Shop Apotheke Product & Price Scraper (Germany)

Search Shop Apotheke, the German online pharmacy, by keyword and get one flat row per product: the current price in EUR, the UVP/AVP list price and the discount percent, the PZN, brand, pack size, price per unit, rating, stock status, whether it is a prescription medicine, and who sells it. Run it on a schedule and diff the dataset to get an OTC pharmacy price watch for Germany: which ibuprofen, vitamin D or nasal-spray packs went up or down, and how far each sits below its list price.

No account, no API key, no login, no browser. One request returns up to 100 products.

Input

Field	Notes
searchTerms	One or more search terms, one per line (ibuprofen 400, vitamin d, Voltaren). Each term is read on its own, down to the first 5,000 matches the shop serves for it. A product found by two terms is returned once, under the first.
startUrls	Shop Apotheke search pages, such as https://www.shop-apotheke.com/search.htm?q=ibuprofen; each is read as its search term. Category and brand pages (/erkaeltung/, /marken/voltaren/) are refused with the reason, see the limits below. Give terms, URLs or both.
maxItems	Products to return per term (default 100, up to 5,000).
onlyOnSale	Return only products the shop marks as reduced (on_sale true). The others are read but not returned and not charged.
sort	relevance (default), topseller, price-asc, price-desc, newest: the five choices of the site's own sort menu.
proxyConfiguration	Apify datacenter proxy by default.

Example input:

{
  "searchTerms": ["ibuprofen 400", "vitamin d"],
  "maxItems": 200,
  "onlyOnSale": false,
  "sort": "relevance"
}

Output

Prices are numbers in euros (the shop stores whole cents; 399 becomes 3.99). currency is the currency the offer states, EUR on every product measured.

Field	Notes
query, position	The search term that first found the product and its place in the shop's list for that term and sort (1 is first).
product_id, pzn, ean	The shop's product id, the PZN (Pharmazentralnummer) and the EAN barcode. pzn is null for marketplace partners' products, which have no PZN (their product_id starts with upm).
name, brand, manufacturer	As the shop shows them. brand falls back to the shop's internal brand when the public one is missing.
url, image_url	The product page and its photo.
price, list_price	price is the price now. list_price is the UVP/AVP the shop strikes through. They are equal when the shop shows no reduction. Null when the shop sends no price.
on_sale, discount_percent	on_sale is true when the shop reports a discount. discount_percent is the shop's own whole percent (it rounds). Null when the product is not reduced, never 0.
pack_size, base_price, base_price_unit	The pack (20 St), and the shop's price per unit (0.17 per 1 St). Null when the shop sends none.
rating, rating_count	Average of customer ratings and how many. rating is null when nobody has rated the product; the shop sends 0.0 for that and it is not a score.
in_stock, stock_status	The shop's flag and its status word as sent (available, out_of_stock, out_of_sale, not_in_catalog). An unavailable product can still carry a price.
prescription_only	True for a prescription medicine (Rx), which the shop lists but can only dispense against a prescription.
seller, marketplace_seller	Who holds the best offer: Shop Apotheke itself or a marketplace partner (marketplace_seller true).
variant_count	How many variants (sizes, flavours) the product has. Counted, not expanded: each variant is its own search hit when it is a separate product.

Example row (real values, 2026-10-16):

{
  "query": "Hansaplast Erste-Hilfe-Set",
  "position": 3,
  "product_id": "11663488",
  "pzn": "11663488",
  "name": "Hansaplast Erste Hilfe Pflaster Mix",
  "brand": "Hansaplast",
  "manufacturer": "Beiersdorf AG",
  "url": "https://www.shop-apotheke.com/arzneimittel/11663488/hansaplast-erste-hilfe-pflaster-mix-strips.htm",
  "image_url": "https://cdn.shop-apotheke.com/images/D11/663/488/D11663488-p1.jpg",
  "ean": "9005800330624",
  "currency": "EUR",
  "price": 3.49,
  "list_price": 3.75,
  "on_sale": true,
  "discount_percent": 7,
  "pack_size": "20 St",
  "base_price": 0.17,
  "base_price_unit": "1 St",
  "rating": 4.8,
  "rating_count": 23,
  "in_stock": true,
  "stock_status": "available",
  "prescription_only": false,
  "seller": "Shop Apotheke",
  "marketplace_seller": false,
  "variant_count": 1
}

Honest nulls

A field the shop did not send is null, never 0 or "". Some hits carry no price at all; their row is still returned with null price, and so are products that are out of stock but still priced. Marketplace products have no PZN.

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.
• $0.0014 per product row written (product-scraped), i.e. $1.40 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

Shop Apotheke's search box queries an Algolia search index, and its public search-only key is embedded in every page the shop serves. The actor asks that same index for the same results, one request per page of up to 100 products, the way the shop's own search does. The HTML search page cannot be used for paging: it shows 30 products and ignores page, p and i (each was tried on 2026-10-16). A refusal (403, 429, 5xx), a 200 that is not the index's answer, 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 on 2026-10-16:

• Only the first 5,000 matches of a term can be read. The index answers a page past that with an empty list. A term with more matches than that is logged with its count; narrow the term (ibuprofen 400 20 st) to see the rest. The match count is approximate: the engine does not count exhaustively.
• A term is matched loosely. Typo tolerance is on, so a nonsense word can still match a few products, and a very common word matches thousands.
• Category and brand pages are not supported. Their product list is loaded by the browser after the page, with filters the page never prints, so only search URLs are accepted in startUrls. Use the brand or category name as a search term instead.
• Sort orders are separate indexes, not re-orderings. The same term can match a different set of products under price-asc than under relevance (Hansaplast Erste-Hilfe-Set: 52 matches by relevance, 2 by price). The price orders are not strict for every term: products without a price sit among the priced ones. This is what the shop's own sort menu shows.
• onlyOnSale is applied after reading. Asking the index to filter on discount widens the match to unrelated products (metamizol has 62 matches, none on sale, and the filtered query returned 12 others), so the actor reads the term and keeps the reduced products. maxItems counts the reduced products returned, so a term with few reductions is read to the end.
• The order can differ slightly from a browser. The website personalises its list; 29 of the first 30 products matched in the comparison.
• The key is public but can change. If the shop rotates it, requests are refused with HTTP 403 and the run fails with that message.

Use it from the API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/<your-username>~shop-apotheke-products/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"searchTerms": ["ibuprofen 400"], "maxItems": 50}'