eBay Product Tracking: Scraper Code Samples (PHP, Node.js, Rust)

eBay is a prime target for price tracking, competitor monitoring, and deal sourcing — but its listing pages are heavily A/B-tested, so scraping rendered HTML with CSS selectors breaks constantly. The reliable source is the JSON-LD block eBay embeds in every item page: a <script type="application/ld+json"> tag containing a clean Product object with name, price, currency, and availability. The samples below fetch the page through the Bright Data Web Unlocker and read straight from that structured data.

Prerequisites

export PROXY_URL="http://brd-customer-<id>-zone-<unblocker_zone>:<password>@brd.superproxy.io:22225"

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Items are identified by their numeric item ID from the URL: https://www.ebay.com/itm/<id>.

PHP

<?php
// Run: php ebay.php 167890123456
$proxy  = getenv('PROXY_URL');
$itemId = $argv[1] ?? '167890123456';

$ch = curl_init("https://www.ebay.com/itm/$itemId");
curl_setopt_array($ch, [
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
    CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true,
    CURLOPT_PROXY          => $proxy,
    CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => false,
    CURLOPT_TIMEOUT        => 60,
    CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER     => ['Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9'],
]);
$html = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

// eBay ships product data as JSON-LD. Find the block whose @type is "Product".
$doc = new DOMDocument();
@$doc->loadHTML($html);
$xp = new DOMXPath($doc);

$product = null;
foreach ($xp->query('//script[@type="application/ld+json"]') as $node) {
    $ld = json_decode($node->textContent, true);
    if (($ld['@type'] ?? '') === 'Product') { $product = $ld; break; }
}

$offer = $product['offers'] ?? [];
echo json_encode([
    'id'           => $itemId,
    'name'         => $product['name'] ?? null,
    'price'        => $offer['price'] ?? null,
    'currency'     => $offer['priceCurrency'] ?? null,
    'availability' => $offer['availability'] ?? null,
], JSON_PRETTY_PRINT | JSON_UNESCAPED_SLASHES), PHP_EOL;

Node.js

// ebay.mjs — node ebay.mjs 167890123456
// Install: npm i axios https-proxy-agent cheerio
import axios from 'axios';
import { HttpsProxyAgent } from 'https-proxy-agent';
import * as cheerio from 'cheerio';

const agent  = new HttpsProxyAgent(process.env.PROXY_URL);
const itemId = process.argv[2] ?? '167890123456';

const { data: html } = await axios.get(`https://www.ebay.com/itm/${itemId}`, {
  httpsAgent: agent, proxy: false, timeout: 60_000,
  headers: { 'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.9' },
});

const $ = cheerio.load(html);
let product = {};
$('script[type="application/ld+json"]').each((_, el) => {
  try {
    const ld = JSON.parse($(el).text());
    if (ld['@type'] === 'Product') product = ld;
  } catch { /* skip malformed blocks */ }
});

const offer = product.offers ?? {};
console.log(JSON.stringify({
  id: itemId,
  name: product.name ?? null,
  price: offer.price ?? null,
  currency: offer.priceCurrency ?? null,
  availability: offer.availability ?? null,
}, null, 2));

Rust

// Cargo.toml:
//   reqwest = { version = "0.12", features = ["blocking"] }
//   scraper = "0.20"
//   serde_json = "1"
use scraper::{Html, Selector};
use serde_json::Value;

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let item_id = std::env::args().nth(1).unwrap_or_else(|| "167890123456".into());

    let client = reqwest::blocking::Client::builder()
        .proxy(reqwest::Proxy::all(std::env::var("PROXY_URL")?)?)
        .danger_accept_invalid_certs(true)
        .build()?;

    let html = client
        .get(format!("https://www.ebay.com/itm/{item_id}"))
        .header("Accept-Language", "en-US,en;q=0.9")
        .send()?
        .text()?;

    let doc = Html::parse_document(&html);
    let sel = Selector::parse(r#"script[type="application/ld+json"]"#).unwrap();

    let mut product = Value::Null;
    for el in doc.select(&sel) {
        let raw = el.text().collect::<String>();
        if let Ok(ld) = serde_json::from_str::<Value>(&raw) {
            if ld["@type"] == "Product" { product = ld; break; }
        }
    }

    let offer = &product["offers"];
    let out = serde_json::json!({
        "id": item_id,
        "name": product["name"],
        "price": offer["price"],
        "currency": offer["priceCurrency"],
        "availability": offer["availability"],
    });

    println!("{}", serde_json::to_string_pretty(&out)?);
    Ok(())
}

Notes

• JSON-LD survives eBay's frequent layout experiments far better than CSS selectors — the same block also carries image, brand, sku, and aggregateRating.
• availability is a schema.org URL (e.g. https://schema.org/InStock); strip the prefix if you only want the status word.
• Auction listings differ from fixed-price ones — for live bids you may need the bidding section in the DOM rather than JSON-LD.
• For a tracker, persist {id, price, timestamp} per run and schedule with cron — see the Amazon tracker for the full alerting pattern.

Scaling beyond a few items

Hitting thousands of eBay listings on a schedule means rotating IPs, handling blocks, and absorbing layout changes — maintenance that adds up fast. Bright Data's eBay data collector returns structured listing data without you managing any of that infrastructure, and pre-built datasets cover bulk historical pulls.

See our E-commerce Web Scraping Solutions overview, the eBay Product Search Scraping guide for market-level pricing, the Bright Data Web Unlocker review, and How to Avoid Getting Blocked.

Scrape eBay at scale with Bright Data →