Ocean Container Tracking Scraper (Multi-Carrier JSON)

Track ocean containers and bills of lading from Evergreen (ShipmentLink) and COSCO through one normalized JSON schema. Give it a list of container or bill-of-lading numbers; it returns the latest public movement, vessel, voyage, location and ETA for each reference.

What it does

• Accepts container numbers (4 letters + 7 digits, for example DRYU9684015) and numeric bill-of-lading numbers (for example 6468636830).
• carrier: "auto" detects the likely carrier from the reference format and falls back to the other validated source.
• Returns one dataset item per reference with public data: normalized events[] with ISO 8601 dates, plus container/containers details for bills of lading. COSCO movement history is added to history[] when the source publishes it.
• Plain HTTP, no browser and no proxies. Both sources answer from the platform egress.
• References without public data are logged and saved as run notes; they are not pushed to the dataset, so they are never billed.

Example output

{
  "url": "https://ct.shipmentlink.com/servlet/TDB1_CargoTracking.do",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-23T10:15:00.000Z",
  "ref": "DRYU9684015",
  "refType": "container",
  "carrier": "evergreen",
  "retrievedAt": "2026-10-23T10:15:00.000Z",
  "container": { "number": "DRYU9684015", "size": "40'(SH)" },
  "events": [
    {
      "at": "2026-10-13",
      "status": "Loaded (FCL) on vessel",
      "location": "OAKLAND, CA (US)",
      "vessel": "EVER MILD 1471",
      "voyage": "012W",
      "weightKg": 24657,
      "eta": "2026-11-13"
    }
  ]
}

A COSCO bill of lading returns containers[] (one row per container) plus history[] with the movement list the public endpoint publishes.

Pricing

Pricing is 5 USD per 1,000 results (tracked references delivered) by pay per event (apify-default-dataset-item), plus the Apify-recommended apify-actor-start event at 0.00005 USD per run. A reference without data is never pushed and never charged. No proxies and no browser are required for the two v1 sources.

Works on the Apify free plan: with the 5 USD monthly credit, about 999 tracked references can be delivered per month (N = floor((5.00 - 0.00005) / 0.005)).

Input

{ "refs": ["DRYU9684015", "6468636830"], "carrier": "auto" }

• refs - container and/or bill-of-lading numbers (max 100 per run). Empty input falls back to the documented example container so the Store test always runs.
• carrier - auto (default), evergreen or cosco.

FAQ

Which carriers are supported? Evergreen (ShipmentLink) and COSCO (elines eBusiness) in v1. Matson was dropped from v1 because no live public reference could be verified before the build (the tracking endpoint itself answers, but no public container or B/L was found to prove a result). Sinokor and Yang Ming are not included while their terms of use cannot be read over plain HTTP.

Does it need an API key or login? No. Both sources are public and work without authentication.

Why is a reference missing from the dataset? Either the carrier has no public tracking data for it, or the format is not recognized. The run log and the ocean-container-tracking-notes key-value store list every reference without data and the reason.

Are dates in UTC? Evergreen publishes dates only (YYYY-MM-DD). COSCO publishes a local date-time without an offset; it is normalized as YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ and should be read as source time.

Can it monitor changes? Not in v1. A watchlist/monitor mode (only new events) is a separate phase.

Maintenance

• Sources are validated against robots.txt, terms of use and cost in docs/legal-gate.md.
• Evergreen requires a descriptive User-Agent. The Actor never uses a search-engine or AI-bot User-Agent, because ShipmentLink's robots.txt disallows those named groups.
• The Actor is tested daily by Steadfetch QA against a live reference. If a source changes its HTML or JSON contract, the Actor is repaired before any new build.

Output schema

Dataset items are validated against .actor/dataset_schema.json before they are pushed. Unvalidated items never reach the dataset.