Dollar Tree scraper: product prices, case packs and stock (USA)

This Dollar Tree scraper reads dollartree.com (the US dollar-store chain's online shop: food, candy, drinks, cleaning, party, craft, kitchen and seasonal goods) by search term or category and returns one row per product: the USD price, the case pack size and the case price (Dollar Tree sells online by the case), the minimum order quantity, the stock flag, UPC, brand, every category the product is filed under, the clearance flag, the sale and list price, rating, link and photo. Run it on a schedule and diff the datasets to get a Dollar Tree price and assortment watch for the terms and categories you follow.

No account, no API key, no login, no browser. It calls the JSON search service the website's own search box and category pages call, 24 products per request.

Input

Field	Notes
searchTerms	What to search for, one term per line, as typed in the website's search box (paper towels, candy). Each term is read page by page until it runs out. A product found by two terms is written once.
categories	Categories to read in full, one per line, named by their labels from the department down and joined with >: Food, Candy & Drinks for a department, Food, Candy & Drinks > Candy & Gum > Chocolate Candy for a group inside it. The labels are looked up on dollartree.com when the run starts; a label that does not exist fails that category with the list of the ones that do. A category's number (1669243216) is also accepted. Categories are read after the search terms.
maxItems	Stop after writing this many products (default 100, up to 50,000), across all terms and categories.
proxyConfiguration	Apify's automatic datacenter proxy by default; dollartree.com answered datacenter addresses when this actor was built.

Give at least one search term or category. Example input:

{
  "searchTerms": ["paper towels", "candy"],
  "categories": ["Food, Candy & Drinks > Candy & Gum"],
  "maxItems": 30
}

Output

One row per product. Prices are numbers in US dollars. product_id is the unique key of a row; scraped_at is when it was read, so keep the datasets of scheduled runs and compare them to see a price move, a markdown or a product going out of stock.

Field	Notes
product_id	Dollar Tree's product id, a string (423153).
name, brand	The product name as the store shows it, and the brand (Mike And Ike). brand is null on the products that carry none (about half).
category, categories	The main category (Gummy & Chewy Candy) and every category the product is filed under, in the order sent. categories is an empty list when there are none; seasonal products list dozens. Of 353 products read on 2026-11-05 (paper towels, candy, LED lights and the first pages of the Department list), 121 were filed only under the store's internal Non-Navigable Sub Collection bucket: categories shows it as sent, category skips it (null if nothing else).
url, image_url	The product page and its first photo, as absolute addresses.
currency	USD when the response's price range is in dollars; null otherwise.
price	The price of one item (sku.activePrice), as the store sends it.
unit_price	The store's unit price (product.x_unitPriceNumeric), as sent; null when absent (about 1 product in 8). Read it with price: on 13 of 507 products read on 2026-11-05 the two disagree, and a price of 0.01 occurs; both are written as the store holds them.
list_price, sale_price	The price before a markdown, and the marked-down price. sale_price is null unless the product is marked down.
clearance, deals	True when the store flags the product clearance, and its deal labels (["Clearance"]; an empty list when none).
case_pack_size, case_price	Items in one full case, and the price of the case (price times case_pack_size on the products measured). Null when absent, and when the store sends 0 (a product it has not set up).
minimum_quantity	The online minimum order, in items. Null when absent or 0. It can be smaller than the case: 4 of a 30-roll case of paper towels.
split_case_multiple	Items per split-case step: 0 when the product cannot be bought in part of a case, otherwise the multiple (4, 6, 12). Null when absent.
in_stock, availability	availability is the store's value as sent (INSTOCK, OUTOFSTOCK); in_stock is true for INSTOCK, false for OUTOFSTOCK, null for anything else. This is the online listing, not a store's shelf.
in_store_only	True when the store flags the product smsb_availableInStoreOnly; null when absent.
upcs	The product's barcodes as a list, each as sent (18 digits, zero-padded); the store sends them as one comma-separated string. An empty list for the products without one.
snap_eligible	True when the store marks the product SNAP eligible; null when it says nothing.
rating, review_count	Average star rating as the store sends it (unrounded, 4.5516) and the number of reviews it is from. Both null where the product has no reviews, never 0.
description	The product description as plain text; null where the store has none (about 4 products in 10).
weight, length, width, height	The package dimensions as the store spells them (6 oz, 1 in); each null when absent.
search_term, search_category	What found the row: the search term, or the category as you named it. The other is null.
scraped_at	When the row was read, UTC, ISO 8601.

