eMAG Products Scraper (RO, BG, HU)

Product listings from eMAG — the largest online retailer in Romania, and also serving Bulgaria and Hungary — as structured rows: price in the local currency, rating and review count, the full category branch, badges, and eMAG's own stable product codes.

---

The thing that makes this different

eMAG answers a search it cannot satisfy with 60 unrelated products, not with zero.

Ask for qwertyuiopasdfgh and you get HTTP 200 and a full page of lipsticks and vacuum nozzles. Ask for iphone filtered to a brand that has no iPhones and you get a Sudoku book and a vitamin supplement. In every failing case the result set overlaps the correct one by exactly zero products — eMAG silently drops the keyword and serves a generic catalogue page.

The rows are real products with real prices. They are simply not an answer to the question you asked, and nothing in the response says so: there is no echo field naming the query eMAG actually ran.

So this Actor checks the output. Every search reports keywordMatchShare — the fraction of returned titles that actually contain your keyword — and a search where nothing matches is returned as a keyword_dropped error row rather than 60 products you would have to notice were wrong. Verified in a cloud run: qwertyuiopasdfgh produced an error and zero products while telefon samsung, in the same run, produced 60 rows at a share of 1.0.

And the prices are a trap in their own right. eMAG renders 6,999.99 lei as 6.999 plus a superscript 99, Romanian-style — . for thousands, , for decimals. float("6.999") gives you 6.999: wrong by a factor of a thousand, and still a plausible-looking price that nothing downstream will flag. Every row carries both the parsed number and priceRaw ('6.999,99 Lei') so the arithmetic is auditable.

---

What you get

One SEARCH_SUMMARY row per keyword or category, then one PRODUCT row each.

Group	Fields
Identity	productId, offerId, partNumberKey, name, url
Price	price, priceRaw, priceCurrency, previousPrice, previousPriceRaw
Reviews	ratingValue, reviewCount
Category	categoryId, categoryName, categoryTrail (full branch), departmentId
Commerce	badges, isGenius, availabilityId, hasUnfairPrice
Media	imageUrl
Provenance	_input, _source, _scrapedAt, country, sourceHost, resultPosition, pageFound

partNumberKey is eMAG's own PNK — the code in the /pd/<PNK>/ URL — which stays stable when a seller edits the title.

categoryTrail is the full branch, e.g. ["Laptop, Tablete & Telefoane", "Telefoane mobile & accesorii", "Telefoane Mobile"].

---

Honesty counters on every summary

Field	What it tells you
keywordMatchShare / keywordHeld	whether eMAG actually ran your search
ratedRows / ratedShare	eMAG renders ratings server-side only some of the time; this says how many you got rather than letting a quiet run look like "these products have no reviews"
pricedRows / rowsWithoutPrice	how many rows carry a usable price
challengesRetried	eMAG's rate-based challenge, absorbed by retries — if this is high, raise minRequestInterval
stoppedReason	no_new_ids, max_pages or max_items, so a short run is never ambiguous
duplicateRowsDropped	ids that repeated across pages

---

Input

Field	Notes
country	ro, bg or hu. Sets the host, the currency and the Accept-Language.
keywords	Keywords to search, one run each. Each is keyword-checked (see above).
categoryPaths	Browse whole categories instead — eMAG's own path segment, e.g. telefoane-mobile. Not keyword-checked, because there is no keyword to hold.
maxPages	Pages of ~60 products.
maxItems	Overall cap on product rows; summaries do not count against it.
minRequestInterval	Raise this first if a run reports retried challenges.

Only these three countries are offered: they are the eMAG sites whose own robots.txt permits this, each checked separately. Any other country is refused at input validation with the reason.

---

Limits, stated plainly

• Pagination is path-based. eMAG accepts ?p=2 and silently returns page 1; this Actor uses /p2, which genuinely advances. If you build your own URLs, do the same.
• eMAG runs a rate-based bot challenge, including one variant that arrives as HTTP 200 with a captcha title and zero cards. Both shapes are detected and retried. Keep maxConcurrency low.
• Ratings are not always rendered. The share is reported per run.

Method, measurements and the full trap list: CRAWLING_METHOD.md.