What you Need to Scrape Etsy Product Data: Methods, Services, and Challenges

3 Methods to Scrape Etsy

Before getting deep into scraping methods, let’s check out what products-related data you can scrape and download from Etsy. For example, you can scrape Etsy sales data, Etsy price history, Etsy sellers name, or just download Etsy reviews, and many other valuable data for further analysis. This could be very helpful to identify your target audience, make competitor research, or develop your sales strategy.

Building Etsy Scraper

In order to build a web scraper on your own, you need to have some basic programming skills. So, this method is reasonable for those enthusiasts who are ready to accept challenges, go deep in programming, and learn something new. To retrieve product data from Etsy you can use the following languages:

Now let’s review a simple Etsy scraper built with Python and the BeautifulSoup. In this example, it is planned to scrape just price data for a specific product type. So, first, it is needed to import the BeautifulSoup, Pyperclip, and Requests modules.

The next part of the code is showing that it was created an HTTP request to the Etsy product list.

As it was planned to scrape just the price, the corresponding parameters were taken from Chrome’s inspector tool.

Not let’s get back to the Python program and paste in the code line:

And here it is, how the entire code looks like:

Using Etsy Web Scraping Tool

For those interested persons who are ready to pay for scraping tools, there are many options on the market. These tools are specially designed to make data scraping an easy process without any coding. You just need to know your requests and the tools will scrape them for you. With the help of these tools, you can easily scrape product descriptions, images, prices, sellers’ lists as well as products’ rankings and reviews.

Outsourcing Etsy Data Scraping

When it comes to data scraping, most business owners are still confused between purchasing a data scraping tool or outsourcing this job to web scraping companies which are expert in delivering data the way it is needed. Web scraping companies are more reliable and experienced. Let’s go through some advantages that you might have by choosing outsourcing Etsy data scraping:

Challenges in Scraping Etsy

In scraping e-commerce data there are some obstacles that might block you from getting quality product data. Especially, this should be taken into account, when you’re scraping data by yourself.

Scraping at a large scale

As a rule e-commerce data extraction implies large-scale scrapping which can be a real challenge for business owners. Anyhow, scraping an enormous amount of data from e-commerce websites like 50+ subcategories under several main categories isn’t an easygoing task. So, all the related measures should be taken for successful data scraping, and only true scraping experts can handle it faster by avoiding lower data quality.

Getting Blacklisted

Another challenge is getting blocked. The most common reason is IP addresses. When you send many requests for data within a certain period of time, the web server understands that it is a bot and blocks the corresponding IP address. There are many techniques that reduce the chance of being blocked, like:

Anti-scraping techniques

One more challenge that you may face is the Captcha issue – one of the most popular anti-scraping techniques. It is used not to overload the server by sending too many requests. Simple Captchas like for login can be resolved by a specially designed web scraper, but there are many anti-Captcha providers who solve advanced mathematical Captchas or image-based Captcha.