HotUKDeals Scraper

Overview

This Apify actor scrapes deal listings from HotUKDeals. It uses Playwright to mimic human browsing behavior, helping avoid detection while extracting structured deal data based on your search criteria.

Key Features

• Multiple Scrape Sources: Scrape from the main pages (hottest, hot, new), specific categories, or custom search results.
• Comprehensive Data: Extracts title, description, price, merchant, expiry, temperature rating, image URL, and both HotUKDeals and final merchant URLs.
• Smart Filtering: Automatically excludes expired deals and sorts results by deal "temperature" (hotness).
• Reliable Scraping: Implements request throttling, follows redirects to get real merchant URLs, and includes retry logic for robustness.

How to Use

Configure the actor with input parameters to define your scrape job.

Input Parameters

Required:
* scrape_type: Choose the source.
* "Main Pages": Scrape homepage sections.
* "Category": Scrape a specific category (e.g., computers, electronics).
* "Search": Scrape using a search query.

Conditional (based on scrape_type):
* For "Main Pages", provide a main_url:
* https://www.hotukdeals.com/ (Root)
* https://www.hotukdeals.com/hottest
* https://www.hotukdeals.com/hot
* https://www.hotukdeals.com/new
* For "Category", provide the category name.
* For "Search", provide the search_query.

Optional:
* max_items: Maximum number of deals to scrape (default: 10).
* throttle: Delay between requests in seconds (default: 2).

Output

The actor outputs a JSON array containing the scraped deals.

[
  {
    "image": "https://images.hotukdeals.com/example.jpg",
    "title": "Samsung 65\" QN95C Neo QLED 4K TV",
    "description": "Lowest ever price for this TV model...",
    "price": "£1,799.00",
    "company": "John Lewis",
    "deal_expiry": "Ends in 2 days",
    "temperature": "325",
    "url": "https://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/samsung-tv-deal-3254",
    "get_deal_url": "https://www.hotukdeals.com/visit/thread/3254",
    "real_url": "https://www.johnlewis.com/samsung-tv-65inch"
  }
]

Technical Notes & Use Cases

Common Integrations: The structured output is suited for price tracking, market research, building deal alert systems, or feeding data into e-commerce analysis dashboards and price comparison services.

Under the Hood: Built with Python, Playwright, and BeautifulSoup4. It handles pagination, manages rate limiting via throttling, and includes error handling for common scraping obstacles.

Ethical Use: Please respect the target site. Use the built-in throttling (2-5 second delay is recommended), adhere to robots.txt, and scrape at reasonable volumes. Handle any personal data in compliance with relevant regulations like GDPR.