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The Ultimate Shopee Scraping Guide: Tools and Limits for 2025

The Ultimate Shopee Scraping Guide: Tools and Limits for 2025

Shopee, launched in 2015 in Singapore, has grown into the largest e-commerce marketplace in Southeast Asia and expanded into Latin America. By 2025 it hosts nearly 300 million active users, billions of product listings, and over US$100 billion in GMV each year.

With this scale, Shopee has become a critical source of market intelligence. Sellers, analysts, and comparison sites all want its data — from prices and stock levels to reviews and trends — making Shopee scraping highly valuable for anyone in online retail.

TL;DR

Scraping Shopee is not as simple as sending a request and parsing HTML. The platform is login-gated, JavaScript-heavy, and packed with defenses: fingerprinting, CAPTCHAs, strict rate limits, and frequent changes in both DOM and APIs.

Shopee homepage

To understand the basics and benefits of extracting data from websites, check out our detailed guide on what is web scraping.

Main Problems and How to Solve Them

  • Login redirects: Use a real browser session with persistent cookies.
  • CAPTCHAs: Slow down requests, add human-like actions, integrate a solver if needed.
  • Mobile-only auth: Emulate a mobile user agent and viewport.
  • Session fragility: Keep browser fingerprint stable (timezone, fonts, UA).
  • Headless detection: Run Puppeteer/Playwright in stealth or non-headless mode.
  • Dynamic SPA pages: Wait for selectors (product title, price) and trigger lazy loading.
  • Rate limits: Randomize requests, rotate proxies, and cache results.

For beginners, this makes Shopee one of the toughest targets to scrape — but with the right approach, it’s still possible.

The Truth About Shopee Scraping (Don’t Waste Your Time)

  • Plain requests or BeautifulSoup-only scrapers: Shopee loads product data with JavaScript, so you’ll just get empty page shells.
  • Unauthenticated calls to mobile or unofficial endpoints: the server replies with is_login: false, meaning no useful data.
  • Generic “all-in-one Shopee scrapers”: they can’t handle Shopee’s dynamic DOM, login wall, and anti-bot checks, so they break fast.

If you want real, meaningful data, you need to be logged in and make your scraper behave like a real user.

If you’re ready to dive deeper, read on. We’ll cover the essential Shopee scraping tools and show how each one helps you get reliable results.

What You Should Know About Shopee Before You Start

Shopee is mainly active in Southeast Asia:

  • Indonesia (shopee.co.id), Malaysia (shopee.com.my), Philippines (shopee.ph), Singapore (shopee.sg), Thailand (shopee.co.th), Vietnam (shopee.vn), and Taiwan (shopee.tw).

Additionally, Shopee has operated in Latin America: Brazil (shopee.com.br), Mexico (shopee.com.mx), Chile (shopee.cl), Colombia (shopee.com.co): and occasionally in cross-border sales for other regions.

To scrape Shopee reliably, you need proxies located in the same countries where Shopee is active. For example:

  • Indonesian products → use Indonesian IPs
  • Thai products → use Thailand proxies
  • Brazilian marketplace → use Brazilian proxies

Without local proxies, you may see wrong currencies, missing products, or restricted access.

FYI: Currency, promotions, and product availability differ by country. If you scrape with the wrong IP, your dataset may be misleading.

What data can be collected from Shopee?

From Shopee’s public marketplace, you can scrape different types of non-PII data (public product and shop information). Common examples include:

  • Product data: titles, descriptions, categories, attributes, images.
  • Pricing info: current prices, discounts, historical changes.
  • Stock availability: whether an item is in stock, low stock, or sold out.
  • Seller info: shop names, ratings, number of followers.
  • Reviews and ratings: customer feedback, star ratings, review counts.
  • Search results & rankings: how products appear for certain keywords.
  • Promotions & campaigns: flash sales, vouchers, free shipping events.

Shopee data is valuable to many different players in e-commerce. Sellers and brands use it to track competitor pricing, spot promotions, and learn from customer reviews. Analysts and research firms study it to understand market share, seasonal demand, and category growth. Price comparison platforms need Shopee’s live prices and promotions to deliver accurate deals to users. Resellers rely on scraping to find underpriced goods or supply gaps between regions.

Safe Rate Limits & Settings for Shopee Scraping

Does Shopee use anti-crawling tech? — Yes. IP rate limits, CAPTCHAs, fingerprint checks, frequent DOM/API changes and behavior detection are all in play. To reduce block risk, combine the items below — with these example numbers:

Simulate a real user environment

  • Keep a stable fingerprint per profile (UA, timezone, language, screen size).
  • Rotate fingerprints no more than once per profile per 24–72 hours (avoid rapid, large fingerprint changes).

FYI: You must be logged in to access real product data; unauthenticated requests return empty or error responses.

