How to Extract Data from Alibaba Easily

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Alibaba has an impressive monopoly on the Chinese e-commerce market. Since China has a global reputation for manufacturing tons of stuff, Alibaba is a fertile ground for merchants who want to tap into the Chinese market, find cheap products, and make serious profits.

But to tap into this gold mine, you need to know how to scrape data from Alibaba. Luckily, we’ve got you covered with this guide.

We’ll show you how to scrape products from Alibaba using a codeless scraping tool. But before we get started, let’s talk about Alibaba’s views on data scraping.


Is it legal to scrape Alibaba?
According to Alibaba’s Terms of Use , it is strictly forbidden to engage in “systematic scraping” of website content to create or compile a collection, database, or directory without written italy number dataset from . This includes using robots, spiders, automated devices, or even manual processes for such purposes.

Alibaba’s position begins to make more sense when you consider that in June 2021, the platform faced a serious data leak of 1.1 billion users’ information , including usernames and mobile numbers.

Given these circumstances, it is clear that Alibaba takes the protection of its website content and the privacy of its users seriously.

However, it is important here to make a distinction between unauthorized data scraping and ethical web scraping. The data leak in question targeted users’ personal information, which falls under unauthorized web scraping.

On the other hand, web scraping, when done ethically and for legitimate purposes, is based on different grounds. Ethical web scraping focuses on collecting publicly available data, such as product details, without compromising personal information or the integrity of the website.

For example, product research and market or competitor analysis are often considered legitimate grounds for scraping Alibaba or any platform.

In short, yes, you can scrape Alibaba, but make sure it’s for legitimate reasons and using safe practices.

And that’s exactly what this article is all about. We’ll show you how to scrape Alibaba for publicly available data without violating their guidelines.


The easiest way to scrape Alibaba
Since marketers are not superheroes who master coding and at the same time possess exceptional skills in their field, scraping Alibaba becomes a challenge.

This is where no-code Alibaba scrapers come in to fill the gap. While there are many solutions available, we have chosen a free Alibaba scraper for this guide called Octoparse.


Alibaba Codeless Scraper
Using Octoparse, we’ll show you how to extract Alibaba products from a category page. But you can use the same method for any page on the Alibaba website. With that out of the way, let’s get started with our guide.


Two Ways to Scrape Alibaba Using Octoparse

Octoparse offers two ways to scrape data from any platform. You can either use a pre-built scraper from the template gallery or create a custom scraping task for any platform.

How to Extract Data from Alibaba Easily

So let’s search for a suitable Alibaba scraper template from the template gallery. Simply press the “Templates” button and type “Alibaba” in the search bar.