Lean Shopify Scraper

The Shopify scraper that bills you for what you actually need.

If you only need daily price tracking, you shouldn't be paying for review scraping every run. This actor splits Shopify storefront extraction into three explicit modes with separate billing — pick the tier that matches your job.

Why use this actor?

Most Shopify actors bundle everything together: product data, variants, images, review aggregation, sales estimates. A dropshipper running a daily price-watch on 1,000 products pays for review scraping they don't need — every run, forever.

Lean Shopify Scraper has three modes:

Mode	Price	Returns	Best for
Price	$1.50 / 1K products	current price, compare-at price, availability, sold-out variant ratio	Daily price-watch, dynamic repricing, discount detection
Catalog	$4 / 1K products	+ variants, images, tags, description, vendor, SKU, barcode	Product research, dropshipping, catalog import
Full	$8 / 1K products	+ review-app aggregation (Judge.me / Yotpo / Loox / Okendo / Stamped), sales estimate	Competitor intelligence, full audits

v0.1 ships with Price and Catalog modes. Full mode is on the roadmap below.

How it stands apart

• 100% parse success rate on every reachable Shopify store in our 20-store benchmark (see test-results/real-stores-report.json). Run npm run test:real to reproduce.
• Correct SKU merging — consolidated product pages return one row per product, not one per SKU. (Some popular alternatives don't do this.)
• No silent failures — HTTP 430 security rejections, 429 rate limits, malformed JSON, and blocked endpoints all surface as named errors in the run log with full per-store context. Crashed runs tell you exactly which store failed and why.
• Built-in retry-with-backoff — 429 and 5xx errors retry automatically with exponential backoff, honouring Retry-After. 430 / 4xx errors do not retry (they won't fix themselves).
• Cents-based price math — no float drift on 19.99 + 0.01. Output uses integer minor units; divide by 100 in your downstream code.

Quick start

Minimal input

{
  "mode": "price",
  "storeUrls": ["https://allbirds.com"]
}

Full input schema

{
  "mode": "price",
  "storeUrls": [
    "https://allbirds.com",
    "https://gymshark.com"
  ],
  "maxProductsPerStore": 500,
  "delayMs": 1500
}

Sample output (Price mode)

{
  "storeUrl": "https://allbirds.com",
  "productId": 6616124981328,
  "handle": "trino-cozy-crew-heathered-onyx",
  "title": "Trino® Cozy Crew - Heathered Onyx",
  "vendor": "Allbirds",
  "productType": "Socks",
  "minPriceCents": 2400,
  "maxPriceCents": 2400,
  "compareAtMinCents": null,
  "compareAtMaxCents": null,
  "hasDiscount": false,
  "variantCount": 4,
  "soldOutCount": 3,
  "soldOutRatio": 0.75,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-27T15:53:23.620Z"
}

A soldOutRatio near 1.0 with the product still listed is one of the strongest demand signals in Shopify catalog data — buyers want this product enough to clear most variants, and the store is slow to restock.

Pricing — concrete examples

Scenario	Mode	Run cost
Daily price check on 1,000 products	Price	$1.50 / day → ~$45/mo
Full catalog ingest of 5,000 products (one-time)	Catalog	$20
Competitor audit with reviews + sales estimate on 500 products	Full	$4

Compare with bundled-billing actors that charge $4–$7 per 1K regardless of fields requested.

Comparison vs current alternatives (Apify Store, May 2026)

Feature	Lean Shopify Scraper	autofacts/shopify	webdatalabs/shopify-product-scraper
Modular billing (Price / Catalog / Full)	✅	❌	❌
Proper SKU merging on product pages	✅	❌ (documented limitation)	✅
Explicit 430 / 429 / parse error logging	✅	partial	partial
Retry-with-backoff + Retry-After honored	✅	partial	partial
Cents-based price math (no float drift)	✅	✅	❓
Review-app aggregation (Judge.me / Yotpo / Loox / Okendo)	Full mode (v0.2)	❌	✅
Published parse success rate	100% on 20/20 reachable stores	not published	not published

Roadmap

• v0.2 — Sitemap-based pagination for catalogs >5K products; Web Bot Auth signed requests (significantly fewer 429s)
• v0.3 — Full mode (review-app aggregation + algorithmic sales estimate)
• v0.4 — Diff / webhook mode for price-change alerts on a watched set
• v0.5 — DACH-specific support (CHF / EUR rounding, VAT-inclusive prices, German review platforms)

Limitations

• Currently scrapes the public /products.json endpoint only. Stores with >5,000 products will lose tail items until sitemap pagination ships in v0.2.
• "Sales estimate" in Full mode is algorithmic (based on review volume + recency). It is not actual transaction data — treat as directional.
• Stores that have moved off Shopify return a NOT_SHOPIFY error (HTML body instead of JSON). The actor classifies this clearly rather than silently returning empty.

Local development

npm install
npm test          # unit tests (vitest)
npm run test:real # integration test against ~33 real Shopify stores
npm run build     # compile TypeScript
npm run start:dev # run locally with storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json

Status

v0.1 — Price and Catalog modes in production. 38 unit tests + 33-store integration suite passing.