Craigslist is an online directory of classifieds from all around the world and it is always updating database for a variety of things you can buy or get information about. Hence, it is very useful for people looking for products and information, both for personal and commercial reasons. 

Why People Scrape Craigslist

Scraping Craigslist enables us to extract and process large chunks of data from the Craigslist website and use it for a variety of personal reasons, such as looking for an apartment, antique, automobile, etc.

For commercial purposes, we can utilize the Craigslist for various purposes, such as:

  • Generation of leads is one of the most important benefits of Craigslist scraping, we can identify various services and products people are looking for and earn a business out of it, by identifying the target customers.
  • Looking for exotic items on sale on Craigslist and then buy them to resell in a more lucrative market, and earn revenue by marking up the price.
  • Monitor the activities of our competitors and find out about the keywords they are using to stay relevant on the list, and we can use this data to increase the visibility of our business.
  • Determine the price range of items on sale on Craigslist, and make a more informed decision about the pricing of our products.

Due to the above mentioned personal and commercial benefits, knowing how to scrape Craigslist is a prominent concern for data science enthusiasts and smart entrepreneurs.

How To Scrape Craigslist Successfully Without Getting Blocked, Through The Usage Of Craigslist Proxies

The use of Craigslist proxy while trying to scrape Craigslist is very crucial, due to variety of reasons. The simplest is, that with the popularity of Craigslist, more and more people are trying to scrape data from it, and this is not prosperous for their business. Hence, there are many ways in which Craigslist people are looking for such attempts and block them.

Without the use of proxy, they can easily identify the IP address of the machine, sending them multiple requests, and can block that IP address right away. Using Craigslist proxy API, we can save ourselves from getting caught red-handed. Hence, using Craigslist proxies help us to stay anonymous and effective while scraping Craigslist. 

We can also use rotating proxies while sending a large number of repetitive queries to Craigslist, and every time we will be hitting the Craigslist proxy server with a new IP address and can avoid suspicion. 

Available Craigslist Scrapers In The Market

Scrapy 

Scrapy is a free Craigslist scraper tool, which is used to scrape Craigslist and other internet websites, with easy configuration and relevant tutorials, we can start scraping tutorials right away.

Visual Web Scraper 

This is a paid Craigslist scraper tool and can be used if we intend to scrape Craigslist for a longer period and commercial purposes. It is equipped with tons of features and can be useful for frequent scraping activities. 

Based on our requirements we can choose from the type of Craigslist scraper tool we want, if we want to do it once, we can go with a free scraper tool or paid ones for the commercial usage. Along with the scraper tools mentioned above, we can also use many other Craigslist scrapers such as Oxylabs, Scrapinghub, Octoparse, Agenty, Egrabber, etc. 

Take Away

Now, we know why Craigslist scrapping is important, why proxies are useful for anonymous an effective scraping, and how we can do it by using various paid and free scraper tools.