Scraping Online Auction Data: eBay, Sotheby's, and Christie's Price Intelligence

Why Auction Data Matters Auction prices are the purest signal of market value — what someone actually paid, not what a seller hoped for. Whether you're flipping collectibles, investing in art, or doing market research, programmatic access to auction results is incredibly valuable. The Challenge Each platform structures data differently: eBay — completed listings with bid histories Sotheby's — high-end lots with estimate ranges Christie's — detailed provenance and hammer prices Setup pip install requests beautifulsoup4 pandas selenium Auction sites are heavily protected. ScraperAPI handles rotating proxies and browser fingerprinting so you can focus on parsing. Scraping eBay Completed Listings import requests from bs4 import BeautifulSoup import pandas as pd from datetime import datetime SCRAPER_API = " http://api.scraperapi.com " API_KEY = " YOUR_SCRAPERAPI_KEY " def scrape_ebay_sold ( query , pages = 3 ): """ Scrape completed/sold listings from eBay. """ all_items = [] for page in ran