Taobao & Tmall Product Scraper: Search, Category, Shop

What does Taobao Catalog Scraper do?

Built for cross-border sellers, dropshippers and sourcing agents who need to find products and supplier prices on Taobao and Tmall without reading Chinese. Type English keywords (translateKeywords turns them into Chinese for you), get prices in USD or EUR, and switch on onlyNewOrChangedPrices to receive only new products and price changes on every scheduled run.

Cost example: monitoring 5 categories x 200 products every week is 1,000 products, about $2 per week ($0.002 per product, no monthly fee). A one-off 50-product sourcing check costs about $0.10.

Quick start: 1) click Try for free and enter a keyword such as phone case; 2) set the currency to USD and turn on translate keywords; 3) click Start and download JSON, CSV or Excel. To monitor prices, save the run as a task, turn on only new or changed prices and add a weekly schedule.

Taobao Catalog Scraper collects Taobao and Tmall products by keyword, category or shop and returns them as clean, structured data: title, CNY price (plus HKD, TWD and an optional conversion to USD or 28 other currencies), promotion label, shop name and score, category IDs, image, selling points, review tags, Taobao's search ranking position and direct product URLs.

It reads only Taobao's public, crawler-facing catalogue at www.taobao.com/list/, the server-rendered pages Taobao publishes for search engines. Its robots.txt explicitly allows every crawler there. There is no login, no cookies, no browser and no slider solving, so runs are fast and cheap.

This is an unofficial tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Taobao, Tmall or Alibaba Group.

Why use Taobao Catalog Scraper?

• Product and market research: see what sells for a keyword, at which prices, from which shops and brands.
• Sourcing: shortlist suppliers by price, shop score and promotion, then open the product in one click.
• Price benchmarking: numeric CNY prices plus a same-day USD/EUR/KRW conversion from the European Central Bank.
• Rank tracking: searchRank is the product's position (1-40) in Taobao's own ranking for the keyword. Schedule a daily run to watch positions move.
• Shop monitoring: list a competitor's catalogue with its service and delivery scores.

More than 20 products per keyword. A Taobao catalogue page shows only 20-40 products and has no "next page", so a single query can never return more. This Actor widens coverage step by step and stops as soon as you have enough products:

1. the keyword page and its 40-product top-rated page;
2. brand refinements: <brand> <keyword> for up to 30 brands that Taobao itself lists for the keyword (e.g. 罗技 机械键盘);
3. attribute refinements: <value> <keyword> for attribute values Taobao lists (e.g. 青轴 机械键盘);
4. sort orders and automatic CNY price bands, only where Taobao honours these parameters for your proxy's region (it ignores them for US IPs, which Apify Proxy uses by default; the Actor detects this after one request).

Every product is returned once (de-duplicated by item ID) and foundBy tells you which step found it. A typical keyword yields a few hundred to about 1,000 unique products. Any scraper of this public catalogue faces the same 20-40-per-page limit; this Actor is upfront about it.

How to scrape Taobao products

1. Enter one or more keywords. Chinese works best (机械键盘, 蓝牙耳机, 连衣裙). Common English words such as keyboard or iphone case work too, but many English phrases have no catalogue page.
2. Optionally add category IDs or shop IDs (any categoryId / shopId from a previous run).
3. Set Max products per query and, if you like, a CNY price range and a currency to convert to.
4. Click Start and download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or fetch it via the API.

