How to Scrape and Export Products Data from Aliexpress

Aliexpress is a goldmine for dropshippers and business executives. You can scrape 111 Million deals on Aliexpress spanning over vertices like kids, men and women’s fashion, phones, electronics and telecommunications, security products, shoes, bags, toys, sports, beauty, health, etcetera. It’s literally like, you name the product and Aliexpress has it. It’s a cross-border online commerce modeled retail export giant from China’s Alibaba. With about 450+ Million visits every month, Aliexpress is also one of the most popular websites in the world. Read this insight to know how to scrape Aliexpress for free without any coding knowledge. If you learn better through videos, hammer this link to see Aliexpress scraping in action. But before that, let’s discuss the use-cases of scraping Aliexpress.

Table of Contents

Why Scrape Aliexpress?

Scraping can give you real-time insights into trending products, most popular products, products with great reviews, products that perform poorly, products with the highest discounts, etcetera. It also enables you to compare prices from different websites. We can bulletize the use-cases of scraping Aliexpress to:

Building your dropshipping empire by scraping product details
Price intelligence by real-time price tracking
Competitor monitoring by scraping their catalog
Customer sentiment analysis by scraping reviews, ratings
New product development

Read in detail the use-cases of scraping eCommerce websites.

Ways to scrape Aliexpress?

Scraping Aliexpress is similar to extracting product data from Amazon or Walmart. There are three different ways:

Use click & scrape tools

These are no-code solutions for scraping websites. You don’t need any technical knowledge to scrape Aliexpress using these tools. Using advanced AI-powered click and scrape tools, you can get started scraping within seconds either locally or in the cloud. Choosing a good scraping tool can save you lots of money and time as well.

Write your web scraping scripts

If you have coding experience or talent at your disposal then you may also consider writing custom scripts for scraping Aliexpress. You can use Python-based frameworks like BeautifulSoup, Requests, Scrapy, or NodeJs-based frameworks like Puppeteer and Cheerio.

But as the target website’s structure changes frequently, you would need to change or adjust your scripts accordingly. This could be a cost and time-intensive deal as you either need to hire a few full-time programmers, or you need to spend time hiring and managing freelancers. The benefit of click and scrape tools is that you can update it for new website changes within seconds, at almost zero additional cost.

Outsource scraping services

Lastly, if you don’t have time to use automated data extraction tools or don’t want to set up an in-house team, you can always outsource your data requirements to trustworthy enterprise scraping service providers.

How to scrape Aliexpress using Octoparse?

I’m assuming you already know about Octoparse. You can extract product data and prices from Aliexpress using Octoparse by developing your custom scraping templates. This is how you do it:

Step 1: Download and login into the Octoparse tool.

Step 2: You see two options, Task Templates, and Advanced Mode. Using Task Templates you can use pre-built Octoparse templates to start scraping. But for this demo, we will demonstrate how to custom develop your scraping template in Octoparse. So, let’s click on the +Task button under Advanced Mode.

Step 3: Enter your target URL i.e., the Aliexpress category URL of your choice in the website field. This will act as the first page that the Octoparse tool gets to see. Click on Save URL.

Step 4: On the workflow development screen, in the website-interaction panel, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the “Next” button. The Next button is meant to take us to the next page of the product listing. And we need to click next to create pagination for this custom Octoparse template. Here is a resource for you to scrape e-commerce websites with an infinite scrolling feature. We don’t need it for scraping Aliexpress as it has a standard pagination UI.

Step 5: When you click on Next, you would see an action tips menu on the right. Select Loop clicks the next page option to create pagination for scraping laptops from Aliexpress.

Step 6: Now, having set up the pagination, we should click and open each Laptop search result item to scrape its information. To do that click on the first laptop search result title. Observe that Octoparse automatically detects 60 other search results and highlights them with colored boxes. In the Action Tips click on Select all to select all search result options.

Step 7: Now, in the Action Tips click on Loop click on the fileURL option. This instructs Aliexpress scraping bot to click on each of these 60 URLs iteratively so that we can go to their respective landing pages where we can extract product data.

Step 8: On the product landing page, point your cursor on the product data that you want to scrape and click on Extract text of the selected element.

Repeat this iteratively for all the product data points of your interest.

Step 9: Yay! Our template for scraping Aliexpress product data is ready. You can save this template by clicking on the Save button at the top. Lastly, you can start scraping by clicking on the Run button.

Step 10: Here is a glimpse into how the data would look in any spreadsheet application. You can download/export this data to any database, JSON, XLS, CSV, or HTML files.

Conclusion

Scraping b2b e-commerce websites can be very beneficial for your Dropshipping business or to leapfrog your competitors. Octoparse is a great tool at your disposal to scrape any website on the internet, you can use IP proxies with Octoparse to overcome geographical or anti-bot challenges. There are several more features of using Octoparse but for brevity, I would call it an intelligent, scalable, affordable, intuitive scraping solution. Having said that, I would wrap this article. Do follow us on Youtube and Twitter.

Some more resources for you:
Boost your retail business with web scraping
Manage inventory of your retail business with web scraping
Scrape Reviews for sentiment analysis

Happy Scraping.