Catena.ro Scraper

Scrape promotional product prices from catena.ro, Romania's largest pharmacy chain by revenue. Extracts product name, brand, discounted and original price, discount percentage, category, image, and description from Catena's live seasonal campaigns.

Why use this actor?

Catena is the biggest pharmacy chain in Romania, with hundreds of stores nationwide. Price monitoring tools, deal aggregators, and market research teams tracking the Romanian pharmacy and cosmetics/dermocosmetics retail market can use this actor to pull structured, up-to-date pricing data without manually browsing Catena's site.

Important: how pricing works on catena.ro

Catena.ro does not operate as a normal online store. Most product pages show "Pentru pret te asteptam in cea mai apropiata farmacie Catena" ("For the price, we're waiting for you at your nearest Catena pharmacy") instead of a checkout price — Romanian pharmacy retail commonly keeps final pricing in-store rather than online.

The one place catena.ro does publish real numeric prices is on its seasonal promotional campaign pages (catena.ro/oferte/{campaign}), for example:

-40% Preț întreg: 105.40 Lei
Preț redus: 63.24 Lei

This actor automatically discovers the currently live campaigns from the Catena offers hub and scrapes every product that has a numeric discounted price attached. Products that only carry a quantity promo (e.g. "Plătești 2, primești 3" — buy 2 get 3) with no per-unit price are skipped, since they have no price to report.

How to scrape Catena.ro data

1. Open the actor and leave searchQuery empty to pull every currently discounted product across all live campaigns, or set it to a keyword (brand or product type) to filter results — for example avene, vichy, bioderma, or crema.
2. Set maxResults to the number of products you want (default 100).
3. Keep includeProductDetails on (default) so each product's own page is fetched for its canonical brand name and full category breadcrumb.
4. Run the actor. Results appear in the default dataset, one row per product, ready to export as JSON, CSV, or Excel.
5. For a narrower run, pass specific catena.ro/oferte/{campaign} URLs via offerUrls instead of auto-discovery.

Because Catena's campaigns rotate with the season, re-run the actor periodically to catch new promotions and price changes.

Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
searchQuery	String	No	Filter products by keyword matched against the product name (e.g. a brand like avene)
offerUrls	Array	No	Specific catena.ro/oferte/{campaign} URLs to scrape instead of auto-discovering current campaigns
maxResults	Integer	No	Maximum number of products to scrape (default: 100)
includeProductDetails	Boolean	No	Fetch each product's own page for canonical brand + category breadcrumb (default: true)
proxyConfiguration	Object	No	Apify proxy configuration. RESIDENTIAL is required — catena.ro serves a stripped page with no products to Apify's shared datacenter proxy pool

Output

Each result contains:

Field	Type	Example
name	String	"Cleanance gel de curatare ten acneic, 200 ml, Avene"
brand	String	"Avene"
price	Number	63.24
originalPrice	Number	105.40
currency	String	"RON"
discount	String	"-40%"
url	String	Full product page URL
imageUrl	String	Primary product image URL
category	String	"Acnee > Curatare ten"
itemDescription	String	Product description text
campaign	String	Name of the promotional campaign the product was found in
scrapedAt	String	ISO 8601 timestamp

Example output

{
    "name": "Cleanance gel de curatare ten acneic, 200 ml, Avene",
    "brand": "Avene",
    "price": 63.24,
    "originalPrice": 105.4,
    "currency": "RON",
    "discount": "-40%",
    "url": "https://www.catena.ro/cleanance-gel-de-curatare-ten-acneic-200-ml-avene",
    "imageUrl": "https://www.catena.ro/assets/uploads/product_images/thumbs/3163a-328770139204-cleanance-gel-curatare-200ml_183x144.jpg",
    "category": "Acnee > Curatare ten",
    "itemDescription": "Un gel de curatare purificator, usor spumant, pentru pielea grasa si/sau predispusa la acnee.",
    "campaign": "Campania Frumusetii la Catena - reduceri de pana la 40% la cosmetice si dermatocosmetice",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-08-01T09:29:01.574Z"
}

Cost estimate

This actor uses lightweight HTTP requests (Cheerio, no browser rendering) against a plain server-rendered site. A run of 100 products with includeProductDetails on uses roughly 110–120 requests total (one campaign listing page plus one detail page per product) and typically completes in under two minutes on the default 1 memory unit. No paid third-party services (e.g. Bright Data) are required — Apify's RESIDENTIAL proxy group is sufficient.

Limitations

• Catena.ro only publishes numeric prices on its seasonal promotional campaigns, not across its full catalogue. This actor reports exactly the products Catena prices online — it does not estimate or infer prices for reservation-only products.
• Campaigns rotate throughout the year, so the exact set of available products and brands changes over time. Re-run the actor to pick up the current campaigns.
• EAN/barcode is not exposed anywhere on catena.ro's public pages and is therefore not included in the output.
• Product availability by individual pharmacy location is not covered by this actor — that requires Catena's separate "find in pharmacy" locator flow.

Legal

This actor only accesses publicly available data. It does not bypass any login, paywall, or access control. Use responsibly and in accordance with catena.ro's terms of service.

Related Scrapers

• Aponeo Scraper — German online pharmacy products and prices
• Newpharma Scraper — Belgian online pharmacy products and prices
• Farmacia Tei Scraper — Romanian pharmacy chain products and prices
• DocMorris Scraper — European online pharmacy products and prices
• Dr. Max Scraper — Central European pharmacy chain products and prices

FAQ

Does this actor need a login or Catena account? No. It only reads publicly visible campaign pages.

Can it scrape the full Catena catalogue, including non-discounted products? No — catena.ro simply does not publish a price for most of its catalogue online (see "Important: how pricing works" above). This actor scrapes every product that does carry a real, published price.

How often do the campaigns change? Catena runs several seasonal campaigns in parallel and refreshes them periodically. Schedule this actor to run daily or weekly to keep pricing data current.