Halfords Scraper

Pull product data from halfords.com, the UK's largest automotive parts and cycling retailer. This scraper reads directly from Halfords' own server-rendered product pages, so it returns clean, structured data — name, brand, price, live stock level, images — for real catalogue listings, not a scraped screenshot of a page.

How to scrape Halfords data

Give the actor a category path prefix (categoryFilter, e.g. "/bikes/mountain-bikes/" or "/motoring/car-parts/") and it enumerates matching product URLs from Halfords' own public sitemap, then fetches each product page for full data.

This is a category-based actor, not a free-text search box. Halfords' /search endpoint and its category-page pagination parameter (?start=) are both disallowed in robots.txt — confirmed live — so this actor works entirely from Halfords' public sitemap (sitemap_index.xml, ~65,000 product URLs across 13 files) instead, filtered to whichever category you're after. Every URL this actor visits is a clean, robots-allowed product detail path.

Halfords sits behind Akamai's bot-management layer: a plain request to any halfords.com path — including /robots.txt itself — gets rejected outright with a 403 "Access Denied" edge page. This actor routes every request through Bright Data's Web Unlocker, which clears the block, so you don't need your own proxy or browser-automation setup.

Under the hood, Halfords runs on Salesforce Commerce Cloud via a React/PWA-Kit storefront. Every server-rendered page embeds a <script id="mobify-data"> blob holding React Query's client-side cache, and on a product page one of those cached entries is the full Salesforce Shopper Products API object for that SKU — name, brand, price, currency, EAN, live inventory, rating, category breadcrumb and complete image galleries. There's no separate hidden API call to reverse-engineer; the same Bright Data-fetched HTML page the actor already downloads for you IS the data source.

If you don't provide any input, it defaults to scraping Halfords' "Mountain Bikes" category as a demo — a real, live category with dozens of matching products.

Input

Field	Type	Description
categoryFilter	string	Path prefix to filter products from Halfords' sitemap, e.g. "/bikes/mountain-bikes/" or "/motoring/car-parts/". Defaults to "/bikes/mountain-bikes/" if left empty.
maxResults	integer	Maximum number of products to scrape (default: 100, hard-capped at 2000)
maxSitemapFiles	integer	Safety cap on how many sitemap files (each ~5,000 URLs) to scan looking for matches (default: 13, the full sitemap)
brightDataApiKey	string	Your own Bright Data API key, if you want to use your own Web Unlocker zone instead of the actor's built-in one
proxyConfiguration	object	Not used — this actor reaches halfords.com exclusively through Bright Data, which handles unblocking on its own. Kept for input-shape compatibility.

What you get back

Field	Type	Example
name	string	"Boardman MHT 8.9 Mountain Bike - S, M, L Frames"
brand	string | null	"Boardman" — falls back to the first word of the product name when Halfords doesn't expose a dedicated brand field (e.g. motoring/car-parts)
price	number | null	800 — current selling price in GBP
originalPrice	number | null	Pre-discount list price, only present when the source marks a markdown
currency	string	"GBP" — halfords.com's UK storefront is priced in GBP
sku	string | null	"189326" — Halfords manufacturer SKU or internal product ID
ean	string | null	European Article Number / barcode, when the source provides one
url	string	Full product page URL
inStock	boolean | null	Live stock availability from Halfords' inventory API. Null when the source doesn't confirm stock status — never coerced to false.
stockLevel	integer | null	27 — live unit count in Halfords' inventory system
category	string | null	"Cycling/Bikes/Mountain Bikes" — full breadcrumb
rating	number | null	4.24 — average customer rating out of 5
reviewCount	integer | null	49
imageUrl	string | null	Primary product image
imageUrls	array	Up to 8 product image URLs
scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp

Sample output

{
  "name": "Boardman MHT 8.9 Mountain Bike - S, M, L Frames",
  "brand": "Boardman",
  "price": 800,
  "originalPrice": 1050,
  "currency": "GBP",
  "sku": "189326",
  "url": "https://www.halfords.com/bikes/mountain-bikes/boardman-mht-8.9-mountain-bike-189326.html",
  "inStock": true,
  "stockLevel": 27,
  "category": "Cycling/Bikes/Mountain Bikes",
  "rating": 4.24,
  "reviewCount": 49,
  "imageUrl": "https://cdn.media.halfords.com/i/washford/189358/Boardman-MHT-8.9-Mountain-Bike---S-M-L-Frames",
  "imageUrls": [
    "https://cdn.media.halfords.com/i/washford/189358/Boardman-MHT-8.9-Mountain-Bike---S-M-L-Frames",
    "https://cdn.media.halfords.com/i/washford/189358d/Boardman-MHT-8.9-Mountain-Bike---S-M-L-Frames"
  ],
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-04T14:45:25.683Z"
}

Use cases

• Price monitoring — track Halfords' own price and markdown changes on the bikes, parts or accessories you sell against.
• Stock tracking — inStock and stockLevel come straight from Halfords' live inventory API, so you can watch availability change over time, not just price.
• Assortment research — see the full product range for a category (car parts, bike parts, tools, camping gear) without clicking through pages by hand.
• Market comparison — Halfords is the reference UK retailer for automotive parts and cycling; useful alongside other UK/EU retail scrapers when benchmarking pricing.

Coverage

halfords.com is Halfords' UK storefront, browsed here through a GB Bright Data exit — pricing and catalogue reflect the UK market (GBP). Halfords also runs a separate Ireland storefront (halfords.ie, EUR) that this actor does not cover.

Performance and cost

Halfords has no crawlable category-listing page — unlike some retailers, its category pages don't embed a product grid, and its own pagination parameter is robots.txt-disallowed. So this actor fetches one Bright Data request per product, sourced from Halfords' public sitemap, at roughly $0.0015 Bright Data cost per result. A 20-product run typically completes in a couple of minutes. Your run's usage cost only settles after the run reports SUCCEEDED — checking cost mid-run will undercount it.

Limitations

• Input is a category path prefix, not free-text search — Halfords' own /search endpoint is disallowed by robots.txt, so this actor works from the site's public product sitemap instead.
• originalPrice is only populated when Halfords marks an item as discounted against its own list price; full-price items will show it as absent, which is correct, not missing data.
• brand comes straight from the source on most categories, but falls back to the first word of the product name on categories (like motoring/car-parts) where Halfords doesn't expose a dedicated brand field at all.
• rating and reviewCount are absent on products with no customer reviews yet, rather than showing as 0.
• Product variants (size, colour) aren't expanded into separate rows — each sitemap URL maps to one product record, generally the master or default variant Halfords itself surfaces at that URL.
• If Halfords restructures its Salesforce PWA-Kit storefront or the embedded mobify-data React Query cache shape, the actor will need updating.

Support

Found an issue or need a category that isn't resolving correctly? Open an issue on this actor's Apify Store page and we'll take a look.

Why Bright Data instead of a standard proxy

Halfords' Akamai layer rejects a plain request outright with a 403 "Access Denied" page — confirmed against /robots.txt itself, which is normally the one path every crawler is allowed to fetch unhindered. Bright Data's Web Unlocker handles the fingerprinting and challenge-solving needed to get a clean response, so this actor can focus on parsing real product data instead of maintaining an anti-bot bypass.