Example row (a real row, 2026-11-05):

{
  "product_id": "423153",
  "name": "Mike And Ike Ice Cream Truck Candy Mix, Assorted flavors, 1-ct.",
  "brand": "Mike And Ike",
  "category": "Gummy & Chewy Candy",
  "categories": [
    "Gummy & Chewy Candy"
  ],
  "url": "https://www.dollartree.com/mike-and-ike-ice-cream-truck-candy-mix-assorted-flavors-1-ct/423153",
  "image_url": "https://www.dollartree.com/ccstore/v1/images/?source=/file/v3031719448600512668/products/423153.jpg",
  "currency": "USD",
  "price": 1.25,
  "unit_price": 1.25,
  "list_price": 1.25,
  "sale_price": null,
  "clearance": false,
  "deals": [],
  "case_pack_size": 12,
  "case_price": 15.0,
  "minimum_quantity": 12,
  "split_case_multiple": 0,
  "in_stock": true,
  "availability": "INSTOCK",
  "in_store_only": false,
  "upcs": [
    "000000070970475306"
  ],
  "snap_eligible": true,
  "rating": 5.0,
  "review_count": 1,
  "description": "The delicious Mike and Ike Ice Cream Truck Candy Mix is a perfect addition to your candy supplies. The yummy, gluten-free, fat-free candy pack is a perfect treat for both kids and adults. Each pack of candy features assorted flavors that add a nostalgic touch to your evenings. You can also distribute the candies to guests at parties, family gatherings, and other fun events. Satisfy your candy cravings with the delicious pack of ice cream truck candy mix. Get the yummy Mike And Ike Ice Cream Truck Candy Mix for your candy supplies inventory. The candies contain bioengineered food ingredients.",
  "weight": "4.25 oz",
  "length": "0.75 in",
  "width": "5.37 in",
  "height": "3 in",
  "search_term": "candy",
  "search_category": null,
  "scraped_at": "2026-11-05T09:15:42Z"
}

Honest nulls

A value the response did not carry is null (or an empty list for categories, deals and upcs), never 0 or "".

• No store inventory. in_stock is the online listing; it says nothing about a store's shelf.
• No price history. One run is one reading. Schedule it and keep the datasets.
• Non-products are skipped. The search index also holds blog posts and a "Handling Fee Product" with a price of 0; they are not written and not charged.

Pricing

Pay per event:

• $0.002 per run (actor-start), charged only after your input is validated, so a run that fails on bad input costs nothing.
• $0.0028 per product written (product-scraped)

That is $2.80 per 1,000 products, 30% under the cheapest comparable Dollar Tree actor on the Apify Store ($0.004 per item) when this one was built. A row is charged only after it is written. A product found twice, a record that is not a product, and a category that does not exist are not written and not charged.

How it fetches

It calls GET /ccstoreui/v1/search on dollartree.com (an Oracle Commerce Cloud store on an Endeca index) with Ntt (the term), Nrpp=24 (records per page), No (the offset) and, for a category, N (the category's number, looked up from the service's own category menu when the run starts). The website's /search address answers 404 and the page its search box opens (/searchresults) holds no products in its HTML; this is the call the page draws its lists from. Measured from the Apify platform on a probe run of 10 requests per proxy group (2026-11-05: datacenter answered the full product list 10 of 10 times and residential 8 of 10), which is why the default is the automatic datacenter proxy. A refusal (403, 429, 5xx), a 200 that is not a search answer, or a dropped connection is treated as the address being blocked: the actor retries from a fresh exit address and a different browser fingerprint (four are tried in turn, one attempt each).

Things worth knowing, all measured on 2026-11-05:

• At most 10,024 results of one search. The service clamps any offset past 10,000 to the page starting at record 10,001, so a search or category that matches more is read to that point and the run log says how many it matches. Use a narrower term or a sub-category (the department Food, Candy & Drinks has 2,148 products; the whole Department has 11,457).
• Categories are a tree, looked up live. Food, Candy & Drinks has seven groups (Candy & Gum, Drinks, Food, Snacks...), Candy & Gum has seven more (Chocolate Candy, Gum & Mints...). A label that does not exist at its level fails that category with the labels that do.
• A search can match more than products. The index holds blog posts next to products; they are skipped and counted in the run log.
• Order is the store's relevance order. The same search read twice moves only as the store's ranking does.

If dollartree.com changes the service, the run fails with a message instead of returning empty rows.