guide Get Ahead with a Facebook Scraper for Marketplace Data

Facebook Marketplace has become a dynamic hub for buying and selling, with millions of listings covering everything from electronics to real estate. For businesses, this platform represents a goldmine of data—if you can effectively tap into it. That’s where a Facebook Marketplace scraper can make all the difference.

Table of contents

• Why Scraping Facebook Marketplace Matters
• How MrScraper Simplifies the Process
• Step-by-Step Guide: How to Use a Facebook Marketplace Scraper
• Expanding Your Scraping Toolkit
• Conclusion

Why Scraping Facebook Marketplace Matters

If you’re serious about understanding market trends, keeping an eye on competitors, or discovering new leads, manually browsing Facebook Marketplace just isn’t practical. A scraper automates this process, allowing you to extract specific data points like pricing trends, product availability, and seller information—all in real time.

Here’s why scraping Facebook Marketplace is essential for businesses:

• Competitive Pricing: Stay ahead by tracking competitors' prices and adjusting your offers accordingly.
• Market Trends: Identify emerging trends by monitoring popular listings and categories.
• Lead Generation: Gather information on potential customers or suppliers in your niche.
• Inventory Management: Keep tabs on product availability and demand in specific locations.

How MrScraper Simplifies the Process

What sets MrScraper apart is its ease of use. You don’t need to be a tech wizard to get it up and running. Whether you’re targeting specific product categories, geographic areas, or price ranges, MrScraper’s customizable options ensure you get the exact data you’re looking for. And when it’s time to analyze that data, exporting it is straightforward with multiple formats like CSV, Excel, or JSON available.

Step-by-Step Guide: How to Use a Facebook Marketplace Scraper

Using a Facebook Marketplace scraper with MrScraper is straightforward. Follow these steps to get started:

Step 1: Sign Up for MrScraper

First, sign up for an account on MrScraper. Once you have an account, you can access the dashboard, where all scraping activities are managed.

Step 2: Create a scraper

The second step, we create a scraper for the facebook marketplace. Fill out the name, choose standard type, then fill out the Default entry urls with the marketplace url containing the items. For example: https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/nyc/search?query=bikes

Step 3: Set custom cookies

Next, to scrape data from facebook, we need to be authenticated otherwise the url we’ve provided will redirect the scraper browser to a login page. To be authenticated on facebook, we need to set custom cookies in the scraper. You can get custom cookies from your own facebook account on your browser’s Devtools Inspect Element. Open up the inspect element, then go to the Application tab, click Cookies, then click https://www.facebook.com.

The cookies you need are c_user and xs, copy the value of each cookie then go back to MrScraper. Go to the Advanced tab then fill the custom cookies with the cookies you’ve already got.

Note: the Facebook account used needs to be able to access the marketplace

Step 4: Create scraping workflows

Next, we need to create scraping workflows for the scraper. Before creating a workflow, you need to know the selector of the container that contains the data you want to scrape.

To find this selector, use your browser’s DevTools by inspecting the page’s HTML. Open the Elements tab to examine the page’s structure. Locate the element that contains the data for each item.

For example, in the image below, the container element selector for each item is .x8gbvx8 .x3ct3a4.

After the container selector is found, let’s go back to the MrScraper app then create a workflow in the Workflow tab.

First, add a Wait time step for 10 seconds so that the page is loaded correctly.

Next, create a Scrape data step then fill the name, choose type Collection, choose All matches for the quantity, choose the CSS type then fill the parent selector with the selector we got which is .x8gbvx8 .x3ct3a4.

Next, we need to determine the data fields we want to scrape from each of the items. In this example, we are going to scrape the picture, name, location, price, and url.

Same as the parent selector, we need to find the selector for each of the data fields. Add a collection item for each of the data fields.

1. Picture: img. Choose the type Attribute, fill the attribute with src.
2. Name: .xvq8zen. Choose the type Text.
3. Location: .xuxw1ft. Choose the type Text.
4. Price: .x1s688f. Choose the type Text.
5. Url: a. Choose the type Attribute, fill the attribute with href.

Choose the First match quantity for every field.

Finally, save the workflow then we’re ready to run the scraper.

Step 5: Run the scraper

After creating the workflows, next, we just need to run the scraper by clicking the Run scraper button on the top right.

Now we wait for the scraping process to complete, which may take anywhere from 10 seconds to over a minute depending on the complexity of the workflows and the amount of data scraped.

Step 6: View the result

Once the scraping process is finished, you can review the extracted data. Additionally, you have the option to copy or export the data by downloading it in either JSON or CSV format.

Expanding Your Scraping Toolkit

If you’ve already started using MrScraper for platforms like Twitter, as we discussed in our Twitter Scraper Made Simple with MrScraper post, adding Facebook Marketplace to your scraping toolkit is a logical next step. The more data you have from multiple sources, the better your insights and decisions will be.

Conclusion

In today’s data-driven world, the ability to quickly and efficiently gather information from platforms like Facebook Marketplace can set your business apart. MrScraper offers an easy and effective way to harness this data, helping you stay competitive and informed. If you haven’t yet added a Facebook Marketplace scraper to your strategy, now’s the time to start.