Your first scraping: the sweaters of an online shop

Before you start

• Eloshon Scraper is installed on your Windows computer (download page).
• You have the address of a category, copied from your browser's address bar. Here, the category atelier-demo.example.com/collections/pulls of a fictitious shop: use the category you want to read instead.
• No account or key is needed: reading is free and happens on your computer.

By the end, you will know how to start a scraping, follow it, and find its products and its CSV file.

Start the scraping

1. In the left bar, click New scraping.
2. In Site address, paste the category's address, copied in full from your browser's address bar.
3. In Source, type atelier-demo. This free name is written in the store_slug column of every CSV row and is used as a label in Jobs.
4. Change nothing else: Default product type stays on auto, Content type on Automatic, and Browser when the page needs it and Manual intervention stay on.
5. Click Start scraping.

Once the address is pasted, the What will be tried, in order block, below the options, reminds you that reading starts for free, from your computer.

Follow the reading

The Scraping in progress screen opens. The Progress card shows the current step, for example Discovering products…, then the pages read, the elapsed time and the time left. The Detected, Accepted, To review and Excluded counters go up as it reads, and the Processed products list shows the latest products read.

You can click Pause, then Resume. Stop… asks for confirmation first: the products already read are kept, and the job can be resumed later from Jobs.

The result

At the end, the screen shows Scraping complete, the number of products processed and four counters: Accepted, To review, Excluded and Detected. A line such as Prices read: 18 of 20 · images read: 20 of 20 tells how many products have a price and an image. Below the buttons, a last line gives where the CSV file is.

Check your result:

• View results shows every sweater read, with its price and status.
• Open CSV opens the file with the program Windows uses for .csv files. It holds the accepted products, and the store_slug column reads atelier-demo.
• The products to review (name or price missing) are in a second file, in the same place, whose name ends with -to-verify.csv.
• Report opens the job's detailed report.

If the result is not what you expected

• Enter a site address.: the Site address field is empty. Paste the address, then start again.
• No products retrieved: the page was read but held no product. The screen gives the reason, for example The page was read, but Eloshon found no product on it. Check that it is a listing page or a product page.
• Scraping blocked: the site refused the reading. Under What to do next, the screen lists the routes still open; read Why a site refuses to be read.
• Scraping partly done: only part of the catalogue was read, for example because Max products (1,000 by default) was reached. For this limit, the screen says so and where to raise it.
• Scraping stopped: no more progress: nothing was moving any more, so the job was stopped and the products read are kept. Resume it from Jobs: Resume a stopped job.

Other ways to do it

• From Dashboard: paste the address and the source in the quick start, then click Start. It uses the settings left in New scraping.
• Before starting, click Analyze first to find out what can be read: Analyze a site before reading it.
• For a shop you read often, save it in Sources: Use fills the form in one click.
• You can also start from the home page, a product page or a search page.

Next steps

Decide on the products to review, then pass the file to the Converter: Results, files and the Converter. Every setting and its default value are in All the Scraper's settings.