Alibaba is a great place to source materials from overseas (all over the world) in bulk. Here, you find a lot of discounted products and many other deals and offers on thousands of items. You have to find products from suppliers with good track records and ratings. Sorting out all the listings to find a trusted supplier is necessary for your business, but can take much of your time. And, it is certain that you do not want to have a hasty decision about this amazing and must component for your business.
As there are a lot of suppliers and merchants, it is very hard to go through each supplier to check their products, prices and seller’s information. You may need a scraper to get all this information from Alibaba. So, we are going to discuss ways and important steps to scrape Alibaba easily.
What Are Alibaba and AliExpress
Alibaba and AliExpress are two platforms that have an important role in building and success of millions of e-commerce businesses all over the world. These two companies are operated by Alibaba Group, a well-known name in the digital retail world.
Many people consider them the same but they offer unique and amazing selling and buying experiences with different features for multiple buyers and sellers all over the world.
What is Alibaba
Alibaba.com was founded by the Alibaba Group in 1999 and after that, there was no back way and it has become the world’s most powerful and well-known B2-B e-commerce business all over the world. Alibaba has discounts and deals on orders with minimum limits.
Although it is made for both buyers and sellers some features of Alibaba are:
- CRM Software tools.
- Lead generation tools.
- API integration for better and advanced level customization.
- RFQ marketing.
- Industry and market analytics tools.
- Auto translation to 18+ languages.
- Bulk order management.
What is AliExpress
AliExpress was also founded by the Alibaba Group in 2010 but it is an offshoot of Alibaba. It is considered a place for businesses to sell their products directly to customers without any longer. It is also one of the top B2B e-commerce businesses in more than 100 countries all over the world. It is different from Alibaba in the aspect that it has no minimum order limits and can sell everything “as is” it.
Some salient features are:
- Automatic translation up to 18 languages for better user experience.
- Best currency exchange system for more than 50 countries.
- Best buyer protection system.
- AliExpress courses are also available at AliExpress university.
- Customized and unique storefronts for sellers.
- Secure payment system.
Does Alibaba allow scraping and have API Access
Yes, Alibaba allows data scraping but is limited. They don’t allow you to scrape private data like payment methods like credit or debit cards, contact details of buyers and any personal information.
Also, Alibaba has an API driven web system and has API Access like on Alibaba GitHub, but you have to ask for scraping before going to start doing anything.
By scraping Alibaba with Octoparse, you’ll get a lot of data about a product like:
- Product name.
- Product image.
- Key features.
- certificate-e.
- certificate-fcc.
- Price for minimum order.
- Per-unit price.
- Rating.
- Number of reviews.
- Country of sellers.
- Seller BioData.
- Taga availability.
- Selling experience.
- URL of the product.
How to Scrape Alibaba without Coding
If you don’t know much about python and coding and want to scrape Alibaba.com, we are introducing you to Octoparse. It is an amazing and powerful tool for scraping Alibaba without any blockage. You don’t need to have technical and coding knowledge to scrape Alibaba by using Octoparse as it is free from any coding and easy to use. You can also find other advanced features like scheduled tasking, IP proxy, pagination, cloud extraction, etc.
Steps to scrape data from Alibaba with Octoparse
Step 1: Enter Alibaba page link into Octoparse
First, download Octoparse from its official website, and install it on your device. After that, copy the target Alibaba page link you want to scrape, and paste it into the search box on Octoparse.
Step 2: Customize workflow and check the data fields
Click on the Start button to enter the auto-detecting mode. After that, you can find the scraped data fields in the preview panel. Create a workflow and make any changes if needed.
Step 3: Export scraped Alibaba data to Excel
After all the changes have been saved, click on the Run button to activate the scraping process. You can download the data files to your local device or save them to a database.
Final Words
Octoparse is a powerful Alibaba scraper that can scrape all types of data, either small or large. Try these ways and steps given above and get your data scraped in seconds and minutes. What’s more, you can scrape other e-commerce sites like Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, Flipkart, and so on with the similar steps. Preset scraping templates are also provided in Octoparse so that you can get website data within several clicks.
