Shopify Scraper 101: How to Scrape Shopify Store Data with Python

Are you looking forward to scraping product data or any other information from a Shopify store? Then stay enough on this page to discover the best Shopify scraping bots in the market and learn how to create custom ones.

Shopify has made it easy for businesses to set up a storefront online and accept payment with minimal effort and hassle. Currently, it has been reported that over 500,000 online stores are powered by Shopify and have driven more than 40 billion worth of sales.

Unlike in the past, most stores are moving their businesses online. Not only physical products are sold using the Shopify e-commerce platform. Digital products, membership, courses, rentals, and many more. With many products listed on  Shopify sites, the platform has become a hub for marketers doing competitive research. As a marketer, you can carry out competitive analysis, discover new products, monitor your competitor’s pricing and how they change over time, and many more. Aside from product data, there are other textual data that can be scraped. If you have an interest in scraping any website that is based on Shopify, then you are on the right page. In this article, you are going to learn about the best web scrapers you can use to scrape data from Shopify websites. If you have coding skills, we will also be showing you how to scrape Shopify sites easily. Before going into that proper, let take a look at an overview of scraping Shopify.

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Shopify Scraping – an Overview

Unlike some e-commerce stores that have been built from the ground up and have control over their sites, stores hosted on Shopify has little control over their site backend. Most of the heavy lifting is done by Shopify. One thing you will come to discover about Shopify sites is that all of the sites are similar, and as such, the process of scraping them is the same.

Interestingly, even though Shopify has an anti-bot system, it can be argued to be one of the weakest in the market in terms of keeping bots away. If you plan to scrape a Shopify site, you will meet minimal blocks than when scraping other sites. If you ask me, I will tell you Shopify is scraping friendly. This is because it has a public API that you can query and retrieve information about all of the products listed on a particular site. Every Shopify site has a products.json file, and you can access it via this URL – "https://www.exampleshop.com/products.json".

https://www.exampleshop.com/products.json

Replace the exampleshop.com with the URL of your target site, and you will get the details of all the products, including that of each variant of a product. Because the information is presented in JSON and formatted, you will most likely not need to send additional web requests if what you are looking for is just product data.

While many store owners complain about this, Shopify has not done anything to prevent this. The interesting part is that no authentication is required, and there’s nothing you can do as a store owner to prevent this. It is important you know that even though Shopify allowed automated access, site owners frown at it. Shopify even has systems that block bot traffic, but the system is not effective enough.

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How to Scrape Shopify Sites Using Python and Requests

If you have coding skills, then this section has been written for you. You can use any programming language to code a Shopify scraper. We can’t possibly demonstrate how to do that using all of the languages in one article, and as such, we will be doing that using Python. Python was chosen because of its simplicity, readability, and the fact that the bot developer's community is in love with it. As stated earlier, Shopify makes it easy to access product information from Shopify stores via the products.json file, which every Shopify store has. With this, we do not have to go through the stress of downloading the HTML of product pages and then parsing out required data.

All data you require about a product is present in the file, and you get everything returned to you at a go. For this reason, you will most likely not have to deal with anti-bot systems since you will only be making a single request. However, if the data you require is not present in the products.json, then you will need to access the pages.

Let me demonstrate to you how easy it is to scrape product details from Shopify stores by developing a simple product list scraper using Python and Requests. All we do is send a web request to the full list URL path with the products.json, and it is returned.

You can then parse out the required data and display it on the screen. Below is the code; you can test run it using any Shopify store. It is a simple scraper that assumes all is OK and as such, exceptions won’t be handled.

import requests

class ShopifyScraper:

def __init__(self, root_domain):
self.domain_url = root_domain
self.product_list_url = self.domain_url + "/products.json"
self.product_list = []
def get_products(self):

self.fetch_products = requests.get(self.product_list_url)

        products = self.fetch_products.json()["products"]

for iin products:
            title = i["title"]
            slug = i["handle"]
publish_date = i["published_at"]
updated_date = i["updated_at"]
            vendor = i["vendor"]
product_type = i["product_type"]
            tags = i["tags"]
full_url = self.domain_url + "/products/" + slug

            details = [title, full_url, publish_date, updated_date, vendor, product_type, tags]
self.product_list.append(details)

def print_products(self):

for product in self.product_list:
print(product)

x = ShopifyScraper("https://shopnicekicks.com")
x.get_products()
x.print_products()

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Best Shopify Scrapers in the Market

The above guide is for programmers. If you do not have a coding skill but want to scrape data from a Shopify site, then there are many options available to you. There are already made scrapers you can use to extract data without understanding a line of code.