Rotate proxies (region-aligned)

  • Aim for one IP per profile/session.
  • Proxy pool size: hundreds → thousands of IPs for medium scale; 10k+ for large scale operations.
  • Health checks: test each IP every 5–15 minutes; retire after 3 consecutive failures.

Throttle & split requests

  • Conservative per-account/page rate: ≤ 30–100 requests per minute (start at the low end).
  • Parallelism: 1–3 concurrent pages per profile for authenticated sessions.
  • Global pacing: spread requests with jitter (randomize intervals by ±20–40%).
  • Cache results for 5–60 minutes depending on data volatility to reduce repeat hits.

Use realistic headers

  • Send proper Referer, Accept-Language, and consistent User-Agent.
  • Rotate UA only when starting a new profile; avoid changing UA mid-session.

Persist sessions

  • Reuse cookies/profile dumps for days → weeks where allowed.
  • Session lifetime monitoring: flag sessions older than 3–14 days for revalidation (depends on account behavior).
  • If login/OTP events spike above 1–3% of jobs, reduce concurrency and investigate.

CAPTCHA / block monitoring thresholds

  • Alert if CAPTCHA rate > 0.5–2% of requests (early warning).
  • Escalate if CAPTCHA rate > 5% — pause and investigate.
  • Redirect/login rate alert: trigger investigation if login redirects > 0.5–1% of page loads.

FYI: Shopee uses CAPTCHA, fingerprinting, IP rate limits, and frequent changes to block bots.

Retries and backoff

  • Use exponential backoff on errors: initial retry after 5–15s, then double; give up after 3–5 attempts.
  • After a block-type signal (CAPTCHA/302), cool down that IP/profile for 15–60 minutes before reuse.

Monitoring & telemetry

  • Track: pages/hour per profile, 4xx/5xx rates, CAPTCHA rate, login-redirect rate, proxy health.
  • Set alerts for sudden spikes (e.g., 2–3× baseline within 10–30 minutes).

Shopee Scraping Issues and Practical Solutions

Scraping Shopee is challenging because of login redirects, frequent CAPTCHAs, fragile sessions, headless detection, dynamic SPA pages, strict rate limits, and environment sensitivity. Without recovery logic, scrapers stall, and at scale these methods risk violating Shopee’s terms.

To succeed, you need stable browser profiles, careful request throttling, CAPTCHA handling, and compliance-aware recovery flows.

Up next, we’ll provide a complete list of tools that can help you set everything up properly.

Essential Toolkit for Successful Shopee Scraping

Antidetect browser

Multilogin — create persistent browser profiles that store cookies, localStorage, fonts, timezone and other client state so each profile presents a consistent fingerprint. It’s the safest bet for profile isolation because it lets you bind a profile to a specific proxy/IP and keep that identity stable across runs.

You can use cheaper alternatives, but they usually offer weaker profile isolation and fewer maintenance tools — Multilogin is worth the cost for reliability. It also includes a built-in proxy marketplace with ready-to-use proxy options, and their support team can help with profile imports or providing pre-warmed cookies.

Automation framework

A full browser automation layer is essential for Shopee scraping because the site relies heavily on JavaScript, dynamic modules, and SPA-like rendering. Frameworks like Playwright and Puppeteer let you control real browsers, execute JS, handle infinite scroll, and capture network/XHR responses for structured data.

  • Playwright stands out for its multi-browser support (Chromium, Firefox, WebKit) and strong context isolation, making it ideal for large-scale projects where you need reliable session handling.
  • Puppeteer is lighter and very widely adopted, which makes it easier to find examples, plugins, and community support.

When you need persistent sessions (keeping users logged in across runs), it’s best to run with persistent contexts or full browser profiles, even though this comes at a higher resource cost compared to raw HTTP clients.

Proxies

Nodemaven (residential or datacenter pools): provides region-aligned IP addresses so your requests look like they originate from the target country — essential for seeing the correct localized storefront, currency, and promotions. A good setup uses a proxy pool with built-in health checks and supports assigning a dedicated IP to each profile or session, which helps prevent cross-session contamination.

FYI: Rotating residential proxies and tools like Multilogin help bypass detection.

OTP provider

OTP providers give you region-appropriate phone numbers when SMS verification is required — for example during testing, account recovery, or official integrations with Shopee. Options include global services like Twilio, Vonage, MessageBird, as well as temporary number providers such as OnlineSim or Grizzly SMS.

For Shopee scraping, virtual numbers should be treated as a last resort: platforms often detect and block them because they are overused. Dedicated or long-term rented numbers from trusted providers are more stable.

CAPTCHA solvers

For Shopee scraping, the CAPTCHA types you’ll most often face are image-based challenges and reCAPTCHA/hCaptcha variants. That narrows down the solver choices — not every provider handles these reliably. Based on stability, support, and developer adoption, here’s what generally works best:

Best fit for Shopee:

  • CapMonster — useful if you want a self-hosted, faster option, but requires setup and server resources. Works well if Shopee challenges are frequent.
  • 2Captcha — reliable for Shopee’s reCAPTCHA and image puzzles; has a wide user base, consistent API, and decent response time.
  • Anti-Captcha — very similar in coverage and pricing; good for reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, and image CAPTCHAs that Shopee sometimes shows.

