Table of Contents
Introduction
When you collect product data from huge e-commerce websites like Alibaba you get a great opportunity to do comprehensive competitive research, market analysis, and price comparison. It is one of the leading e-commerce portals with an enormous product catalog. However, extracting the required Alibaba data is a real challenge if you are not familiar with web scraping. But if you know the stuff and have some coding skills go through this article to find out how to extract Alibaba products’ data through Scrapy – one of the most widely used open-source frameworks for web scraping.
3 Reasons to Scrape Alibaba.com
Data extracted from e-commerce websites is a potential help to businesses that are in e-commerce and not only. Keep reading to learn three main reasons why you need to scrape data from Alibaba.
Cataloging and listing

Analyzing data

Comparing prices

How to Create an Alibaba Crawler
Written in Python, Scrapy is one of the most efficient free frameworks for web scraping that enables the users to extract, manage, and store information in a structured data format. It is perfectly adapted for web crawlers extracting details from various pages. Let’s move forward to learn how to scrape data from the leading marketplace.Getting started
To create an Alibaba crawler you need to have Python 3 and PIP. Follow the links to download them: To install the necessary packages, the following command is used:
Extracting Product Data from Alibaba
In this example, we’re going to extract the following fields for the earphones: https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product_en&CatId=&SearchText=earphones&viewtype=G</a > To extract the required data from Alibaba we’re going through the following 3 steps:- Create a Selectorlib library
- Create a keyword file
- Export data in the required format
Creating a Selectorlib pattern for Alibaba
Selectorlib is a Chrome extension enabling users to point out the required data and create CSS Selectors or XPaths to extract that data. To learn more about Selectorlib go to the following link https://selectorlib.com/getting-started.html</a > Below you may find how we point out the fields in the code for the required data we need to extract from Alibaba using Selectorlib
Reading keywords
Now we’re going to set up the Alibaba crawler to read specific keywords from a certain file placed in the folder /resources. Let’s create there a CSV file named keywords.csv and use Python’s CSV module to read our keywords file.

Exporting data into CSV or JSON
With Scrapy you can have in-built JSON and CSV formats. To save the extracted data in the desired format just use the appropriate command line


Final Thoughts
To sum up, we can state that creating the Alibaba crawler is not an easy task. So, if you make up your mind to outsource Alibaba product data extraction to a dedicated web scraping service, a provider like DataOx will free you of the complications in web crawling. Schedule a free consultation with our expert</a > to reveal the whole list of our web scraping services and learn how DataOx can help you to scrape Alibaba data on a large scale.