AutoTrader.co.za Scraper — South Africa Cars, Prices & Specs

Scrape AutoTrader.co.za, South Africa's largest car marketplace, in bulk — no login, no API key, no browser. Point the Actor at any category or result page and it walks the pages, parses every card into flat, sortable columns, and saves rows as it goes.

17 columns per row · thousands of rows per run · numeric prices, not strings · JSON, CSV, Excel or API · pay only for the rows you keep.

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Why this AutoTrader.co.za scraper

AutoTrader.co.za publishes everything a buyer needs on the result page — but as prose, inside a card, behind pagination. Reading it at any useful scale by hand is not realistic, and copy-paste gives you text where you need numbers.

This Actor turns those pages into a table. price is a number, not a formatted string. Location, seller and vehicle specs are their own columns instead of one blob. That is the difference between data you can pivot on and data you have to clean first.

It is built on the same engine as the rest of this fleet, which means three things you only notice when they are missing:

• It respects the clock. Every run carries a time budget and saves rows continuously, so a slow page never costs you the whole run.
• One bad page does not end the crawl. An unreachable page is retried, then skipped and logged — not treated as the end of the listing.
• It says what it did. Row counts, skipped pages and stop reasons all appear in the log, so a short run is always explainable.

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What you get

Used car price intelligence for South Africa

AutoTrader.co.za is the reference site for car buyers in SA. price is numeric in ZAR, make and model come from the URL structure (not flaky CSS), and mileage is parsed as displayed — ready for analysis without cleaning.

Dealer inventory monitoring

Track which dealers list what, how much they charge, and how long their stock sits. dealerName plus listingId gives you a per-dealer inventory snapshot you can diff daily.

Vehicle specification analysis

fuel, transmission, condition, and variant are separate columns, so you can pivot on any spec dimension — electric vs petrol, automatic vs manual, new vs used — without parsing text.

Lead generation for auto services

Filter by make, model, and mileage to find owners of specific vehicles likely to need parts, insurance, or servicing. Schedule daily for a continuous stream.

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Input

Field	Type	What it does
startUrl	string	Any AutoTrader.co.za category or result URL. The Actor paginates from here.
maxResults	integer	Stop after this many rows (default 200).
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify Proxy settings. The default is fine.

Note: AutoTrader embeds every filter in the URL. Copy any search result page URL and paste it as the start URL.

Example input

{
  "startUrl": "https://www.autotrader.co.za/cars-for-sale",

  "maxResults": 200,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true }
}

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Output

One row per listing, 17 columns:

Column	Type	Description
listingId	string	AutoTrader listing ID from the URL.
title	string	Car headline (year, make, model).
listingUrl	string	Canonical listing page.
make	string	Car manufacturer extracted from the URL.
model	string	Car model extracted from the URL.
variant	string	Trim or engine variant from the URL.
price	number	Asking price in South African rand.
currency	string	Always ZAR.
mileage	string	Odometer reading as displayed (e.g. 150 000 km).
condition	string	Used or New.
transmission	string	Manual or Automatic.
fuel	string	Fuel type: Petrol, Diesel, Hybrid or Electric.
imageUrl	string	First listing photo.
dealerName	string	Dealer or seller name from the image alt text.
country	string	Always South Africa.
source	string	Always autotrader_za.
scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp of collection.

Example row

{
  "listingId": "…",
  "title": "…",
  "listingUrl": "…",
  "make": "…",
  "model": "…",
  "variant": "…",
  "price": 0,
  "currency": "…",
  "mileage": "…",
  "condition": "…",
  "transmission": "…",
  "fuel": "…",
  "imageUrl": "…",
  "dealerName": "…",
  "country": "…",
  "source": "…",
  "scrapedAt": "…"
}

Export from the Apify Console as JSON, CSV, Excel, XML or RSS, or pull it straight from the Dataset API.

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How to use it

1. Open the Actor and paste a AutoTrader.co.za URL into Category or listing URL.
2. Set Maximum results to how many rows you want.
3. Click Start. Rows appear in the dataset while the run is still going.
4. Export, or schedule the run daily and diff the results to track price moves.

You can also run it from the Apify API, the JavaScript client or the Python client, and wire the output into Google Sheets, Zapier, Make or your own warehouse.

