet account or API key? No. There is no login.

Why is a Dutch proxy required? The Actor ships with a Dutch residential proxy pre-selected; keep it on. Without it, requests are blocked and the run returns no categories (the block is reported in SUMMARY).

Why can't I just use a category id? Bare category ids return 404. That is exactly why this Actor exists — it captures the working uri for every category so you don't have to.

What does hasOnlineProducts mean? It is true when the category actually holds products. Filter on it to feed the product scraper only the leaves that have something to scrape.

Does the output include every category or only the ones with products? Every node in the tree — including parent/department categories that hold only subcategories. The hasOnlineProducts and hasOnlineSubCategories flags let you filter to whatever you need.

How fresh is the data? Each run fetches the live tree, so you get exactly Hoogvliet's current category structure. Schedule the Actor to catch new or renamed categories.

What formats can I export? JSON, CSV, Excel, XML — from the Console or via the Apify API.

Related Actors

• Hoogvliet Product Scraper — its companion (run this one first). This Category Scraper is stage one of a two-stage pipeline: run it to map the tree, then feed the uri of each category (filter on hasOnlineProducts == true to scrape only product-bearing leaves) into the Hoogvliet Product Scraper to pull the actual products, prices, and promotions. Map the store, then scrape the shelves.
• The wider Dutch supermarket family. Product scrapers for every major Dutch chain — Albert Heijn, Lidl, Plus, Dirk van den Broek, and DekaMarkt Product Scrapers — plus the Lidl Category Scraper, the other category-tree mapper (same map-then-scrape pairing as Hoogvliet's two Actors).
• Same clean schema and pay-per-event billing across every Dutch chain — mix and match for full market coverage, and you are never billed for failures on any of them.

Disclaimer

This Actor is intended for personal and research use. You are responsible for ensuring your use complies with Hoogvliet's terms and applicable law. Please scrape responsibly — keep concurrency moderate and delays reasonable. This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Hoogvliet.