What is price scraping?

We understand the importance of getting the right price when you shop.

So we've put together a guide that explains exactly what price scraping is and what it isn't.

Price scraping is the practice of visiting a website and automatically copying the prices from its product pages to a spreadsheet. Why do you scrape prices? The price scraping process is a really simple one. It consists of using a tool (such as Google Refine) to enter a website address into a form and scrape the prices from the webpage. The website will then be added to a spreadsheet which contains the relevant prices.

What are the pros of scraping prices? Using a tool like Google Refine, you can have thousands of prices scraped in just minutes. This means that you can get access to the most competitive prices without having to manually search for them.

What are the cons of scraping prices? While price scraping is convenient, there are a number of things to be aware of. These include: Your results may be incomplete. While price scraping works well for products that have a single price, it won't work for products that have multiple prices. These are common among e-commerce websites where the pricing structure often has fixed prices and discounts. This means that if the price scraping tool doesn't visit all the prices on a webpage, it won't be able to find all the relevant prices. If you know that a product has multiple prices, you'll have to manually search for all the prices and copy them into a spreadsheet. You'll also need to remember to return the original webpage so that it can be added to your spreadsheet. It could take up to 24 hours to scrape all the prices on a website. You might think that you could scrape prices within a couple of hours, but if you do, you might be disappointed with the number of products you have. It takes longer for price scraping tools to scrape prices than it does for the site to load. This means that it could take a lot longer to scrape all the prices than it would to simply visit the website and find the relevant prices. Scraping prices can be costly. There are certain price scraping tools that require a subscription to use.

Are scraping bots legal?

I run a personal website called jonnholland.

Com. My domain has been hijacked by scrapers that are crawling the site looking for content to sell on e-bay. I've taken legal action to force them to delete their IP addresses.

Is it a legal action? If not, could it lead to a ban on scraping from certain bots? Or is my IP address the only part I need to worry about? It might be worth getting in touch with any of the various anti-scraper or scraper fighting organisations to see what they advise. The ones we work with seem to have a high degree of success but you're free to contact the scraper fighting community and ask for guidance and advice.

They aren't technically illegal but you are taking steps to try to ensure it doesn't happen again. It is possible to get a bot banned but I'd also say there's a strong possibility of you spending money on legal bills and even if you win you will still spend money.

It is always safer to fight a war than wait and see what happens. The problem we're having with Jona Holland right now is that the IP's who steal from us are hiding behind masking IP addresses. A great deal of anti-scraping software and services will work with masked IP addresses. Because of this masking, there's no way for us to get to their true address.

We've hired a private investigator to find their real-world addresses. Even if we manage to catch them at home, all we'll get is a street address.

We may be able to take action against someone who takes data without permission and resells it elsewhere. In summary - yes - it's a legal action. But it may cost you a lot of money and time. If you decide you want to move ahead then you should find out about your options before embarking on a legal battle.

You could contact me as an independent member of this site. We also post to forums on other issues so would be happy to chat about it with you in person (as well as in a public forum!). PM me if you would like us to act as an independent resource for you.

Is price scraping legal?

I was just wondering if anyone has ever had any issue with the guy who goes into the mall and just scans everyone's cart at their register with a laptop, and if so how did they get out of it?

The reason I ask is I've never really had much interaction with mall cops but I heard that some malls will make you leave if you even try touch the cash register. That's not illegal, even though it isn't legal either.

It's actually illegal for him to do it without you being there or at least within 15 feet of you. But it's a gray area and the cops might not be able to catch someone doing it if they don't even see it.

It's illegal, but it's almost as if it is a good idea to stop shoplifting. Like the person will only steal a single item and not go to stores where a lot of things are in the same place. Plus, you have other options to get cheap merchandise that they don't want to stock.

Mall police can't ticket you for what you do on your own time, but the store/mall can if they catch you. Most times the mall will handle it in-house, but they won't hesitate to call the authorities if they feel you may be more than just a petty thief.

What a lot of people don't know is that the police and mall patrol officers are trained and licensed to handle shoplifting investigations and detainment. They have the authority to search you and your vehicle for the stolen property. You can easily be arrested by mall patrol for leaving the mall with stolen property on you. You may also be charged with shoplifting if you have intent to take more than one item from a single store without paying for them.

As you saw above, this is the case at my local mall. I was caught once for the little bit of cash I was able to take from a nearby mall kiosk. I told them I didn't mean to steal, but they didn't seem to care. I was told they had a "no tolerance" policy for shoplifting.

Is Scraper AI free?

It's no secret that I'm a big fan of Scraper.

We were one of the earliest teams to build a custom scraper for our own internal applications. We got pretty deep into the code. Eventually we wrote it in Scala, which I'll tell you about in another post. The product has changed since then and the pricing structure has changed too.

We found that as the market grew (and continues to grow), there was some benefit to having a free product, rather than a commercial one. We think that is still the case. But that means that anyone can have Scraper. You can build your own scraping solution free of cost or charge money. It is possible to get away with charging money for such a service; but even the cost of hosting and maintenance isn't worth it unless you are already in a large enterprise. In fact, that's what Scraper was initially made for it was developed by the large e-commerce companies.

Why are there many different scraping companies? If Scraper had existed in 2025, they probably would not exist now. Many people build their own. And why would that be? There are really three main reasons:

Because you can. Because it is fun. Because there is no one better. Let's tackle these in order. Because You Can. If you can write a scraper yourself, great! When we started, we wanted to make a product that everyone could use. We didn't have to write software and we didn't have to maintain it. There were some advantages to this approach, but the biggest one was that the price was always free. If you knew how to scrap web pages you could build your own scrapers. There is a lot of value in that knowledge, so we felt free to share that information with anyone who wanted to start building their own.

Scraping today is really a combination of a UI framework and an API framework. Most scraper solutions provide the UI; and I don't see why anyone would want to spend money on it. APIs (eg, for the data) can be maintained by one person or a team. The Scraper API is built on top of open-source technologies. That means anyone can contribute to it. That is the real promise of Open Source.