Input

Field	Default	Description
keywords	["机械键盘"]	Search keywords or www.taobao.com/list/product/... URLs
categoryIds	–	Category IDs or /list/category/<id>.htm URLs
shopIds	–	Shop IDs, /list/dianpu/<id>.htm or shop<id>.taobao.com URLs
maxItemsPerQuery	100	Unique products per keyword, category or shop
refineByBrand	true	Widen keyword coverage with <brand> <keyword>
refineByAttribute	true	Widen keyword coverage with <attribute value> <keyword>
splitByPriceBands	true	Sort orders and price bands where Taobao honours them (not on US IPs)
minPrice / maxPrice	–	CNY price filter (out-of-range products are dropped, not charged)
convertPricesTo	USD	Currency for priceConverted (ECB rate) or NONE
deduplicateAcrossQueries	true	Return a product only once per run
translateKeywords	false	Search English keywords such as phone case in Chinese (built-in dictionary, free)
trackPriceChanges	false	Remember prices between runs and add priceStatus, previousPrice, priceChange ...
onlyNewOrChangedPrices	false	Return (and charge) only new or price-changed products - for scheduled monitoring
priceHistoryStoreName	taobao-price-history	Named key-value store holding the price history; one per monitoring project
proxyConfiguration	Apify Proxy	Datacenter proxy; the IP rotates every 30 requests and after any block

{
  "keywords": ["机械键盘", "蓝牙耳机"],
  "maxItemsPerQuery": 500,
  "minPrice": 50,
  "convertPricesTo": "USD"
}

Quick API example

Minimal input (also the prefill style used in the Apify Console):

{"keywords": ["机械键盘"], "maxItemsPerQuery": 50}

Run synchronously and get the dataset items in one call (replace <TOKEN> with your Apify API token):

POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/kyungminlee~taobao-catalog-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<TOKEN>
Content-Type: application/json
{"keywords": ["机械键盘"], "maxItemsPerQuery": 50}

AI agents using the Apify MCP server can call this Actor as kyungminlee/taobao-catalog-scraper with the same JSON input.

Output

{
  "itemId": "991372610509",
  "title": "机械手感有线静音电脑键盘鼠标套装笔记本游戏电竞外设三件套办公",
  "titleEn": null,
  "price": 34.8,
  "currency": "CNY",
  "priceConverted": 5.19,
  "convertedCurrency": "USD",
  "priceHkd": 41.16,
  "priceTwd": 166.56,
  "promotionLabel": "超级立减活动价",
  "freeShipping": false,
  "areaLimited": false,
  "shopId": "465965982",
  "shopName": "天天特卖工厂",
  "shopUrl": "https://www.taobao.com/list/dianpu/465965982.htm",
  "descriptionMatchScore": 4.75,
  "shopServiceScore": null,
  "shopDeliveryScore": null,
  "categoryId": "110210",
  "rootCategoryId": "11",
  "image": "https://img.alicdn.com/imgextra/i3/3937219703/O1CN01OXYoId2LY28CBaSC1_!!3937219703-2-C2M.png",
  "sellingPoints": [],
  "reviewTags": [],
  "url": "https://www.taobao.com/list/item/991372610509.htm",
  "taobaoUrl": "https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=991372610509",
  "query": "机械键盘",
  "queryType": "keyword",
  "queryTotalResults": 18814,
  "searchRank": 1,
  "foundBy": "default",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-07T00:52:07Z"
}

Every row also has images (all catalogue image URLs, usually one) and categoryPath (Taobao's category breadcrumb in Chinese for keyword and category queries, null for shops). With the optional features on, rows add searchedKeyword (translation) and the price-tracking fields shown under Data fields.

A run summary is saved as SUMMARY in the run's key-value store at no extra cost. It holds requests, products per step, the brands Taobao lists for each keyword with their listing counts, the attribute values, and the exchange rate used.

Data fields

Field	Description
itemId, url, taobaoUrl	Stable numeric item ID, public catalogue page, canonical Taobao product page
title, titleEn	Original Chinese title; titleEn only when Taobao itself publishes an English title (rare)
price, currency	Current price in yuan (CNY) as a number (promotional price when a promotion runs)
priceConverted, convertedCurrency	price converted with the ECB daily reference rate
priceHkd, priceTwd	Taobao's own HKD and TWD prices
promotionLabel, freeShipping, areaLimited	Promotion name, shipping flags
shopId, shopName, shopUrl	Seller shop (no personal seller account data)
descriptionMatchScore, shopServiceScore, shopDeliveryScore	Shop scores (1-5); service/delivery only for shop queries
categoryId, rootCategoryId	Taobao category IDs (usable as categoryIds input)
image, sellingPoints, reviewTags	Main image, seller highlights, review tag counts when published
images, categoryPath	All catalogue image URLs of the product; category breadcrumb (Chinese) of the query
searchedKeyword	Only with translateKeywords: the Chinese keyword actually searched (null if the keyword was used as typed)
priceStatus, previousPrice, priceChange, priceChangePct, firstSeenAt, priceChangedAt	Only with trackPriceChanges: new / changed / unchanged against the last tracked run, the previous different price, the CNY and percent change, and when the product was first seen and its price last changed
query, queryType, queryTotalResults	What found the product and how many listings Taobao reports for it
searchRank, foundBy	Position (1-40) in Taobao's ranking for the query (empty for products found by refinements) and the coverage step that found the product

