How to Scrape AliExpress’s Product Search Engine Results Without Code
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AliExpress is one of the world’s online retail giants. With a global audience of 150+ million users in 190+ countries, its impact can’t be understated. The platform offers a vast array of products, with buyers looking for everything from clothing and home goods to gadgets and auto parts.
AliExpress is a valuable data resource due to the vast number of brands, products, and customers on the platform. Information collected from the site can be utilized by:
- Competing retailers : To compare product data and conduct market analysis
- Product manufacturers : To perform customer sentiment analysis
- Product reviewers : To gather product and customer sentiment insights
The scale and reach of AliExpress make it an important source of data for businesses across different industries, particularly in e-commerce. But because the process of manual data collection can be exhausting and time-consuming, many people turn to automation to help.
Robotic process automation tools like Roborabbit are fantastic for collecting data at scale. Those that specialize in browser tasks can perform actions like clicking buttons, entering search queries, and saving both structured and unstructured data that you can use for decision-making. And if you’re looking to collect product data from AliExpress’s search engine results, a fairly simple nocode task can make the process a breeze.
This tutorial will cover the information available on AliExpress’s search engine result pages, then teach you how to set up a Roborabbit task that automatically collects the data you need in seconds.
How to Collect AliExpress Product Search Data
The Roborabbit task we’ll be building will navigate to a search engine results page, collect the desired data, click through to the next page, then repeat the process for as many pages as needed.
Log into your Roborabbit account (or create a free trial account if you don’t have one—no credit card required! 🎉). Go to the Tasks tab, then click Create a Task.
You’ll be able to insert a starting URL, which should be an AliExpress link containing search parameters. It should look something like this:
https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-rabbit-plush-toy.html
❗️ Note : Another approach to scraping AliExpress search results is to start from the home page and then enter a search query. However, we found that including search parameters in the starting URL offered more consistent results. You can change the query and scrape data for many different search terms by connecting the task to Zapier and using a dynamic link.
Click Save. You’ll be on a task page where you can add additional steps, run your automation, and view completed runs.
Now, set up the following steps:
Step 1. Go
The starting URL you inserted when creating a new task will already be added as the first step: Go. If you’d like to use the same task for multiple search queries, this can optionally be changed to a dynamic field using Zapier later on.
Hare Hint 🐰: Blocked? Try using a proxy, setting cookies, or reading our guide, Web Scraping without Getting Blocked: 5 Common Reasons You're Blocked and How to Avoid Them.
Step 2. Loop Start
A loop will instruct Roborabbit to extract data from multiple pages as many times as needed.
Add a Loop Start step to your task, and choose repeat as the loop type. Insert the number of times you’d like the process to repeat.
Click Save. The following steps will be repeated until a Loop End or Loop Break If step ends the loop.
Hare Hint 🐰: Maximize your cloud credits by toggling Test Mode on in task settings. This will limit the amount of loops in a run while you set it up.
Step 3. Scroll Into View
AliExpress’s search result page loads more cards as you scroll, so a page control action will increase the number of results you can extract.
Add a Scroll Into View step to your task. Set it up by inserting config for the pagination button so that more search results will load.
The Roborabbit Helper Chrome extension can help you isolate and generate config. You can also use CSS selectors, XPath, and other types of element-identifying syntax.
Step 4. Save Structured Data
The next step is to extract data from each product search result.
Add a new Save Structured Data action to your task.
To set it up, you’ll need to identify the parent container that holds data for each product listing. Use the Helper extension to help or insert your own config in the Element section.
Then, isolate each piece of data you want extracted from within each parent container. Enter a name, config, and data type. Remember to click Add Data every time you add a new element.
You should see a sample show up in the Data Preview section below.
After you’ve added all of the data you’d like to collect, click Save.
Hare Hint 🐰: If you’re primarily looking to gather pricing insights, our tutorial on building a price scraping bot might provide some guidance.
Step 5. Assert
Since different product searches yield a varying number of results, it’s important to set conditions that end the loop when there is no more to scrape. We can use the presence or absence of a "next page" button as an indicator to determine when to stop the loop.
Add an Assert step to your task. Insert config for the next button in the Element section, then choose element_visible as the assertion type.
Click Save.
Step 6. Loop Break If
This step will end the loop if a condition is met—in this case, there are no more pages to scrape.
Add a new step to your task and choose Loop Break If as the action. Select assert as the condition step, and false as the desired output.
Click Save.
Step 7. Click
If the loop is to proceed, we’ll need to interact with a button to load the next page of results.
Add a Click button to your task, and insert config for the same “next page” button as in the assertion step.
Save the step once you’re done.
Your task should now look something like this:
Hare Hint 🐰: Does your use case closely match this tutorial? Click Use This Task to add it to your project, then plug your own search term into the starting URL!
Running the task should yield output that looks something like this:
Try it out for yourself!
Streamline Your E-commerce Processes With Roborabbit
Automation can be a game-changer in the fast-paced, data-driven world of e-commerce. Extracting data from AliExpress search results can help businesses gather competitive intelligence, analyze customer sentiment, and stay up-to-date on the latest product trends.
To take this automation even further, you might consider integrating it with other tools and workflows:
- Automatically send the extracted data to a database or spreadsheet for further analysis
- Set up notifications to alert your team via email or Slack when new data is ready
- Schedule the data extraction to run on a schedule, ensuring you always have the latest information within reach
The possibilities are endless! With Roborabbit's nocode approach, you can quickly build and customize automation to suit your unique business needs. Give it a try and see how it can streamline your data collection processes.
