eBay Category Products Scraper

The Actor pages through an eBay category browse listing and saves the items it contains, recording for each one its item ID, its link, and the page it was found on. Enabling enrichItemDetails adds the full item page to every row, which turns a list of IDs into a list of priced, described products at the cost of one extra request per item.

{
  "category": "https://www.ebay.com/b/Womens-Shoes/3034/bn_740022",
  "startPage": 1,
  "maxItems": 100,
  "enrichItemDetails": false
}

Accepted input

category is required and takes an eBay category browse link of the form https://www.ebay.com/b/<slug>/<category_id>/bn_<bn_id>. A link is the input rather than a category ID because the listing is identified by three values together — the slug, the category ID, and the browse-node ID — and those three appear side by side only inside the browse URL. A value that is not a browse link is rejected before any request is made rather than resolved to a guess. The eBay Category Tree Scraper publishes a usable link for every category eBay lists.

startPage defaults to 1 and sets the page the walk begins on. maxItems bounds the number of records saved and defaults to 100; a value of 0 disables the bound. enrichItemDetails defaults to false.

Result fields

Without enrichment each row carries item_id, url, and page. A category browse listing publishes only identifiers and links; the title, price, and condition are not present on it and are not inferred.

With enrichItemDetails enabled each row additionally carries title, price, currency, image_url, images, condition, availability, brand, mpn, gtin, model, breadcrumbs, seller, store_name, and item_detail. page is preserved through enrichment, since only the listing knows which page a row came from.

{
  "item_id": "157392565949",
  "url": "https://www.ebay.com/itm/157392565949",
  "page": 1,
  "title": "adidas women Grand Court 2.0 Shoes",
  "price": 24,
  "currency": "USD",
  "condition": "New",
  "brand": "adidas",
  "store_name": "adidas"
}

How the walk advances, and where it stops

Pages are independent fetches rather than steps along a cursor. A page number requested twice can come back composed differently, and consecutive pages overlap by a handful of promoted listings, so the run keeps every item ID it has already saved and yields each one only once. The walk ends when maxItems is reached, when a page comes back empty, or when two consecutive pages contain nothing that has not already been saved. That last condition matters because the listing publishes no end-of-results flag; without it an exhausted category would be requested indefinitely.

Page size is set by eBay and is not uniform. Large categories return roughly 65 to 70 items per page, but a narrow category can return far fewer — a single-digit page is normal near the end of one, and is not a sign the run failed. A run that saves fewer rows than maxItems has reached the end of the category, not an error.

Resuming a long category

startPage exists for categories too large to walk in one run. A run that stops at page 40 can be continued by starting the next at 41. Because pages are independent fetches, a resumed run does not share the earlier run's record of what it has already saved, so a small overlap between two runs is expected; deduplicating the combined dataset on item_id removes it.

What enrichment costs

Enrichment is one additional request per item and is charged per item as a separate event, billed only after the item page has been read successfully. An item whose page cannot be read keeps its listing row unchanged and is not charged. Enriching a run of 1,000 items therefore means 1,000 extra requests, which is why the setting is off by default; where a full product record is needed for a known list of IDs rather than a whole category, the eBay Product Scraper is the direct route.

Related Actors

The eBay Category Tree Scraper supplies the category links this Actor takes and is the natural first run. For a seller's catalogue rather than a category, use the eBay Store Scraper; for eBay's current promotions, the eBay Deals Scraper. The eBay Keyword Tool covers keyword research, which this Actor does not do.