Walmart
Scraping Teardown
Find out everything you need to know to reliably scrape Walmart,
including scraping guides, Github Repos, proxy performance and more.
Walmart Web Scraping Overview
Walmart implements multiple layers of protection to prevent automated data extraction. This section provides an overview of its anti-bot systems and common challenges faced when scraping, along with insights into how these protections work and potential strategies to navigate them.
Scraping Summary
Walmart is a global multichannel retailer with a comprehensive product catalog ranging from groceries to electronics. Hence, it's a popular choice among web scrapers for extracting product data, shopper reviews, and price information. Walmart incorporates certain anti-scraping mechanisms such as irregular page structure changes and CAPTCHA challenges to combat non-human traffic.
Preliminary research reveals that Walmart employs dynamic CSS classes that add a layer of complexity in targeting web elements, making it moderately difficult for scraping via parsing. To effectively scrape Walmart, it would need an understanding of javascript and automation tools such as Selenium or Puppeteer to handle the dynamic contents. From an access perspective, data is openly accessible and doesn't seem to require specific proxies, though rotating IPs can reduce the chances of getting blocked.
Best Walmart Proxies
Proxy statistics and optimal proxy providers for scraping Walmart. Learn which proxy types work best, their success rates, and how to minimize bans with the right provider.
Walmart Anti-Bots
Anti-scraping systems used by Walmart to prevent web scraping. These systems can make it harder and more expensive to scrape the website but can be bypassed with the right tools and strategies.
Walmart Data
Explore the key data types available for scraping and alternative methods such as public APIs, to streamline your web data extraction process.
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Public APIs
API Description
Walmart, one of the leading multinational retail corporations, provides a public API primarily designed to serve affiliate partners. The API includes services such as product search, product lookup, and taxonomy, making it ideal for developers looking for specific product information including images, sales price, and customer ratings.However, this API is not exhaustive and does not offer access to all the data available on Walmart's website like transaction data or user activity data. Hence, to extract such information, web scraping is often employed as a complementary approach.
Access Requirements
To access the Walmart API, developers need to sign up for an affiliate account. However, not all requests may be granted access especially if they do not meet Walmart's specific affiliate prerequisites.
API Data Available
Why People Use Web Scraping?
Although Walmart provides a public API for developers, it covers primarily product-related data for affiliate partners. Unfortunately, it's not as comprehensive and does not offer access to several probable data types that developers might be interested in, such as transaction data, user-specific data, and user behavior data among others.This limitation causes developers to resort to web scraping — a technique used to extract data directly from websites — to access a broader range of information from Walmart's website. Web scraping therefore complements the use of the public API by providing a way to extract additional data that isn't otherwise accessible through the API.
Walmart Web Scraping Legality
Understand the legal considerations before scraping Walmart. Review the website's robots.txt file, terms & conditions, and any past lawsuits to assess the risks. Ensure compliance with applicable laws and minimize the chances of legal action.
Legality Review
Walmart's robots.txt file strongly discourages automated access to its key website sections such as search, browse and reviews, and its Terms of Service straightforwardly prohibit any form of data extraction through bots without express written consent. These documents clearly establish Walmart's position, though their restrictions alone aren't absolute legal barriers to web scraping of its publicly accessible pages, a practice considered generally permissible in numerous jurisdictions provided no access controls are sidestepped.
The real potential for legal risk emerges mainly not from the scraping of public content, but rather from activities like scraping areas behind logins, gathering personal data, and circumventing access controls. This could include breaching login walls or circumventing technical limitations such as CAPTCHAs or rate limits, particularly on sites like Walmart where users have explicitly agreed to the rules by creating an account or consenting to Terms of Service. Therefore, developers enacting web scraping need to carefully consider factors like respectful crawling, evading blocked areas, and appropriately managing any personal or copyrighted data.
Walmart Robots.txt
Does Walmart robot.txt permit web scraping?
Summary
The robots.txt file for Walmart constitutes a broad set of restrictions with respect to automated access. Rules like Disallow: /browse, Disallow: /reviews, and Disallow: /search are prominent and collectively plays a key role in thwarting the standard attempts of automated crawlers trying to access the prime sections of the website. These prohibitions are applicable across all user agents, without exceptions for the standard ones.
On the contrary, there are no explicit allowances or permissive rules like Allow: /example, nor there are references to sitemap locations, which deems the automation or systematic crawling virtually impossible. The implications of such configurational design of the robots.txt seems to be highly restrictive, deterring any automated interaction with the site. In conclusion, the robots.txt file of Walmart signals a rigid stance against automated scraping, only allowing a handful of known and accepted bots.
Walmart Terms & Conditions
Does Walmart Terms & Conditions permit web scraping?
Summary
The terms of service for Walmart explicitly prohibit automated access and data extraction. The terms state:
“Use any robot, spider, site search/retrieval application or other manual or automatic device to retrieve, index, ‘scrape,’ ‘data mine’ or otherwise gather any Materials, or reproduce or circumvent the navigational structure or presentation of the Walmart Sites, without Walmart’s express prior written consent.”
This covers all scraping, crawling, and bot-driven collection across both public and logged-in portions of the site. While enforceability can vary based on whether a user has explicitly agreed to the terms (for example, by creating an account), Walmart frames this restriction broadly so that it applies to all website visitors by default.
Walmart does not offer a general public product API; API access is only available to official partners and not for general scraping[3]. The terms do not explicitly mention bypassing barriers such as logins, rate limits, or CAPTCHAs, but they do outline that violating these rules could result in technical countermeasures like IP blocking or other remedies. Scraping is therefore forbidden without express written consent from Walmart, as detailed in their terms of use, and violations may lead to account suspension or legal action.
Walmart Lawsuits
Legal Actions Against Scrapers: A history of lawsuits filed by the website owner against scrapers and related entities, highlighting legal disputes, claims, and outcomes.
Lawsuits Summary
Walmart has not been involved in any known legal disputes related to web scraping.
Found 0 lawsuits
Walmart Github Repos
Find the best open-source scrapers for Walmart on Github. Clone them and start scraping straight away.
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Code Level
Stars
Sorry, there is no github repo available.
Walmart Web Scraping Articles
Find the best web scraping articles for Walmart. Learn how to get started scraping Walmart.
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Walmart Web Scraping Videos
Find the best web scraping videos for Walmart. Learn how to get started scraping Walmart.