John Lewis Scraper

A John Lewis scraper that turns a search term or a listing URL into structured product rows: price, previous price, rating, review count, stock status, brand and every colour variant. No login, no cookie, no API key.

It reads the JSON that johnlewis.com already ships inside its own pages, which is why the rows carry fields the rendered cards never show, such as the reduction history behind a sale price and the full colour variant list.

What you get

• Price and previous price, so a reduction is a number you can act on rather than a red badge you have to interpret. on_sale tells you whether the site records a reduction at all
• Rating and review count per product, straight from the site's own data
• Stock status as a boolean, not a guess from whether a button is greyed out
• Every colour variant with names and a count, plus the alternative image URLs
• Brand, product id and SKU id, so consecutive runs deduplicate cleanly and you can join against your own catalogue
• Real pagination. The site reports how many results and pages exist, so the walk stops at the true last page instead of hammering until it 404s
• A named error when a term redirects. Search for a brand like "dyson" and John Lewis sends you to a brand landing page with no products on it. Instead of an empty run, you get the destination URL and what to do about it
• No actor-start fee. A run that returns nothing costs nothing

Why scrape John Lewis

John Lewis is a price anchor for the UK market. It rarely discounts first, it price-matches selectively, and its Never Knowingly Undersold heritage means competitors watch it closely even now that the promise has changed. If you sell homeware, electricals or fashion into the UK, what John Lewis lists and at what price is a reference point your own pricing has to answer to.

There is no public product API. The site is a Next.js application, so every listing page carries its data as JSON for the browser to render, and that JSON is richer than the page it produces. Reading it is both faster than driving a browser and more stable than chasing CSS class names that change with every deploy.

The third reason is the reduction history. A UK retailer's sale price only means something next to what the item cost before it, and that prior price is in the payload rather than on the page. Most scrapers throw it away because they read the card instead of the data behind it.

Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	What it does
search_term	string	yes	laptop	What to search for on johnlewis.com
url	string	no	–	A johnlewis.com search or category URL to read instead. Takes precedence over the search term
limit	integer	no	48	Products to return, 1 to 480
sort_by	select	no	relevance	relevance, price_low_high, price_high_low, newest, popularity, discount
retries	integer	no	3	Retry attempts per page

Output

{
  "position": 1,
  "product_id": "113493667",
  "sku_id": "113397136",
  "title": "Acer Chromebook 314 Laptop, Intel Celeron Processor, 4GB RAM, 64GB eMMC, 14\" Full HD, Black",
  "brand": "Acer",
  "url": "https://www.johnlewis.com/acer-chromebook-314-laptop.../p113493667",
  "price": 169.99,
  "price_max": 169.99,
  "price_display": "£169.99",
  "was_price": null,
  "on_sale": false,
  "currency": "£",
  "rating": 4.8,
  "reviews_count": 9,
  "out_of_stock": false,
  "image": "https://media.johnlewiscontent.com/i/JohnLewis/113397136?",
  "images": [
    "https://media.johnlewiscontent.com/i/JohnLewis/113397136alt1"
  ],
  "colours": [
    "Black"
  ],
  "colour_count": 1,
  "parse_path": "next_data",
  "search_term": "laptop"
}

Use cases

Price benchmarking against a UK anchor. Pull a category, join on brand and title against your own range, and you have John Lewis's shelf price next to yours. Because was_price and on_sale come from the site's own reduction history, you can separate a genuine markdown from a product that has simply always been priced there, which is the distinction that decides whether you follow the price down.

Watching a category for markdowns. Sort by discount and schedule the run. The rows come back ordered by how deeply the site has cut them, so the first page is the answer rather than something you compute afterwards. was_price gives you the depth of the cut in pounds.

Stock and assortment monitoring. out_of_stock is a boolean straight from the payload, so a daily run over a category tells you what John Lewis has stopped being able to supply. For a supplier, a competitor's stockout is the most actionable single signal there is, and it is invisible from the front end unless you open every product.

Feeding a product database. product_id and sku_id are stable identifiers, brand is a clean field rather than a substring of the title, and the colour variants come as a list. That is enough to build a catalogue without a normalization pass, and enough to diff yesterday's run against today's on identity rather than on fuzzy title matching.

How it compares

	this actor	sian.agency/currys-product-scraper	apify/e-commerce-scraping-tool
Per 1.000 products	$4,50	$8,50	$6,00
Actor-start fee	none	$0,05 per run	$0,0001
Previous price / reduction history	yes	no	no
Rating and review count	yes	not stated	no
Stock flag	yes	not stated	no
Colour variants	yes, named	no	no
Covers John Lewis	yes	no	generic, needs configuring

Honest about the other side: apify/e-commerce-scraping-tool has 575 monthly users and 49 reviews, and it will point at almost any shop rather than only this one. If you need many retailers and shallow fields, it is the better tool. This one goes deep on a single retailer.

Pricing

One event. product costs $0,0045 per product returned, which is $4,50 per 1.000. All pricing is pay-per-event, so you only pay for products you actually receive. No actor-start fee, no per-compute-unit charges, and a run that returns nothing costs nothing.

Limits and gotchas

• A brand-only search term redirects. "dyson" sends you to a brand landing page with no product grid. The run reports redirected_to_content_page with the destination URL. Open it, click through to the listing you want, and pass that URL in url.
• John Lewis never returns an empty search. A nonsense term still comes back with a few hundred unrelated products and nothing in the payload flags it. The run summary always reports totalResults, so check it looks sane for what you asked.
• Requests egress from the UK, because the site serves a different experience to visitors it reads as overseas. Prices are always in pounds.
• rating and reviews_count are empty for products nobody has reviewed yet, which is normal on newly listed lines. Roughly six in ten products in a typical search carry a rating.
• was_price only appears when the site records a reduction. A product that has never been discounted has on_sale: false and a null previous price, which is correct rather than missing.
• 480 products is the cap per run. The site pages 24 at a time and most searches have fewer than 20 pages anyway; the run summary reports pagesAvailable so you know whether you hit the end of the listing or the end of your limit.

FAQ

Can I scrape John Lewis without an API key? Yes. The site publishes its listing data to anonymous visitors as JSON inside the page, and that is what this actor reads. There is no credential field in the input.

Why does searching for a brand return nothing? John Lewis redirects brand terms to a curated brand page that has no product grid on it. The actor detects the redirect and returns the URL it landed on, so you can pick the real listing and pass it in url.

Can I get the previous price before a discount? Yes, as was_price, taken from the reduction history in the site's own payload. Most John Lewis scrapers only read the rendered card, where that number does not appear.

Does this work on category pages as well as searches? Yes. Paste any johnlewis.com listing URL into url and it is read the same way, including sort parameters you have already applied in the browser.

How do I track price changes over time? Schedule the run and store product_id, price and the timestamp. The product id is stable, so a diff between two runs is an exact join rather than a title match.

Related Actors

• Price Scraper — price and availability from any product URL
• Google Shopping Scraper — offers from every merchant for an EAN or SKU
• Amazon Bestsellers Scraper — ranked products across 15 Amazon marketplaces