How to Scrape Data from Home Depot
If you want to build a Home Depot price scraper or automate performing Home Depot inventory checks for individual stores, you’ve probably seen a few web scrapers out there that promise to extract this data from the screen for you, allowing you to download product, pricing & inventory information as CSV files.
While these “screen scrapers” are certainly popular, because they rely on visual components of the target website, they can often fail to extract data accurately when Home Depot changes its website or performs tests on its presentation - as each product page is unique and has many different elements & sections that can often confuse web scraping programs.
This article will present an alternate method for Home Depot data scraping using HAR File Web Scraping, relying instead on the Official Data API that Home Depot uses to send information to your web browser.
This allows us to instead legally scrape the Home Depot API responses from HAR file recordings, which are meant for machines to read and contain all the structured data you will see on the product information pages, search results, and store inventory levels.
Home Depot Product Catalog Scraping
The best way to scrape a basic list of Home Depot products is through their search results page on the Home Depot Official Website. You can simply enter in any search term, navigate to any category, and/or set any advanced filters you may need. You can then simply record your web traffic (per the instructions in the HAR File Web Scraper) and then scroll through the products shown, clicking the next button to get multiple pages.
Once you export the HAR file and parse it, you’ll be able to download a CSV file containing all of the basic product data including name, price, basic details and product ID which will be useful for monitoring local store inventories & pricing.
Home Depot Inventory Checker
Once you have a list of products you want to collect data for, you can then browse to their pages using the HAR file scraper and intercept the raw inventory and pricing data back from the Home Depot API. For example, if the webpage says something like “stocked but inventory levels low,” the raw data API behind that page may reveal the exact quantity of product available (even if not presented on the screen).
You can try this yourself and also check out some of the known Home Depot API Endpoints we have documented on this page to cross reference with HAR files to see where you can find this pricing & inventory data.
