Almost all eCommerce or online retail websites display products in different categories: by brand, type of products, or price, etc. With ParseHub you can grab the number of products in each category easily to do a product analysis, fast.
In this tutorial we will show you how to:
1) Open and go to every category on the eCommerce website.
2) Scrape the name of the subcategories.
3) Click into each subcategory to scrape the products.
If you're looking to scrape the details of the products in category, or from a search result, you should follow this tutorial on eCommerce pages instead.
Getting Started:
1. Open the ParseHub desktop app and click "New Project".
2. In the text box add the following url (or any other eCommerce site url) - https://www.ebay.ca/ and click on "Start project on this url".
Open and go to each category
3. Click on the "Select page" command plus button. Choose the "Select tool" from the tool menu.
4. Click on the first category on the website "Dresses".
5. Click on the second category on the website. All of the categories should be now selected for you in green.
6. 3 tasks are automated for you. The "Begin new entry in selection1" command is created for you (hidden under list icon ). Click on "selection1" to rename it to "categories".
7. The name and url of each category is extracted for you automatically. Two new columns in excel will be created for you with the name and the url.
8. Choose the plus button on the "Select categories" command to add a command under. The new command will open each category and navigate to it.
9. Choose the "Click tool" from the tools menu.
10. When asked if it is a "next page" button, choose "No", then choose the "Create New Template" button and type in a new template name such as "categories".
You are creating a template because the next page that will open will look differently from the current page. The main_template was used to create instructions to get and open the categories. The new product_listings template will be used to process instructions that will let you get the number of products in each category.
11. Click "Create New Template".
A new template has now been created for you and a new webpage that shows one of the categories products was opened for you. This behaviour will repeat automatically for you, for every category. You only have to set it up one time.
Extract the name of each subcategory for each category
12. Click on the subcategories names to select them.
13. Rename the "Select selection1" to "Select subcategories".
Click into each subcategory to scrape the products
1. From the + button next to the Select subcategories you can choose the click command to click into each subcategory.
2. When asked if it is a "next page" button, choose "No", then choose the "Create New Template" button and type in a new template name such as "products".
3. On the "products" template you can follow this tutorial to select the products and scrape them from all the categories and their subcategories.