Learn practical approaches and considerations in bypassing webscraper captchas.

Storage & Session Exports — JSON/CSV + cookies.json or full profile dumps

Save extracted Shopee data in JSON or CSV so it can be processed later in analytics pipelines or databases. To keep your scraper logged in across runs, persist either a cookies.json file or complete browser profile dumps.

Always store session files securely, rotate access credentials, and avoid keeping any PII. For better traceability, add metadata (such as profile ID, proxy ID, and timestamp) to each record so you can track where the data came from and when it was collected.

Monitoring & telemetry

Set up a basic dashboard to watch how your Shopee scraper is performing. Track key metrics like pages per hour, error rates (4xx/5xx), login redirects, CAPTCHA frequency, and proxy health.

FYI: Exceeding ~100 requests per minute per account risks bans or CAPTCHAs.

Add alerts for sudden spikes in logins or CAPTCHAs so you can slow down or adjust your setup before blocks get worse. It also helps to watch things like fingerprint stability and session lifetime — changes here often explain why a scraper starts failing.

Orchestration & queuing

Use a lightweight task queue to organize scraping jobs — for example, mark them as pending, running, blocked, or needs manual review. Pair this with a worker pool, where each worker runs on a dedicated browser profile and proxy.

Add retry and backoff logic so failed jobs don’t overload Shopee with repeated requests. This setup keeps sessions stable, avoids mixing up profiles and IPs, and prevents the chaos of random rotations in the middle of a run.

Data Hygiene & Compliance Layer

Add safeguards to your Shopee scraper so it only collects what’s allowed. Use automated filters to remove any PII, apply rate limits on data exports, and keep an audit log of scraping jobs and sources.

Before scaling up, double-check your approach against Shopee’s Terms of Service and local laws. Whenever possible, use official APIs or partnerships. This reduces legal risk and ensures the data you share or analyze is safe for downstream use.

FAQ

Can you scrape Shopee?

Yes, you can scrape public product data from Shopee, but it’s not straightforward. Shopee uses login walls, CAPTCHAs, rate limits, and fingerprinting to block simple scrapers. To succeed, you need authenticated sessions, stable browser profiles, proxies from the right region, and careful request throttling.

How to scrape a Shopee review?

Shopee reviews are loaded dynamically through JavaScript, so plain HTML parsing won’t work. To collect them, you need to use browser automation (e.g., Playwright or Puppeteer), wait for review sections to render, and scroll to trigger lazy-loading. Always store metadata like product ID, rating, and timestamp for context.

Is it legal to scrape from Shopee?

Shopee scraping exists in a gray area. Public product data may be collected if you avoid PII (personal data) and respect robots.txt and Shopee’s Terms of Service. However, bypassing anti-bot protections, creating fake accounts, or ignoring legal boundaries can put you at risk. The safest path is to use Shopee’s official APIs or partnerships whenever possible.

How to get API from Shopee?

Shopee offers an official API for sellers and partners. To access it, you must apply through Shopee’s Developer Portal, provide your seller/partner credentials, and get approval. The API allows you to manage products, track orders, and integrate shops programmatically — but it does not give full unrestricted access to marketplace-wide product data.

Can web scraping be detected?

Yes. Shopee and other platforms detect scraping through patterns like too many requests per IP, use of headless browsers, unstable fingerprints, and repeated logins. To lower detection risk, scrapers must mimic normal user behavior: stable sessions, realistic fingerprints, and controlled request rates.

Conclusion

Scraping Shopee is not a simple task — it requires a layered approach. Basic HTTP scrapers, unauthenticated API calls, and generic tools don’t work, as Shopee relies on JavaScript rendering, login walls, and anti-bot defenses. To collect meaningful data, you need to authenticate properly, handle session persistence, and manage OTP or third-party logins.

Shopee scraping also depends on IP rotation, request throttling, and multi-account strategies to avoid suspicion and blocks. Using an anti-detect browser with stable fingerprints and session management is critical for maintaining consistency across runs. When done right, Shopee scraping provides access to rich product data (titles, descriptions, prices, stock, reviews), shop metrics, and market insights (pricing strategies, demand trends, competitor behavior). This information is invaluable for sellers, analysts, and businesses aiming to stay competitive in Southeast Asia’s fast-moving e-commerce space.

I'm a Content Manager and Full-Stack SEO Specialist with over 7 years of hands-on experience building strategies that rank and convert. I graduated from Institut Montana Zugerberg College, and since then, I’ve been helping brands grow through smart content, technical SEO, and link building. When I'm not working, you'll likely find me lost in Dostoevsky's books.

Melika Ghasemifard

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