Python 3 Code to scrape prices from ebay.com

ebay_scraper.py

import argparse
from pprint import pprint
from traceback import format_exc

import requests
import unicodecsv as csv
from lxml import html


def parse(brand):

    url = 'https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw={0}&_sacat=0'.format(brand)
    headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/73.0.3683.103 Safari/537.36'}
    failed = False

    # Retries for handling network errors
    for _ in range(5):
        print ("Retrieving %s"%(url))
        response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, verify=False)
        parser = html.fromstring(response.text)
        print ("Parsing page")

        if response.status_code!=200:
            failed = True
            continue
        else:
            failed = False
            break

    if failed:
        return []

    product_listings = parser.xpath('//li[contains(@id,"results-listing")]')
    raw_result_count = parser.xpath("//h1[contains(@class,'count-heading')]//text()")
    result_count = ''.join(raw_result_count).strip()
    print ("Found {0} for {1}".format(result_count,brand))
    scraped_products = []

    for product in product_listings:
        raw_url = product.xpath('.//a[contains(@class,"item__link")]/@href')
        raw_title = product.xpath('.//h3[contains(@class,"item__title")]//text()')
        raw_product_type = product.xpath('.//h3[contains(@class,"item__title")]/span[@class="LIGHT_HIGHLIGHT"]/text()')
        raw_price = product.xpath('.//span[contains(@class,"s-item__price")]//text()')
        price  = ' '.join(' '.join(raw_price).split())
        title = ' '.join(' '.join(raw_title).split())
        product_type = ''.join(raw_product_type)
        title = title.replace(product_type, '').strip()
        data = {
                    'url':raw_url[0],
                    'title':title,
                    'price':price
        }
        scraped_products.append(data)
    return scraped_products


if __name__=="__main__":

    argparser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
    argparser.add_argument('brand',help = 'Brand Name')
    args = argparser.parse_args()
    brand = args.brand

    scraped_data =  parse(brand)
    if scraped_data:
        print ("Writing scraped data to %s-ebay-scraped-data.csv"%(brand))
        with open('%s-ebay-scraped-data.csv'%(brand),'wb') as csvfile:
            fieldnames = ["title","price","url"]
            writer = csv.DictWriter(csvfile,fieldnames = fieldnames,quoting=csv.QUOTE_ALL)
            writer.writeheader()
            for data in scraped_data:
                writer.writerow(data)
    else:
        print("No data scraped")

Hello everyone,
I have tried to run the code for Samsung (and a few other companies) and I keep on getting the same error. For Samsung, it says "Found 52,503 results for Samsung for Samsung", however, it says "No data scraped" right below it and no csv file is made. I tried printing out the product_listings variable and it came up empty. Does anyone have suggestions of what I am doing wrong? Thank you.

Hello everyone,
I have tried to run the code for Samsung (and a few other companies) and I keep on getting the same error. For Samsung, it says "Found 52,503 results for Samsung for Samsung", however, it says "No data scraped" right below it and no csv file is made. I tried printing out the product_listings variable and it came up empty. Does anyone have suggestions of what I am doing wrong? Thank you.

@jenaalsup It may not have anything to do with what you are doing. I'm running into the same thing when I run the code and last year it worked just fine. I have a feeling it has to do with the way the code is parsing the html. If you print response.text you will see that there are definitely results being returned. My only suggestion would be to tackle each statement that is transforming the data by printing the results after the transformation to see what is happening.