Shein Catalog Scraper

Shein Catalog Scraper: product ids, titles and images from the public catalogue

There are no prices in this output, and there is no setting that turns them on. That is the first thing to know, because price is what most people are after when they go looking for Shein data, and this is not where they will find it.

What Shein does publish, openly and in bulk, is the catalogue itself: an XML index of every product URL on a storefront, each entry carrying the product id, the full product title, a CDN image URL and a last-modified date. Germany lists 440 catalogue files of 12,000 entries each, which is 5,271,135 products. Twelve more storefronts publish their own, about 60 million rows between them. This Actor reads that, one row per entry, and stops there. It does not open product pages, because the product pages are closed: tested across five different HTTP clients on four storefronts, every one came back with the product data stripped out. No price, no stock, no rating, no sizes, no seller.

So: if you need prices, buy something else. If what you need is the list, every product id and title on a storefront, everything whose title mentions "cargo", an id set you can diff against last week's, this reads it cheaply and without a browser, a login or a key.

What one row looks like

A real row from a real run:

{
  "ok": true,
  "recordType": "catalogEntry",
  "region": "de",
  "contentType": "products",
  "productId": "68470079",
  "title": "2pcs/Set Baby Girls Newborn Cute Bodysuit & Headband Summer Outfit",
  "url": "https://de.shein.com/2pcs-Set-Baby-Girls-Newborn-Cute-Bodysuit-%26-Headband-Summer-Outfit-p-68470079.html",
  "imageUrl": "https://img.ltwebstatic.com/v4/j/spmp/2025/05/24/78/1748082702.jpg",
  "lastmod": "2026-09-20",
  "changefreq": "daily",
  "price": null,
  "sourceSitemap": "sitemap-products-1.xml",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-20T17:42:11.108Z"
}

price is on every row, always null. It is there so that anyone scanning the output for a price finds the field and its answer rather than an absent key they have to guess about.

Input

Everything is optional. Run it with no input at all and you get one free sample row showing the shape, and nothing is charged for it.

{
  "region": "de",
  "maxItems": 500,
  "updatedSince": "2026-09-19"
}

Both filters are applied here, to rows already read, because there is no search behind a static XML file. There is only the file. The upside is that a filter cannot be quietly ignored the way a query parameter can, and rows it drops are never delivered or charged. The downside is that a narrow filter makes the run read a lot and deliver a little, which costs you time even though it costs you no rows. That is what maxSitemapFiles bounds.

updatedSince is not a change feed, and this is the one setting that will mislead you. Shein re-stamps the whole catalogue at once rather than each product when it changes. Checked on 2026-09-20: two catalogue files read end to end were 12,000 of 12,000 on a single date, all 440 files in the index carried that date, and so did samples taken from 24 files spread across the whole catalogue. So the date tells you when Shein last regenerated the catalogue, not which products moved. Set it to yesterday and you may get everything; set it to tomorrow and you will get nothing.

If you want real changes, pull the ids and diff them against your last pull. The setting is still here because it does exactly what it says and costs nothing, and if a run drops every row to it you get a free row naming the dates it actually saw rather than a silent zero. One thing to expect: runs from different places see slightly different stamps, and a run may come back carrying today's date and yesterday's side by side. Within any one catalogue file the date is the same on every entry, which is the part that matters.

Output

One row per catalogue entry, with these fields:

Every real row carries ok: true and recordType: "catalogEntry". The free sample row carries _sample: true and every diagnostic carries _diagnostic: true, both with charged: false. So a filter on ok === true gives you real data and nothing else, whatever else the run had to report.

Price

$0.20 per 1,000 rows, plus a $0.0015 start fee per run. One event per row written to the dataset is the only thing metered, flat on every plan, with no volume tiers and no minimum spend.

A storefront holds millions of entries, so the row count you ask for is the bill you get. There is no per-file minimum hiding underneath it.

Everything else is free. The sample row is free. Diagnostic rows are free. A row dropped by one of your filters is never delivered and never charged. A catalogue file that comes back refused is free, and so is one that comes back empty. A run that matches nothing at all charges for no rows at all.