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Frequently asked questions

Do I need an AutoTrader account or API key?

No. All data comes from public result pages — no login, no key.

How do I filter by make, model or price?

AutoTrader puts every filter in the URL. Build your search on the website, then paste the URL as the start URL.

Why is imageUrl sometimes null?

AutoTrader lazy-loads images for some result tiles. The listing URL still works — the image just was not in the initial HTML.

Which currency?

South African rand (ZAR), stated in the currency column.

What does variant contain?

The engine variant or trim level extracted from the listing URL — for example 1.4tsi, sport, or dark-edition.

Is mileage a number or text?

Text, as displayed by AutoTrader — for example '150 000 km'. This preserves the exact formatting shown on the site.

How much does it cost?

You pay per row kept, plus Apify platform usage. A 1,000-row run is inexpensive; run it on a schedule and you have a continuous price feed for the cost of a coffee.

Is scraping AutoTrader.co.za legal?

This Actor reads only publicly available pages — the same ones anyone can open in a browser — and collects no personal data beyond the seller display name that AutoTrader.co.za itself publishes next to each listing. You are responsible for how you use the output, including compliance with AutoTrader.co.za's terms and with data-protection law such as the GDPR. If in doubt, take legal advice.

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Related Actors

Browse the rest of the fleet for country marketplace, classifieds, property and company-registry scrapers covering more than eighty countries.

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Support

Found a broken column or a site change? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab and it will be looked at. This Actor is actively maintained — see the Changelog for its history.

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AutoTrader.co.za is a trademark of its respective owner. This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by AutoTrader.co.za.

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Use cases

• Export car listings in bulk and analyse them in a spreadsheet or database.
• Track how the data changes over time by scheduling repeat runs.
• Feed car listings into a dashboard, CRM or internal tool through the Apify API.
• Build a research dataset without writing or maintaining a scraper.
• Monitor AutoTrader.co.za for new entries and alert your team when they appear.

Pricing

This Actor is pay per result: you are charged for the rows it writes to your dataset, not for the time it spends running. There are no platform fees to calculate on top, and higher Apify plans pay a lower rate per result. A run that returns nothing costs nothing.

Related scrapers

Other Actors from the same collection:

• Nettiauto
• Carvago
• Mashina.kg
• Encar

AutoTrader.co.za scraping — frequently asked questions

Do I need a AutoTrader.co.za API key, account or login?

No. This Actor reads publicly available pages and feeds, so there is nothing to register for and no credentials to manage.

How do I export AutoTrader.co.za data to CSV, Excel, JSON or Google Sheets?

Open the Storage tab after a run and pick the format you want — CSV, Excel, JSON, XML or an HTML table. For Google Sheets, Airtable or a database, use the dataset URL or the Apify API so the sheet refreshes itself on every run.

Can I schedule this AutoTrader.co.za scraper to run daily or hourly?

Yes. Use the Schedules tab and pick a cadence. Daily is enough for most tracking work; pick hourly only if the vehicle listings you care about really do change that fast.

How many vehicle listings can I get, and what does it cost?

See the volume section above for a measured figure. Billing is per result, so you pay for the rows you actually receive and a run that finds nothing costs nothing.

Is scraping AutoTrader.co.za legal?

This Actor collects only information that AutoTrader.co.za publishes publicly. It does not log in, does not defeat access controls and does not touch private data. You remain responsible for how you use the output, including under GDPR and similar rules where personal data is involved.

What happens if AutoTrader.co.za blocks the run or changes its layout?

A refused exit IP is swapped for a fresh one within a quarter of a second and retried, and rate limiting is waited out rather than fought. If nothing gets through, the run fails with the reason instead of reporting success with zero rows — so an empty result always means "no matches", never "the source would not answer".

Can I use this with an AI agent, LangChain or an MCP client?

Yes. The Actor is callable over the Apify API and through Apify's MCP server, so an agent can run it and read the dataset back as a tool call.

Legal and compliance

This Actor collects publicly available information from AutoTrader.co.za only. It does not log in, does not circumvent access controls, and collects no private data. You are responsible for using the output lawfully, including under GDPR and comparable regimes where the rows contain personal data, and for respecting AutoTrader.co.za's terms where they apply to you.