eBay is one of the trustable and popular buy and sell marketplaces out there. eBay was founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar. It is one of the largest platforms for which helps with consumer-to-consumer (C2C) and business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions.

This is the website where people around the world buy and sell products & services through the auction and through the shopping site. During 1995, the internet was evolving and the founder of eBay knew how the internet is going to change the buying and selling in the future.

At present, we can see how buying and selling have been changed. The presence of the internet made it easy to connect buyers and sellers from different corners of the world. Over time, the buyers and sellers on this platform started to grow.

The presence of the internet has been a great opportunity for business owners to avoid limiting their business to a particular area. It allowed entrepreneurs to grow their business worldwide and gain better returns. 

With the passage of time, the competition in this platform also increased for sellers. Just like an offline business, data plays an important role in online business as well. This is when the importance of web scraping eBay comes in. Before selling anything online, you need to have a detailed idea about your product. You need to make sure the product or service you are selling is of the right price and quality.

Why People Are Scraping eBay?

For a complete new eBay seller, it can be confusing why actually other sellers find need to scrape eBay listings. Because the market is becoming more and more competitive, it is essential to set the pricing of your product after knowing your competitors’ price. 

This is when the role of a good eBay scraper tool comes in. In order to consistently collect all the pricing data of your competitors’ products, you will need the help of an eBay scraper. Gathering and tracking data of your competitors will help you adjust your products’ pricing and know what products are in demand.

eBay Proxy

It is never a good idea to manually copy and paste all the products from the eBay website. Using an eBay proxy for data scraping can help you automate this task. Here are some major reasons why people are scraping eBay listings  and why you should consider scraping eBay:

  • Get an idea about your competitors’ pricing on eBay so that you can price your products accordingly. Let say, if you are selling on Amazon, Flipkart, or eBay itself, knowing the price of your competitors’ products will give you an idea about how much price you should set for your products. People selling on other marketplaces (Amazon, Flipkart, Walmart, etc. are also your competitors.
  • Using a scraping tool, you can also get an idea about which products are in huge demand on eBay. When you figure out that a particular product is in high demand, you can list that product and start getting good sales.
  • The best thing about scraping listings is it helps to save a lot of time and energy. If you do it manually (copying and pasting), it will take so much time. You can your time by using a good tool.
  • Using an eBay scraping tool, you can also check out the best and worst reviews for different products within your niche.

So these are some major reasons why people are scraping eBay. Using a tool is far better than doing it manually because it helps to save time.

Some eBay Scraping Software

So now you understand the importance of using an eBay scraping software, now you should figure out which scraping software you can use for the best results. There are many eBay data scraping tools out there in the market. You can select any good tool and start gathering the data. Some eBay scraping software are:

Octoparse

Octoparse is the tool that helps to collect different important data of your competitors’ products. Just like any other web scraping tool, you can gather information like price, features, product descriptions, etc. This tool does not require you to go through the complex procedures in order to collect the data. You just need to get the URL for web scraping and get started with the process.

ParseHub

ParseHub is a tool using which you can scrap dynamic, Javascript, and AJAX websites. This tool can smoothen so many works. Using this tool, you can decide which data you want to extract from eBay. This software also helps to search for products and also calculate price differences.

Scrape Storm

Another software on our list is Scrape Storm, which is supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. Just like a good website scraping tool, this tool also does not require any manual work or programming. You can automate the data gathering using this tool. The smart AI helps to automatically identify list data, tabular data, pagination buttons, etc.

Scraping Expert

Scraping Expert is another eBay data scraping tool that can help you automate the task of extracting data of your competitors, different products, and their prices. It can extract all the important data including product name, category eBay listing, bid information, estimated delivery time, location, payment option, seller, shipping details, and much more.

Why & How Ebay Proxy Is Used in the eBay Scraping Software

The use of proxy plays an important role during the eBay website scraping process. Scraping software or tools use proxies for web scraping. A proxy is the third party server through which you can make request the third-party servers and use their IP addresses. With the help of proxy, the website you want to scrape the data, can’t see your IP address.

Using the eBay proxy, you can extract the data of your competitors with reliability and it helps to reduce the chances of getting banned or blocked by the website.

Without the use of proxy, the chances of getting banned or blocked the website increases. If you don’t want the website to see your location or IP address, it is possible with a proxy. Instead of data scraping from your current location, you can make the request from different geographical area or location.

Using a proxy, you can make unlimited requests from the same or different websites without the fear of getting banned. When you make requests from AWS servers, the chances of getting banned increases. The reason behind this is it holds the record of overloading websites with so many requests.

In short, proxies play a crucial role in web scraping. eBay scraping tools use proxies to ensure you will have an eBay web scraping experience without your IP address getting blocked or banned. It allows you to make requests from different geographical areas or locations without any hassle. So these are the reasons why proxies are used in different eBay scraping software.

Conclusion of Using eBay Proxy

If you are an eBay seller, getting a good scraping tool is very important. It will help you get an in-depth idea about your competitors’ products & pricing. With the use of a scraping tool, you do not have to manually gather the data. This will help to save your time and gather the huge data on your local computer (in the form of MS Excel) without messing with programming or anything.