SmartCustomer Review Scraper (Pay-Per-Event)
Pricing
Pay per event
Scrape consumer reviews from SmartCustomer by domain. Self-contained review records with embedded business metadata, rating, date, user, and run-summary. Pay-per-event pricing — only pay for businesses resolved + reviews extracted.
Reviews now carry the business's public reply in a new business_response field — { text, published, author_name }, or null when the business hasn't replied. This is what shoppers and support/ORM teams actually want alongside the review itself.
business_response. The business's reply text (text), when it was posted (published), and who posted it (author_name, usually the business). null when there is no reply.includeBusinessResponses (default true). Turn it off to omit responses. No extra charge — responses ride along with the reviews you already collect; billing is unchanged (business-resolved + review-extracted).api.smartcustomer.com/v2/businesses/<domain>/reviews). The server-rendered JSON-LD does not expose business replies; the API returns each reply inline (business_comment). The API is also the same endpoint the SmartCustomer website itself reads, is ~20× lighter than the 900 KB+ HTML page (lower proxy cost per run), and provides structured, stable fields.business.categories is now populated from the business subindustry (previously always []), and business.review_count reflects the business's total review count from the API's pagination metadata.review_id, review_url/url/business_url, text, rating, review_date, user_name (still "First L."), user_avatar_url, photos[], status, embedded business, scraped_at are all preserved. business_response is purely additive.sortBy remains accepted but is a no-op — the SmartCustomer site and its API both ignore sort parameters and serve a fixed "recommended" order (this was already true of the HTML source in v0.3).tsc build clean, 94 unit tests pass (incl. a new reviews-api suite), plus a live end-to-end smoke test (fetch → parse → record) confirming real business responses attach correctly (Shein 37/40, Fashion Nova 2/40, Chewy 0/40) with full field integrity, and unknown domains resolve to zero rows.The site previously branded as Sitejabber has rebranded to SmartCustomer — sitejabber.com 301-redirects to www.smartcustomer.com, and the rendered page's <title> reads "SmartCustomer". v0.2 documented this in passing but kept "Sitejabber" in the actor title and most user-facing copy. v0.3 normalizes the canonical brand to SmartCustomer everywhere:
buildReviewsUrl now hits https://www.smartcustomer.com/reviews/<domain> directly (skip the sitejabber.com 301 hop).Surveyed Apify Store competitor PPE pricing for the SmartCustomer/Sitejabber target:
cerridwen/sitejabber-scraper (54 runs): apify-actor-start $0.00005 + $0.0015 per result.zadexinho/sitejabber-scraper (99 runs): apify-actor-start $0.00005 + per-review event.v0.2 priced business-resolved $0.001 + review-extracted $0.0005 — roughly 3× cheaper than cerridwen per result, leaving margin on the table. v0.3 repriced to match the working market:
| Event | v0.2 | v0.3 |
|---|---|---|
apify-actor-start (auto-fired on every run) | not configured | $0.00005 |
business-resolved (one per resolved business) | $0.001 | $0.0005 |
review-extracted (one per emitted review, post-onlyWithPhotos filter) | $0.0005 | $0.0015 |
A 50-review run from one business will cost $0.00005 + $0.0005 + 50 * $0.0015 = $0.07555 — competitive with cerridwen's 50 * $0.0015 = $0.075.
Pricing change is gated by Apify's 1-month cooldown between price modifications. v0.2 pricing was set on 2026-05-07; the next pricing change is allowed on 2026-06-07. The v0.3 prices above will be applied then, with another 14-day notification period after that. Until 2026-06-07 the actor runs on the v0.2 pricing ($0.001 + $0.0005, effective 2026-05-22).
Breaking change. v0.1 targeted Yelp; v0.2 targets SmartCustomer .
Yelp's WAF (DataDome) comprehensively blocks every IP in Apify's RESIDENTIAL, BUYPROXIES94952, and StaticUS3 proxy pools. Six iterations of stealth Playwright, cookie warming, and headful-Chrome fingerprint patches did not get us past the challenge. Even Apify's flagship super-scraper-api (a drop-in scraper-API replacement for ScrapingBee) returns "Request blocked" against Yelp on Apify proxies. Wrapping working competitors (tri_angle/yelp-review-scraper) is plan-blocked on the user's CUSTOM Bronze plan.
SmartCustomer uses much softer anti-bot defenses (HTTP 200 from Apify RESIDENTIAL on first request) and server-renders 20 reviews per page in a JSON-LD Organization block with a stable aggregateRating + review[] schema. Same architecture (PPE, dual-input, embedded business metadata, photos validation, run summary) ports cleanly.
business-resolved (one per resolved business) + review-extracted (one per emitted review, post-onlyWithPhotos filter).review_url / url / business_url (first-present-wins permalink), text, rating, review_date, user_name, user_avatar_url, photos: string[], status, embedded business block, scraped_at.status enum: ok / partial / business_not_found / blocked / rate_limited.*.smartcustomer.com (SmartCustomer's image CDN).onlyWithPhotos flag preserved.domains: string[] (e.g., ["amazon.com"]) replaces Yelp's searchTerms + businessAliases. businessUrls now accepts SmartCustomer /reviews/<domain> URLs.CheerioCrawler + got-scraping TLS impersonation. Dockerfile back to apify/actor-node:24 (Alpine).?page=N (20 reviews per page).defaultRunOptions.memoryMbytes reverted to 1024.photos: []. The onlyWithPhotos: true filter still works correctly but will drop most reviews on photo-light businesses.categories or price_tier in business metadata (SmartCustomer doesn't expose these). Both fields emit as null / [] for schema compatibility with the v0.1 contract.| Attempt | Result |
|---|---|
| CheerioCrawler + RESIDENTIAL | 403 (DataDome challenge HTML) |
| PlaywrightCrawler + RESIDENTIAL (default fingerprints) | Crawlee aborts on 403 |
| PlaywrightCrawler + manual goto + 25s wait + headful xvfb | DataDome markers persist after 41s |
| PlaywrightCrawler + stealth init + cookie-warming homepage | Both homepage AND target return 403 + DataDome challenge |
Apify super-scraper-api standby endpoint with premium_proxy=true | 500: "Request blocked - received 403 status code" |
Yelp /biz/<alias>/review_feed JSON endpoint via raw proxy | 403 + geo.captcha-delivery.com redirect URL |
m.yelp.com/biz/<alias> mobile site | 403 + DataDome 'rt':'c' (visual CAPTCHA challenge) |
| BUYPROXIES94952 proxy group (datacenter, 27 available) | 403 + DataDome challenge |
| StaticUS3 proxy group (3 static IPs) | 403 + DataDome challenge |
| DATACENTER proxy group | 407 (group not available on this plan) |
DataDome on Apify's standard proxy infrastructure in 2026 is unbeatable with code alone.
Architecturally complete actor targeting Yelp with PPE, dual-input, embedded business metadata, Yelp-host-validated photos, and run-level summary record. Functionally non-functional in production due to the DataDome block above. See v0.2 entry for the pivot rationale.