eBay Keyword Suggestions Scraper

The Actor expands seed keywords into the completions eBay's own search box offers shoppers, saving one record per suggestion. Each seed is looked up separately, and a live lookup returns up to ten completions.

{
  "keywords": ["lego", "running shoes"],
  "maxItems": 100
}

Accepted input

keywords is required and accepts a list of partial or complete search terms; surrounding whitespace is trimmed and blank entries are dropped before any request is made. Each entry is one lookup, so a list of fifty seeds is fifty requests.

maxItems bounds the number of records saved across the whole run rather than per keyword, and defaults to 100; a value of 0 disables the bound. With several seeds and a low bound, the run fills from the first seed before reaching the second.

Result fields

Each row carries keyword, the seed that was looked up, and suggestion, one completion eBay offers for it.

{ "keyword": "lego", "suggestion": "lego star wars" }

One row per suggestion is deliberate rather than one row per keyword holding an array. Exported to CSV, the result is a column that can be sorted, deduplicated across seeds, and fed back into this Actor as a second round of seeds, none of which requires unpacking a nested field first.

What a suggestion means, and what it does not

These are the completions eBay's search box offers as a shopper types, ordered as eBay ranks them. That ordering reflects what eBay considers relevant and popular for the seed, which makes the list a usable demand signal for writing listing titles and choosing terms to target.

It is not search volume. eBay publishes no figure for how often a suggestion is searched, and none is inferred here; the only information in the ranking is the relative order eBay itself assigns. A suggestion's position is therefore comparable within one seed's results and not across different seeds.

Seeds that return nothing

A seed for which eBay offers no completions contributes no rows and does not stop the run; the remaining seeds are looked up normally. A request that fails outright is treated the same way, so one bad seed in a list costs only that seed's rows. A run whose keywords list is empty is rejected before any request is made.

Broad seeds return more useful expansions than narrow ones. A seed that is already a complete, specific product title frequently returns nothing at all, because there is nothing left for eBay to complete.

Related Actors

Suggestions from this Actor describe what shoppers search for; the categories eBay files listings under are a separate axis, listed by the eBay Category Tree Scraper and browsable with the eBay Category Products Scraper. To see what is actually listed and at what price against a term, use the eBay Product Scraper for known listings, the eBay Store Scraper for a competitor's range, or the eBay Deals Scraper for what eBay is currently promoting.