Cars & Bids Scraper

Scrape public Cars & Bids search, browse, results, and auction pages. Each dataset item is one auction with vehicle specifications, current/final bid, auction status, seller, location, bid counts, description, and image URLs.

The actor uses a Playwright browser to load search/browse pages and discover auction listings. Vehicle details are then fetched through Cars & Bids' own first-party JSON API from inside the warmed browser session (same IP, cookies, and session), which avoids the access challenge that direct detail-page navigation triggers. If the API is unavailable, the actor falls back to parsing the detail-page HTML. It detects Cloudflare or other access challenges and stops with a truthful warning when no data can be collected. It does not sign in, place bids, bypass access controls, or collect private account data.

Input

Use startUrls or searchUrls. Examples:

{
  "startUrls": [{ "url": "https://carsandbids.com/search/honda" }],
  "maxResults": 25,
  "includeDetails": true
}

Direct auction pages such as https://carsandbids.com/auctions/K1GDYq2n/factory-five-type-65-coupe are also supported. When no URL is supplied, the actor uses a public Honda search page as a prefill path.

Output

Records include auctionId, title, url, status, price, year, make, model, mileage, vin, location, transmission, bodyStyle, engine, drivetrain, seller, bid/view/watch counts, description, imageUrls, and scrapedAt. Run diagnostics are written to the SUMMARY key-value record.

Pricing

This Actor uses Pay Per Event pricing: $0.03 per auction record delivered. A run returning 10 records costs $0.30 in event charges, in addition to any platform usage charged by Apify. Blocked or empty runs return no auction records and incur no result-event charges. The maximum result-event cost is $0.03 × maxResults.

Limits and access

maxResults is capped at 500 and maxPages at 50. The actor uses the known-good US Apify proxy group for the owner account by default, keeps one browser session consistent, persists cookies, limits request rate/concurrency, and rotates the session after a challenge response. Proxy availability depends on the Apify account and region; provide another available group in proxyConfiguration when needed. Results reflect public page content at scrape time. This Actor does not sign in, place bids, solve CAPTCHAs, bypass access controls, or collect private account data.

Changelog

• 2026-08-14 (1.1): Fixed Cars & Bids challenging detail-page navigation under the external proxy. Auction details are now fetched through Cars & Bids' first-party signed JSON API from within the warmed browser session (same IP, cookies, and session), with HTML parsing kept as a fallback. Direct auction URLs are fetched the same way (via the API) instead of navigating to the auction page. Discovery via search/browse pages is unchanged.

Known limitations

• Cars & Bids' Cloudflare WAF can return HTTP 403 for some free-text search terms (for example search/miata) from cloud proxy IPs, even though the same query loads from a normal residential connection. Make-based searches (for example search/honda) and direct auction URLs are reliably accessible. When a search page is blocked, the actor reports the block truthfully and returns no records for that URL rather than fabricating data.