The metered event is a named one, so there is nothing quietly riding on the built-in dataset-item charge. That is the usual reason a run ends up costing more than the figure on the page.

How it works

Shein publishes the catalogue as an XML index at each storefront's own address. No key, no session, no browser, and the files answer a plain request. The run reads the index first, works out which files it needs, and then streams them.

Streaming rather than downloading matters here for two reasons. One file decodes to roughly eight megabytes, and holding one, never mind two, inside a small container is how a run gets killed halfway through. And because the reader parses entries as they arrive, maxItems stops the transfer in the middle of a file instead of after it. Asking for 200 rows genuinely transfers about 200 rows' worth of bytes.

The run checks what came back rather than trusting the status code. A refusal dressed as a page, a file that parses to nothing, a file whose entries carry no usable URL: each produces a free diagnostic row saying which file and why, and the run carries on to the next one. A startFile past the end of the catalogue is refused before anything is downloaded, and the message tells you how many files the storefront actually has today.

Requests go out directly by default, because that is what the files answer to, and the run retries automatically if a request is ever refused. You can point the run at proxy servers of your own if you would rather, but you do not need to.

Limitations: what this does not do

• No prices. Not on any row, not on any setting, not on any storefront. Shein does not put a

price in the catalogue and the product pages are closed to this kind of request. This is the limitation that matters most and it is not going to change from this side.

• No stock, sizes, colours, ratings, reviews or seller data either. Same reason. The catalogue

is a list of what exists, not a description of it.

• Thirteen storefronts. us, www, mx, in, ar, ru, br, ca, au and jp all

answer 403 to the catalogue file, and there is no setting that gets round that. Thirty-two country codes were checked, each at two possible addresses; thirteen serve it. Mostly European, but Switzerland and Turkey are on the list and the United States is not, so whatever draws the line is not a border anyone can name from the outside.

• lastmod cannot tell you what changed. It is one date stamped across the entire catalogue

and refreshed daily. Covered above. It is the single most misleading field in the output and it is Shein's, not ours.

• Titles are in the storefront's language. The German catalogue is mostly English in practice,

but the French and Polish ones are not, and there is no translation step.

• Category and store rows are thinner than product rows. Those files carry a URL and a date

and nothing else, so the title is derived from the URL slug and the image is empty.

• One run is one storefront. Reading four means four runs.
• A narrow filter is slow, not cheap-and-fast. It still has to read entries to reject them.

It costs you nothing per rejected row, but it costs you wall-clock, and maxSitemapFiles will stop it before it reads the whole catalogue.

• The catalogue is not a stock list. An entry existing does not mean the product is buyable,

and a product vanishing from the catalogue is the only signal you get that it went away.

FAQ

Can I get Shein prices from this? No. Not with a setting, not with a different region, not with your own proxy servers. The catalogue files carry no price and the product pages do not serve one to this kind of request.

How many products are there? Germany lists 440 files of 12,000 entries each, which is 5,271,135 products once you allow for the short last file. The United Kingdom has slightly more, Turkey the fewest at 307 files. Files within a storefront do not overlap, so the numbers add up rather than double-count.

How do I pull the whole catalogue? Run it repeatedly, moving startFile forward. One run can take 100,000 rows, which is about nine files, so note the sourceSitemap on your last row and start the next run there.

How do I find out what changed since last week? Pull the ids and compare them yourself. updatedSince will not do it; see the input section. Ids that appear are new listings and ids that vanish are gone, and that is the only change signal the catalogue carries.

Do I need an API key, a login or a proxy? No, no and no. The files are public and answer an ordinary request.

What happens if Shein refuses a file mid-run? You get a free row naming the file and the status it returned, the run switches address and keeps going, and you are charged for nothing that did not arrive.

Why is there a price field if it is always null? Because an absent field makes people wonder whether they did something wrong. A field that is present and empty, with a README paragraph explaining it, does not.

Is this legal to use? It reads files Shein publishes for search engines to read, at a polite rate, with no login and no attempt to get past anything. What you then do with the data is your call and your responsibility.