kestrel actors › Ecommerce

eBay Scraper — Search, Listings, Prices & Sellers

An eBay scraper that turns search results and item pages into clean rows: price, struck-through list price, shipping cost, condition, buying format, bids and time left, units sold, watchers, seller feedback score and percentage, item location and image. No API key, no login, no browser. It reads the same public pages a shopper sees, on 18 marketplaces, and bills you per listing row it actually delivers. Use it for ebay price research, for bulk ebay product data, and as an ebay api alternative when the official Browse API's onboarding is more than your project needs.

Run eBay Scraper on Apify →

eBay scraper pricing: what one row costs

Pay per event: $0.003 per listing row, and nothing else. There is no per-run start fee and no compute charge on top.

• A search that returns nothing is free.
• Listings where eBay withholds the price ("See price") are dropped free whenever you have set a price bound.
• Rows dropped by your price bounds are free.
• A listing found by two of your keywords is delivered and billed once per run.
• status rows are free.
• If your spending limit is reached mid-run, the run stops delivering rather than delivering rows it could not charge for — you never receive unpaid data and never pay for data you did not receive.

One page of 60 listings is $0.18. A daily two-page watch on five keywords is about $1.80 a month.

eBay scraper input reference

Every field of eBay Search & Listings, straight from the actor's input schema.

Example input

{
  "queries": ["mechanical keyboard", "keycap set"],
  "domain": "com",
  "pages": 2,
  "maxResultsPerQuery": 60
}

{
  "startUrls": [
    "https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_nkw=lego+star+wars&_sacat=19006",
    "https://www.ebay.de/sch/i.html?_nkw=nintendo+switch+oled"
  ],
  "pages": 3
}

eBay scraper output fields

Two row types share one dataset: item (one eBay listing from a search page or an item page, charged) and status (one per keyword or URL, free).

Dataset views in the Apify Console: Overview, Demand signals, Sellers, Price research, Item pages, Run status.

eBay scraper in Python, JavaScript and curl

Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("kestrel/ebay-search-scraper").call(run_input={
    "queries": ["mechanical keyboard"],
    "pages": 2,
    "minPrice": 30,
    "maxPrice": 200,
})
for row in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    if row["type"] == "item":
        print(row["price"], row["currency"], row["units_sold"], row["title"])

JavaScript (Node)

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: '<YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN>' });
const run = await client.actor('kestrel/ebay-search-scraper').call({
    queries: ['keycap set'],
    pages: 1,
    sortBy: 'price_low',
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items.filter((r) => r.type === 'item').length, 'listings');

curl

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/kestrel~ebay-search-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"queries":["vintage pocket watch"],"buyingFormat":"auction","pages":1}'

The same three calls are runnable files in the examples repository: examples/ebay-search-scraper.py|.js|.sh.

Limits and honest notes

FAQ

How many listings are on each eBay page?

Sixty. The actor requests _ipg=60, which is eBay's ceiling. pages: 3 therefore reads up to 180 listings per job. eBay stops paginating any single search at roughly 2000 items however many it reports in results_total, which is why pages is capped at 34.

Why did my search return no rows?

Either eBay genuinely found nothing, or the run was refused. The two are never confused: a genuine miss produces a status row with status: "no_results" and costs nothing, and a refusal produces status: "error" with the reason. This matters more than it sounds — eBay's zero-result page still renders about twenty "results matching fewer words" cards from other searches, and a scraper that delivers those bills you for listings you never asked for. This one drops them.

Do I need a proxy?

Yes, and Apify Proxy is the default. eBay is behind Akamai Bot Manager and refuses unrotated callers with a /splashui/challenge interstitial. The run opens several proxy sessions, warms each one against the marketplace homepage, paces every session separately, retries on a different IP whenever a page is refused, and escalates from datacentre to residential proxies by itself once eBay has pushed back twice. Measured at one request per second on 2026-08-29: datacentre answered 5 of 10 searches and residential 8 of 10, so with retries a run completes reliably on either.

Are sponsored listings flagged?

There is deliberately no sponsored column. eBay's current results page prints the (deliberately obfuscated) "Sponsored" disclosure on every card — 60 of 60 on four different searches across two marketplaces and both buying formats, all from the same organic results module. A column that is always true is worse than no column, so we left it out and documented the finding instead.

Can I track prices over time?

Yes — schedule the run and keep the datasets. Each row carries fetched_at, item_id and price, which is everything a time series needs. A daily run of the same keywords, appended to one table and grouped by item_id, gives you an ebay price tracker with the listing's units_sold and watchers moving alongside the price, which is far more informative than the price alone.

What about eBay Kleinanzeigen or eBay Motors?

Kleinanzeigen is a separate site with its own markup and is not covered. Motors listings are ordinary eBay listings and come back like any other, though vehicle-specific attributes live in item_specifics on item-page rows rather than in dedicated columns.

Is scraping eBay legal?

This actor reads only publicly available pages — the same search results and item pages any visitor sees without logging in — and collects no personal data beyond the seller usernames and store names eBay itself publishes next to every listing. Public-data scraping of this kind is broadly lawful in the US and the EU, and courts have repeatedly declined to treat access to a public web page as unauthorised access. That is not the whole story, though: eBay's own Terms of Service restrict automated access, so scraping can be a contractual matter between you and eBay even where it is not a legal one. You are responsible for your own use — respect robots directives and rate limits, do not republish listing content wholesale, keep collection proportionate to your purpose, and take your own legal advice for anything commercial. We do not scrape anything behind a login, and we will not: that is exactly why the sold-listings view above is absent rather than faked.

How do I find an eBay category id?

Open any eBay category in a browser and read the _sacat number out of the URL, or click into a category from a search and copy it from the address bar. Pass it as category and every keyword in the run is searched inside that category only.

How to use eBay Scraper

• Which Review Sites Can Be Scraped Without a Browser — Measured evidence for 14 review sources: which answer a plain HTTP client, which need a TLS fingerprint, which need a browser, and which are closed.
• How to Scrape eBay Listings (Sold Items Are Closed) — eBay active listings scrape cleanly; sold listings are sign-in walled — 0 of 115 attempts. What to use instead, plus the decoy cards on every page.
• How to Track Competitor Prices Daily with n8n — A schedule, one HTTP node, a compare-with-yesterday code node and an alert. The workflow shape that turns any price scraper into a daily drop feed.

Related scrapers

• Amazon Product Scraper — full product detail pages by ASIN, with pricing, availability, specifications and Best Sellers Rank.
• Amazon Search Scraper — keyword rank and search results across Amazon marketplaces.
• Amazon Best Sellers Scraper — category charts and new releases, for demand ranking rather than price.

Run eBay Scraper

The actor lives on the Apify Store, where the pricing tab carries the live per-row price and the input form has every field above: apify.com/kestrel/ebay-search-scraper