These tools are known as Shopify scrapers. While some of them are specialized scrapers, some are generic. Let me introduce you to some of the best Shopify scraping tools you can use to effortlessly scrape product data from Shopify.

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eScraper

• Pricing: Starts at $59for 5000 rows
• Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON
• Supported Platform: Web

eScraper does the heavy lifting for you. They do not hand over a scraper for you. You can see them as a Shopify data scraping service that you can contact to help you scrape product listing from any Shopify store.

All that’s required from you is to fill a form providing details of your requirement. They would contact you with samples, after which you get the full data sent to your email. An important feature of eScraper you will is that you can opt-in for schedule scraping, and they will do just that as planned.

eScraper is a paid service you will want to use, especially if you do not want to deal with the hassle of using a tool directly. It has support for data adjustment, scraping dynamic websites, and many others. Their pricing is based on number of rows and can be regarded as cheap.

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ScrapeStorm

• Pricing: Starts at $49.99 per month
• Free Trials: Starter plan is free – comes with limitations
• Data Output Format: TXT, CSV, Excel, JSON, MySQL, Google Sheets, etc.
• Supported Platforms: Desktop

ScrapeStorm is one of the best web scraping tools in the market. Itis one of the best Shopify scrapers out there. It is a paid tool developed by an ex-Google crawler team, and as such, you can be sure you’re dealing with a solid scraper. This tool can be used for scraping all websites, including modern websites that are Ajaxified and JavaScript-heavy.

ScrapeStorm is one of the most advanced scrapers out there. However, on the surface, it is easy to use. One thing you will come to like about Scrape is that it makes use of Artificial Intelligence to automatically detects important data points for scraping.

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ShopScraper

• Pricing: Free
• Free Trials: Free – comes with advanced features at a cost
• Data Output Format: CSV
• Supported Platforms: Google Chrome

ShopScraper is a Chrome extension you can download for free and use, provided you are not interested in using its advanced features. This tool is a specialized scraper developed only for scraping product details from Shopify stores. With ShopScraper, you are just a click away from exporting data of products of a Shopify store into a CSV you can use.

This Shopify scraper has been downloaded by over 2000 and has garnered an impressive star rating even though the number of users that rated it is far below the number of users. But as at the time this article was written, it is rated 5 stars.

With this tool, you cannot only export all fields, but you can also choose a few products to scrape or a collection. This tool is easy to use, light, and fast.

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Octoparse

• Pricing: Starts at $75 per month
• Free Trials: 14 days of free trial with limitations
• Data Output Format: CSV, Excel, JSON, MySQL, SQLServer
• Supported Platform: Cloud, Desktop

Octoparseis a web scraping tool that you can use to scrape all kinds of websites, including e-commerce stores. Octoparse is built for the modern web, and as such, even if the Shopify store is Ajaxified, Octoparse has got you covered.

Octoparse is a visual scraping tool that requires no coding skill. All you need to do is make use of the point and click interface to train it. Interestingly, it has templates you can use to improve your workflow. While Octoparse has a free plan you can use, the power of this tool is unleashed when you subscribe to a paid plan.

Also important is the fact that you can export scraped data in many formats. The Octoparse scraping software is perfect for scraping Shopify sites. You can either make use of their desktop application or the cloud-based scraper. Octoparse offers intending customers a 14 days free trial.

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ParseHub

• Pricing: Free
• Free Trials: Free – advance features come at an extra cost
• Data Output Format: Excel, JSON,
• Supported Platform: Cloud, Desktop

ParseHub is another free tool you can use to scrape product listing from Shopify sites. ParseHubhas a cloud-based solution, but using that will require you to make payment.

If you do not want to spend money, then you will have to download the desktop application and install it before using it. Just like Octoparse, ParseHub is a general scraping tool as it is not specifically made from Shopify sites. ParseHub also does not require you to know how to code as it provides you with a point and clicks interface for training it.

Conclusion

Every site developed using the Shopify e-commerce platform spends largely on it for functionality. Interestingly, as stated earlier, Shopify exposes product details for each site in a JSON format and, as such, makes it easy to be scraped. However, not everyone is a coder, and as such, some web scrapers are available that you can use to scrape product data – recommendations have been made in the article.

Source: https://www.bestproxyreviews.com/shopify-scraper/