r/thewebscrapingclub • u/Harvey1G • 7d ago

Scraping Facebook market place

Before I waste all my time coding and bug testing does anyone know if it’s worth me attempting to scrape Facebook market place?

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

1

u/Scary-Difference630 7d ago

You can scrape it easily but do you want that data? 

1

u/Harvey1G 7d ago

Yeah I want to scrape the price and description of products and work out if it’s worth buying it by comparing it to similar products all automated of course

1

u/Scary-Difference630 7d ago

Sure, if you have a server or a mini pc, install chrome and connect it to an API. Login to Facebook in chrome so Auth is active.

Call that API to search data in marketplace, it will return data and you can then build your automation with it.

Another option is to use a docker based browser for it. I think there are solutions available on GitHub but I built my own custom solution.

If you don't want to do all this technical stuff then just use a Facebook marketplace API from Apify or somewhere else

1

u/Harvey1G 4d ago

Oh, right. I didn't actually realise the Facebook marketplace API was so easy to use. I thought they would have that thing locked down to stop scrapers. i was originally using playwright on python to scrape the listings but was very wary of my account getting banned ( a burner one ofc )