Sam's Club scraper: product and price tracker (USA)

This Sam's Club scraper searches Sam's Club (the US warehouse club) by keyword, or reads a category page, and returns one flat row per product: the current price in USD, the was-price, the discount in dollars and percent, the per-unit price, the price range of a product's options, rating and review count, stock, whether the club ships, offers pickup or delivers it, the member order limit, the promotion texts, the product link and the photo. Run it on a schedule and diff the dataset to get a warehouse club price and markdown watch: which TVs, grocery lines or tires were reduced since last week, and by how much.

No account, no API key, no login, no browser. One request returns about 45 products.

Input

Field	Notes
searchTerms	One or more search terms, one per line (paper towels, tv, coffee). A term Sam's Club recognises is sent to its category list and that whole list is read (shoes goes to /browse/shoes/1090111); any other term is read as search results. A term it sends to a page with no product list (tires, grill, toys, membership) fails at no charge. A product found by two terms is returned once, under the first.
startUrls	Sam's Club pages to read in full: a category (https://www.samsclub.com/browse/televisions/1087) or a search URL (/search?q=tv, read as that search term). A filter copied from the site (?facet=Brand%3ASamsung, or cat_id=1087 on a search) is kept; every other parameter is dropped. /b/<name>/<id> links work too. Product pages (/ip/...) and /cp/... landing pages are not accepted. Give terms, URLs or both.
maxItems	Products to read per term or page (default 100, up to 10,000). About 45 per page.
onlyOnSale	Return only products that are reduced (on_sale). Products that are not reduced are read, not returned and not charged, and do not count toward maxItems.
sort	relevance (default), price-asc, price-desc, top-selling: the choices of the site's own sort menu.
proxyConfiguration	Apify datacenter proxy by default.

Example input:

{
  "searchTerms": ["paper towels", "tv"],
  "maxItems": 200,
  "onlyOnSale": true,
  "sort": "price-asc"
}

Output

Prices are numbers in US dollars; currency is USD (every page measured). The club is the default one the site assigns to a visitor with no account, so prices, stock and the pickup/delivery flags are that club's, not the club nearest you (a stores parameter was tried and ignored by the server).

Field	Notes
query, position	The search term or page URL that first found the product, and its place in Sam's Club's list for that source and sort (1 is first). Positions count every card of the walk, sponsored ones included, so they are not exactly organic ranks.
sponsored	True when the site marked the card as a sponsored placement. Sponsored cards repeat on every page of a search; a product is returned once, under its first sighting, so a product first seen in a sponsored slot says true even if it also sits in the organic list. A sorted search (any sort but relevance) has no sponsored cards.
product_id, url	Sam's Club's item id (15505523006, always a string) and the product link.
name, product_type	As the page shows them. product_type is the site's own type (Televisions) and is null if the page sends none.
category_ids	The department path, outermost first (["1086", "1087", "1088"]). Any id works as /browse/<name>/<id>.
price	The current price of the option the card shows. Null when the card says "See price in cart" (price_visibility is in_cart).
price_range_min, price_range_max	For a product with options priced differently ("Options from $499.00 - $899.00"): the lowest and the highest option price. price is the default option, not necessarily the lowest. An open-ended "From $7.41" gives a floor and no top. Both null for a single-price product.
original_price	The was-price. Null when the product is not reduced: the page sends none.
on_sale	True when original_price is above price.
discount_amount, discount_percent	Dollars off as the page sends them, and (1 - price / original_price) * 100 to one decimal, worked out from the prices. Null when not on sale, never 0.
unit_price	The per-unit price text as shown ($0.31/oz). Null when the card shows none (many non-grocery lines).
price_visibility	sign_in when the card says to sign in to see the price (the list still carries a figure, in price), in_cart when it says "See price in cart" (then price is null). Null for an ordinary price.
promotions	The promotion texts on the card ($40 off, Earn $15 Sam's Cash). Empty list when there are none.
has_options	True when the product has options (sizes or colours) that are separate sellable variants.
order_limit	The most a member may buy per order. Null when the page sends none.
rating, review_count	The average star rating (two decimals) and how many reviews it is from. Null for an unrated product; review_count is 0 when the page says 0 reviews and rating is then null too.
availability, in_stock	The page's availability value as sent (IN_STOCK, OUT_OF_STOCK) and a boolean for it.
fulfillment	Any of shipping, pickup, delivery, from the card's badges. Empty for a product the club does not currently fulfil: an out-of-stock card carries none.
snap_eligible	True when the card shows SNAP eligibility. Null when the page sends no flag.
image_url	The photo, a JPEG on i5.samsclubimages.com with the page's size parameters removed.

