Generally, a scraper is a software tool designed to retrieve data from webpages. It may differ by the platform it’s designed for, a purpose or a scope of efforts a user takes to set it up and running, varying from manually run scripts up to Python-based automations and browser extensions that return data with a couple of clicks.
Specifically, Facebook Marketplace Scraper is a web scraper developed to retrieve information posted by companies on Facebook Marketplace, from seller details to customer reviews.
Why is Scraping Facebook Marketplace Important for Businesses?
Facebook Marketplace is a huge online venue housing thousands of proposals by companies all over the world. Their listings can be sorted by distance from a user location or time when they were posted. The marketplace supports searching and browsing by category.
As an automated data retrieval, web scraping will always save time and efforts and is worth implementing mostly for three reasons:
- Product insights. You can find out what products are highly demanded and what consumer behavior patterns are popular to later use this information for product development or customer journey;
- Marketing research. You can extract product and pricing data, or monitor market trends. This will help you improve your business decisions;
- Competitive analysis. If you regularly check pricing and campaigns of your competitors, this allows you to get better business insights and adjust your commercial strategy accordingly.
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What Facebook Marketplace Data Can I Extract?
Depending on the scraper capabilities and the data you need, you can extract any of:
- seller details, including seller name, merchant ID;
- product listings to cover such data as title, URL, product descriptions, prices, ratings, stock status,
- image URL,
- customer reviews,
How to Scrape Facebook Marketplace
There are plenty of options to choose from, but far and foremost we recommend legal and ethical alternatives. As any prominent platform, Facebook implements strict policy protecting the privacy of its users and their personal data. So one of the options to consider is Facebook Marketing API that helps programmatically access and analyze data related to ads running on Meta’s family of apps and services.
Manual Approach
Though simplest, the most time-consuming approach is to gather data by manually copying / pasting them to a file. It’s an unsophisticated method apt for small-scale projects.
If you need more data, or your task is to collect them regularly, you will need automation tools to save the day.
Automating Facebook Marketplace Scraping
There is also a variety of approaches to automated crawling of the Facebook Marketplace, from hand-made Python-based solution up to zero-code Google Chrome extensions.
Besides, you can find free scripts on GitHub or order tailor-made solutions to take into account all your specific requirements.
Method 1: Using URLs, Location, and Radius Data
To sort the desired deliverables geographically, you can rely on URLs as combined with radius and location data of the listings.
To automate web scraping this way, you’ll need:
- a list of URLs,
- a residential proxy not to get banned,
- radius of your search query combined with latitude/longitude data
The sample code looks as follows:
You can also specify the maximum number of scraped pages. If you don’t want to set the limit, enter 0.
Method 2: Creating Queries from the Dashboard Using Filters and Options
However, it’s not necessary to enter links directly. Another way is to make up a filter-based query in the dashboard. To view all available options, use the dropdown or click ❔.
To automate web scraping this way, you’ll need:
- a residential static proxy not to get banned,
- radius of your search query combined with latitude/longitude data
- search category
You can also specify the maximum number of scraped pages. If you don’t want to set the limit, enter 0. This is the sample code:
Issues & Fixes
Mistakes happen, so it’s always better to be on the safe side. Common problems you can face include inconsistent or missing data, changed web pages, requirements to interact with the platform UI or dynamic content.
Some crawling tools have an issue of their deliverables not being visible in the output tables.
Few Fields Not Visible in Table or JSON Format and Showing Undefined
Occasionally, output tables of JSON files fail to show values of some fields and characterize them as <undefined>.
You can still view all the fields by clicking on <All Fields> or you can download the data where the fields will be visible.
To bypass the error, you can download the data with visible fields or click <All Fields> to view the fields.
How Much Will Scraping Facebook Marketplace Cost You?
In today’s world, you can always choose what suits you best. As for Facebook Marketplace crawling, there is also a range of solutions to meet your technical needs and pricing requirements:
 |  |  |
| Product | Pricing | Details |
| Bardeen AI playbook | Free for personal use$30 Pro pricing plan | As a zero-code Google Chrome extension, Bardeen workflow automatically extracts and saves Facebook Marketplace listings into Google Sheets to enhance valuable business insights. |
| Axiom Google Chrome Extension | $15 for 5 hours of monthly runtime$50 for 30 hours of monthly runtime | A zero-code browser bot designed to scrape listing and seller details in any product category. |
| Facebook Marketplace Scraper | $39.00/month after 3 days’ trial | An easy-to-use tool to extract data from Facebook Marketplace listings. It supports filters for targeted queries and export to JSON/CSV. |
| Facebook Marketplaces Extractor | $74 / month – Project plan$184 / month – Startup plan$336 / month – Business plan | A zero-code extractor tool designed to retrieve all product details from the Marketplace website. |
| facebook-marketplace-scraper | free | An open-source Python script to crawl Facebook Marketplace, based on Playwright, BeautifulSoup, and FastAPI. |
| Marketplace Monitor | $24.99 / month for Starter plan$44.99 / month for Intermediate plan$99.99 / month for Expert plan | A tool designed for automated real-time tracking with Discord and push notifications. |
| Facebook Marketplace Scraper by Hat Incorporation | $52.2 for 1-week plan$290 for 1-month plan$493 for lifetime access | An easy-to-use scraper that downloads the crawled results to the Excel file with the set time intervals |
If you don’t want to install any software or write a single line of code, your way out is to order Facebook Marketplace scraping from a company that offers data crawling services, such as Actowitz, Crossworlds, and X-Byte.
Can You Automate Scraping Facebook Marketplace for Analysis?
A teaser: yes, you can.
You can employ available Facebook-related APIs, such as Marketplace Search API or Graph API to search through the platform marketplaces or individual marketplaces and listings.
Another option is to write Python scripts; that would be a totally customizable solution that suits your business needs. For example, you can order such a solution on Upwork or another freelance venue.
There are also off-the-shelf software products you can use without any programming skills – these are zero-code automations suitable for any user without technical background.
Understanding the Feasibility: Can You Scrape Facebook Marketplace?
To a greater extent, whether it’s feasible to automate Facebook Marketplace scraping depends on the project scope. If you deal with a small-scale personal project with dozens of listings, you can go with a manual search. However, if you need to regularly extract large volumes of business information on pricing, product characteristics, and market trends, it makes sense to choose and implement the adequate automation solution.
Frequently Asked Questions
Please read our Documentation if you have questions that are not listed below.
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Is it legal to scrape Facebook Marketplace?
Facebook has strict terms of service that clearly prohibit web scraping without their permission, so everyone who aims to extract data from Facebook should thoroughly assess the risks.
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How does Facebook combat scraping?
The Facebook’s dedicated External Data Misuse team hampers scraping through rate and data limits. Rate limits restrict how often a user can interact with their products, and data limits prevent users from obtaining more data than is generally needed to use Facebook services.
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What challenges do you face when scraping Facebook Marketplace?
If you retrieve Facebook Marketplace data in violation of their rules and policies, you face a number of consequences: your account can be suspended, and you can be taken to court and charged severe penalties.
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Any opportunity to overtake competitors and get some valuable insights on the current market state can be considered gold for any buineseses. With Facebook as one of the main platforms for connection with customers, scraping of this source can grant access to a whole layer of new useful information for analysis. In this article, we will look at how to scrape data from Facebook using Web scraper and other processes around this task.