MerchantCircle US Local Business Directory Scraper

Extract local business leads from MerchantCircle, a US small-business directory covering millions of listings city by city. Returns name, phone, address, description, premium-listing status, and profile URL for every business on a city's directory page — filterable by state, city, and 15 top-level business categories.

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MerchantCircle Scraper Features

• Pulls every business on a city's directory page — name, phone, address, and description, not just a name and a link.
• Paginates automatically. Point it at a city and it keeps going until the directory runs out.
• Filters by category — autos, legal & financial, real estate, food & dining, and 11 others — so you get leads in the vertical you actually sell to.
• Flags premium/sponsored listings separately from organic ones, which tells you who's already paying to stand out in that market.
• Runs multiple cities and categories in a single job. Feed it a list, get back one combined dataset.

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Who Uses Local Business Directory Data?

• Sales and lead-gen teams — build city-by-city prospect lists with phone numbers already attached.
• Marketing agencies — find businesses in a specific category and metro to pitch services to.
• Market researchers — gauge business density and premium-listing adoption by city or category.
• Franchise and territory planners — scope competitor and vendor density before entering a market.
• Data vendors — merge MerchantCircle records into a broader business-directory dataset.

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How MerchantCircle Scraper Works

1. Give it one or more locations as "City, ST" strings, and optionally one or more categories.
2. It opens each location's directory page (or each location-category combination, if you selected categories) and extracts every business card on it.
3. It keeps turning pages until the location's directory is exhausted or your maxItems cap is hit.
4. You get back a flat dataset — one row per business, ready to filter, dedupe, or load straight into a CRM.

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Input

{
  "locations": ["Chicago, IL", "Los Angeles, CA"],
  "categories": ["legal-and-financial"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

Field	Type	Default	Description
locations	array	["Chicago, IL"]	US city/state combinations to crawl, one per entry, formatted "City, ST". Each location's full business directory is paginated in full.
categories	array	[]	Optional business categories to filter by (see table below). Leave empty to crawl each location's general top-businesses page instead — output records then carry a null category.
maxItems	integer	15	Maximum number of business records to return across all locations and categories combined.
resumeCursor	string	—	Cursor from a previous run's Output. Leave empty for a fresh crawl.

Available categories: autos, home-and-garden, legal-and-financial, education, professional-services, real-estate, health-and-beauty, food-and-dining, business-to-business, community, electronics, entertainment-and-arts, recreation, retail-shopping, travel-and-lodging.

Filtering to one category across several cities

{
  "locations": ["Chicago, IL", "Austin, TX", "Denver, CO"],
  "categories": ["real-estate"],
  "maxItems": 200
}

Resuming a large crawl

Every run emits a resumeCursor in its Output. If a large crawl stops before it finishes — because it hit maxItems, your spend cap (maxTotalChargeUsd), or was aborted — start a new run with the same input plus that resumeCursor to continue from where it left off. The crawl resumes from the queued work the previous run didn't reach.

• You are not re-charged for records the earlier run already delivered.
• Resume within your account's run-retention window — on the free tier, roughly your 10 most recent runs. Once the source run is pruned, its resumeCursor is no longer valid.
• resumeCursor is opaque — supply it unmodified.

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MerchantCircle Scraper Output Fields

{
  "business_name": "Gregory K. Stern, P.C.",
  "phone": "3124271558",
  "address": "53 W Jackson Blvd #1442, Chicago, IL, 60604",
  "city": "Chicago",
  "state": "IL",
  "description": "Our attorneys will assist you in exploring Chapter 7, Chapter 11 and Chapter 13 options as well as various bankruptcy alternatives...",
  "category": "legal-and-financial",
  "is_premium": true,
  "profile_url": "https://www.merchantcircle.com/gregory-k-stern-pc2-chicago-il",
  "listing_url": "https://www.merchantcircle.com/il-chicago/legal-and-financial"
}

Field	Type	Description
business_name	string	Business name
phone	string	Phone number as listed
address	string	Full street address, formatted street, city, state zip
city	string	City
state	string	US state abbreviation
description	string	Business description as shown on the listing card
category	string | null	Category the record was crawled under — only set when categories is used; null on a general location crawl
is_premium	boolean	True when MerchantCircle marks the listing as a premium/sponsored placement
profile_url	string	URL of the business's own MerchantCircle profile page
listing_url	string	URL of the directory page this record was scraped from

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FAQ

How do I scrape MerchantCircle business listings?

MerchantCircle Scraper needs no account or API key. Give it a city and state — "Chicago, IL" works — and it returns every business on that city's directory page, paginated automatically.

Can I filter by business category?

Yes. Pass one or more of the 15 category slugs in categories (see the Input table above), and every returned record is tagged with the category it came from. Leave it empty to get the general mixed directory instead.

Can I scrape multiple cities in one run?

Yes. locations takes an array, so a single run can cover as many cities as you want — results come back as one combined dataset.

What happens if I misspell a city or state?

That location is skipped and logged as a warning; the run continues with the rest of your locations. Nothing fails silently — check the run log for which entries didn't resolve.

How much does MerchantCircle Scraper cost to run?

Pay-per-event pricing: a small per-run fee plus a per-record charge. No subscription.

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Need More Features?

Need custom fields, a different output shape, or another directory added? File an issue or get in touch.

Why Use MerchantCircle Scraper?

• Full directory coverage — not a top-10 preview. It paginates every city's listings until the directory runs out.
• Category-aware — tag results by vertical instead of sorting a mixed bag of businesses yourself afterward.
• Clean, flat JSON — one row per business, consistent field names, ready for a CRM import or a spreadsheet without cleanup.