Example row (real values, 2026-10-17):

{
  "query": "tv",
  "position": 3,
  "sponsored": false,
  "product_id": "15505523006",
  "name": "VIZIO 50\" Class Quantum 4K QLED Smart TV",
  "url": "https://www.samsclub.com/ip/VIZIO-50-Class-Quantum-4K-QLED-Smart-TV/15505523006",
  "image_url": "https://i5.samsclubimages.com/asr/d412384f-1ad9-4ecd-b48f-13cb5ca85760.a63e0a539f4e7c077f8d70c2c518f556.jpeg",
  "product_type": "TV & Monitor Mounts",
  "category_ids": ["100001", "1086", "1087", "1088", "15190201"],
  "currency": "USD",
  "price": 208.0,
  "price_range_min": null,
  "price_range_max": null,
  "original_price": 248.0,
  "on_sale": true,
  "discount_amount": 40.0,
  "discount_percent": 16.1,
  "unit_price": null,
  "price_visibility": null,
  "promotions": ["$40 off"],
  "has_options": false,
  "order_limit": 5,
  "rating": 4.37,
  "review_count": 1766,
  "availability": "IN_STOCK",
  "in_stock": true,
  "fulfillment": ["shipping", "pickup", "delivery"],
  "snap_eligible": false
}

Honest nulls

A field the page did not send is null, never 0 or "". promotions, category_ids and fulfillment are empty lists when there are none.

• No brand. The list sends none (the brand is in the product name), so the rows do not carry one.
• No stock levels. in_stock says what the card says, nothing more.
• price can be null. A few cards say "See price in cart"; the price is not in the list at all.

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.
• $0.00062 per product row written (product-scraped), i.e. $0.62 per 1,000 products. A row that is not written is not charged: rows filtered by onlyOnSale, and repeats of a product another term already returned, are free.

How it fetches

It reads the product list that samsclub.com's own search and category pages embed in their page data. Measured 2026-10-17: HTTP 200 HTML (0.6 to 0.9 MB a page) from a plain home connection and from Apify datacenter addresses, no key or cookie needed. A refusal (403, 429, 5xx), a 200 that is not a Sam's Club page (the site's "Let us know you're not a robot" page) or whose list did not load, or a dropped connection is treated as the address being blocked, and the actor rotates to a fresh one and retries.

Things worth knowing, all measured:

• Page 1 is asked for with no page parameter. A request for page=1 from a client with no cookie yet is redirected to the bot-check page every time; page=2 and no page are not. The actor never sends page=1.
• The sort is checked, not trusted. Sam's Club ignores a sort name it does not know (best_seller, rating_high, new...) and answers in relevance order. The page says which sort it applied, and a run that did not get the sort it asked for fails that source rather than return the wrong order. The price sorts follow the current price, but not to the cent: the order comes from the site's search index, whose price can differ from the card's. In 90 tv products price_low had no pair out of order and price_high one or two (a card asking you to sign in for its price at a page boundary; 1198.00 listed after 1197.99).
• A search does not always return search results. shoes is redirected to /browse/shoes/1090111; tires, grill, toys, iphone and gift card to /cp/... landing pages, membership to the join page. The actor reads whatever list the site lands on, all its pages; a landing page with no list fails at no charge. query stays the term you typed. The redirect drops the sort, so the actor reads the first page again from the list when you asked for one.
• Depth. About 45 products per page and no page-size setting that behaves (ps changes the size unpredictably, so it is not used). The deepest list measured has 85 pages (a department of 3,807 products). A page past the last holds only the five sponsored cards every page carries, and the actor stops there; the last page is also recognised from maxPage. At most 10,000 products per term or page.
• Totals drift. The same search reported 136 and then 140 results, because the count includes the sponsored cards.
• Filters. facet=Brand:Samsung (or Brand:Samsung||Brand:LG) and cat_id=1087 narrow a result; a second facet= is ignored by the site. They are kept from a start URL. An unknown facet value leaves nothing but the sponsored cards, which are not returned.

If Sam's Club changes its page data, the run fails with a message instead of returning empty rows.