How to Scrape eBay Search Results

In the world of e-commerce, eBay is one of the largest online marketplaces, along with Amazon, Walmart, Etsy, Alibaba, Rakuten... Scraping eBay search results brings massive value to businesses, researchers, and consumers, such as market research and competitor analysis, pricing intelligence, product research and development, consumer insights, and enhancing buying decisions.

Scraping eBay search results can be challenging, especially scraping data consistently and at scale. There are some common challenges when scraping huge amounts of data from eBay: bypassing CAPTCHAs, IP blocking, session timeouts, dynamic web structure, pagination and infinite scrolling, data variability complexity, and legal and ethical considerations. Luckily you don't need to tackle these problems. SerpApi takes care of them and provides high-quality eBay Search Results APIs for your usage. By using SerpApi, you save a lot of time and can concentrate on your business.

Let's dive in!

Setting up a SerpApi account

SerpApi offers a free plan for newly created accounts. Head to the sign-up page to register for an account and do your first search with our interactive playground. When you want to do more searches with us, please visit the pricing page.

Once you are familiar with all results, you can utilize SERP APIs using your API Key.

Scrape your first eBay Search Results with SerpApi

Head to the eBay engine documentation on SerpApi for details.

In this tutorial, we will scrape the eBay search results - organic results containing: titles, links, thumbnails, prices, sellers…

We will be using Ruby in this example, and the process is similar to other languages like Python, Node, Java, Javascript, etc.

First, you need to install the SerpApi client in your Gemfile.

gem 'google_search_results'

Then install the gem.

bundle install

Set up the SerpApi credentials and search.

EbaySearch.api_key = "YOUR_API_KEY"
search = EbaySearch.new(_nkw: "coffee")

puts search.get_hash

To retrieve the eBay organic results for a given search query, you can use the following code:

results = search.get_hash[:organic_results]

You can store eBay organic results in databases or export them to a CSV file.

require 'csv'

CSV.open("organic_results.csv", "w") do |csv|
  csv << ["title", "link", "thumbnail", "price", "seller"]
  results.each do |organic_result|
    price = organic_result.dig(:price, :raw).presence || organic_result.dig(:price, :from, :raw)
    csv << [organic_result[:title], organic_result[:link], organic_result[:thumbnail], price, organic_result.dig(:seller, :username)]
  end
end

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.