eBay Keywords Discovery Tool

What does eBay Keywords Discovery Tool do?

eBay Keywords Discovery Tool is an eBay autocomplete API alternative for discovering public search phrases from a seed keyword. It requests the selected eBay marketplace's public autocomplete response, keeps only suggestion text evidenced by that response, deduplicates it, and adds transparent SEO metadata such as word count, expansion type, marketplace, and public search URL.

The Actor does not sign in, use private endpoints, replay protected browser state, use mirrors, or bypass CAPTCHA, WAF, rate, device, paywall, login, or geographic controls. When eBay indicates an access boundary, the Actor stops expanding queries and writes a diagnostic row with found: false and dataAvailable: false.

Why use eBay Keywords Discovery Tool?

Use the results for eBay SEO research, product-listing brainstorming, catalog taxonomy, content planning, and marketplace comparison. The Actor supports:

• Seed-only discovery or bounded A-Z append/prepend expansion.
• US, UK, German, French, Italian, and Spanish eBay site IDs.
• A configurable maximum of 1–1,000 unique suggestions.
• Sequential requests with short pacing, bounded retries, request timeouts, and a 1 MB streaming response cap.
• Explicit success, partial, failure, and access-boundary diagnostics.

Because it is an Apify Actor, you can schedule runs, use the API tab for programmatic access, connect the dataset to integrations, and monitor run logs. This Actor uses the public endpoint directly; it has no proxy input and does not use proxy rotation as an access-control workaround.

What data can the Actor extract?

Field	Type	Description
recordId	string	Stable suggestion or diagnostic identifier.
keyword	string	Public eBay autocomplete suggestion.
keywordModifier	string	Text added around the seed phrase.
wordCount	integer	Number of words in the suggestion.
expansionType	string	Base, appended-letter, prepended-letter, or diagnostic stage.
marketplaceName	string	Selected eBay marketplace.
searchUrl	string	Public eBay search URL for the suggestion.
found	boolean	Whether the row contains public keyword evidence.
dataAvailable	boolean	Whether public response data was available for the row.
sourceUrl	string	Exact public autocomplete URL used as evidence.
accessStatus	string	success, blocked, or error.
diagnostics	object	Bounded reason and request context when evidence is unavailable.

How to scrape eBay autocomplete keywords

1. Open the Actor's Input tab.
2. Enter a public seed phrase such as wireless earbuds.
3. Choose seed for one request or letters for bounded long-tail expansion.
4. Select the eBay site and set maxSuggestions.
5. Run the Actor and open the dataset in the Output tab.

Leave userAgent blank unless you need a fixed, identifiable request header for your own network policy. It is not an access-control bypass mechanism.

How much does it cost?

The Actor has no separate per-result fee. Apify billing depends on the compute time and storage used by your plan. seed mode makes one bounded request; letters mode can make more sequential requests until the result limit, an access boundary, or the failure budget is reached. Keeping the result limit and expansion mode appropriate for the research task helps control compute usage.

Input

See the Input tab for the complete configuration. seedKeyword is required. maxSuggestions defaults to 100, mode defaults to letters, and siteId defaults to US (0). userAgent is optional and fixed when supplied.

Output

You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel. A simplified result can look like this:

[
  {
    "position": 1,
    "keyword": "wireless earbuds noise cancelling",
    "keywordModifier": "noise cancelling",
    "found": true,
    "dataAvailable": true,
    "actorStatus": "success"
  },
  {
    "keyword": null,
    "found": false,
    "dataAvailable": false,
    "actorStatus": "blocked",
    "diagnostics": {
      "code": "rate_limited",
      "message": "The public eBay endpoint rate-limited the request."
    }
  }
]

Tips and troubleshooting

Use seed mode for a quick check and letters mode for broader discovery. An empty result is not converted into a guessed keyword: inspect errorCategory and diagnostics. If the dataset reports captcha, login_required, paywall, geofence, rate_limited, device_blocked, waf_blocked, or access_denied, wait, review the marketplace's public availability, or stop the run. Do not attempt to bypass the boundary.

Key-value store

The actor does not write custom key-value records. Keyword suggestion and diagnostic rows are stored in the dataset; the declared key-value store is intentionally empty.

FAQ, disclaimer, and support

Does this Actor scrape private eBay data? No. It extracts only public autocomplete suggestion text and response metadata returned without authentication.

Our Actors are ethical and do not extract private user data, such as email addresses, gender, or location. They only extract what the user has chosen to share publicly. You should not scrape personal data unless you have a legitimate reason to do so; consult your lawyers if you are unsure.

For programmatic use, see the API tab. For feedback or a reproducible problem, use the Issues tab and include the input mode, site ID, status, and diagnostic category without sharing credentials.