English keywords and price monitoring

• English keywords: turn on translateKeywords and phone case, wireless earphones or men's t-shirt are searched as 手机壳, 无线耳机 and 男士t恤 (Taobao catalogue pages are lowercase; if a page does not exist the Actor tries simpler variants such as iphone 手机壳 before using your keyword as typed). The offline dictionary covers a few hundred common product words and brand names; keywords with unknown words are searched as typed, and the Chinese term used is shown in searchedKeyword.
• Price monitoring: turn on trackPriceChanges and schedule the same input daily or weekly. The Actor keeps each product's last price in a key-value store in your own account (priceHistoryStoreName) and flags every row as new, changed or unchanged with the change in yuan and percent. Add onlyNewOrChangedPrices and you pay only for new and re-priced products. The first tracked run returns everything as new. In this mode the Actor keeps widening the keyword until it has found your maximum number of new or changed products, so use a realistic limit.

Pricing

Pay per result: $2.00 per 1,000 products ($0.002 per product). No start fee, no monthly fee. Only products written to the dataset are charged. Duplicates, products outside your price filter and failed requests cost nothing. The run stops cleanly when your maximum charge is reached.

Tips

• Use a store name unique to this Actor: priceHistoryStoreName must be a named key-value store that this Actor created itself. If a store with that name already exists in your account but was created by another Actor or manually, this Actor may not use it and the run ends with an input-problem message (nothing is charged). Keep the default name or pick a new one.

• No-code automation: a ready-to-import n8n workflow runs this Actor on a schedule and sends daily price-change alerts by email (all templates).

• Use Chinese keywords. Taobao is a Chinese catalogue and English keywords match far fewer products.

• 100-500 products per keyword is the sweet spot. Higher limits go deeper into niche brands and attribute values; turn the refinements off if you only want the products Taobao ranks for the exact keyword.

• Feed categoryId or shopId values from one run into the next run to drill down.

• English keywords: enable translateKeywords, or search the Chinese word yourself.

• For rank tracking, schedule the same keywords daily with maxItemsPerQuery 40 and refinements off, then compare searchRank.

• Categories return about 20 products and shops up to 60 per run on Apify's default (US) proxy. For broader coverage, search the category's product type as a keyword.

• Marketplace data for other countries: Korea (Naver Shopping), Turkey (Trendyol), Russia (Wildberries).

FAQ

Why are there no SKUs, stock levels, full image galleries or full reviews? Those live on Taobao's logged-in product pages and app APIs, which this Actor deliberately does not touch. It returns only what the public catalogue shows.

Can I tell Tmall products from Taobao products? Not reliably: the public catalogue lists both together without a platform label. taobaoUrl opens either kind (Taobao may ask you to sign in to view it).

Why can price differ from the product page? The catalogue shows the current (often promotional) price of the default variant. Prices of other variants can be higher. Some sellers use placeholder prices such as 99999 CNY; filter them with maxPrice.

Do I need a Taobao account or proxies? No account. Apify's datacenter proxy is enabled by default and usually enough.

Is it legal? The Actor only reads pages Taobao publishes for crawlers and allows in its robots.txt, at a polite rate, and it does not collect personal data. You are responsible for how you use the data. This unofficial tool is not affiliated with Taobao, Tmall or Alibaba Group.

Something broke? Taobao can change its catalogue without notice. Open an issue with your input and we will look at it quickly.