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Web scraping online shops like eBay and Amazon has become a critically important data source, allowing you to do the comparison between hot-sale products from prices, features, and product descriptions, conveniently. 

In this tutorial, you will learn how to scrape product data from eBay.

You can go to "Task Template" on the main screen of the Octoparse scraping tool and start with the ready-to-use eBay Templates directly to save your time. With this feature, there is no need to configure scraping tasks. For further details, you may check it out here: Task Templates

If you would like to know how to build the task from scratch, you may continue reading the following tutorial. We will scrape data such as the name, condition, price, and more info from the product details page with Octoparse.

To follow through, you may want to use this URL in the tutorial:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/Digital-Cameras-/31388/i.html

We are going to scrape the product information of "digital camera" on eBay. Check out the main steps in the tutorial below [Download task file]

1. "Go To Web Page" - open the target web page

2. Auto-detect web page data - create the workflow

3. Select the link to scrape data from the detail page

4. Extract data from the product detail page

5. Modify the XPath of the data fields

6. Start extraction - run the task and get the data

1. "Go To Web Page" - open the target web page

• Enter the example URL and click "Start"

2. Auto-detect web page data - create the workflow

• Click "Auto-detect web page data" and wait for the detection to complete

• Delete unwanted fields or modify field names in the Data Preview

• Uncheck the "Add a page scroll"
• Choose "Create workflow" on the Tips panel

You will now get the workflow below.

If all the data you need could be scraped from the listing page, you can stop here and jump to Start extraction - run the task and get the data. If you want to go to each product detail page to get more info, follow the steps below.

3. Select the link to scrape data from the detail page

• Choose "Click on link(s) to scrape the linked page(s)"
• Choose "Title_URL" from the drop-down option 
• Choose "Confirm"

Octoparse would automatically go to the first product detail page.

4. Extract data from the product detail page

• Click the element(s) you want and choose "Extract the text of the element"

• Double click on the field name to rename it if needed

5. Modify the XPath of the data fields

You may need to modify the XPath of some data fields that do not show on every product page, or the field position varies from page to page, like MPN or UPC. We can modify the XPath to make the data scraping more precise. No worries! We have prepared some frequently-used XPaths for you. You can just use the element XPath provided below.

• Click "More"
• Click on "Customize XPath"

• Replace the XPath with the revised one
  • MPN: //td[contains(text(),'MPN')]/following-sibling::td[1]
  • EAN: //td[contains(text(),'EAN')]/following-sibling::td[1]
  • UPC: //td[contains(text(),'UPC')]/following-sibling::td[1]
  • Item Weight: //td[contains(text(),'Item Weight')]/following-sibling::td[1]
• Click "Apply" to save

6. Start extraction - run the task and get the data

• Click 
• Click  on the upper left side
• Select "Run task on your device" to run the task on your computer, or select "Run task in the Cloud" to run it on our Cloud servers (for premium users only)

Here is the sample output. 

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Happy Data Hunting!

Author: The Octoparse Team

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