Is It Legal to Scrape eBay, Walmart, Zillow and Other Marketplaces?

ProxyField sells residential proxies from $1.95/GB for public price monitoring, but eBay itself does not allow web scraping: as of October 2026 its User Agreement forbids robots, scrapers and data-mining tools, and since February 2026 also buy-for-me agents and LLM-driven bots, except with eBay's prior express permission. Collecting public listings while logged out is a contract risk rather than a crime. eBay's licensed route is its Developers Program APIs.

It is set out in two places: the User Agreement, which bars automated access for any purpose without prior express permission, and robots.txt, which allows automated access only for publicly available search engines and says "Checkouts are strictly for human users." Enterprise integrations are pointed to eBay's official API and its API License Agreement.

Reading public prices is low legal risk, but automated access breaks eBay's User Agreement, so eBay can block you, act against the eBay account you scrape from, and sue heavy crawlers, as it did in eBay v. Bidder's Edge (2000). Safer routes: check listings by hand, use eBay's Product Research tool if you sell, use the eBay Developers Program APIs under their license, and do not build an automated scraper unless eBay has authorized it.

Generally yes for public product facts such as prices, stock and ratings, which copyright does not protect. Most large shops forbid scraping in their terms, so the risks are contract claims if you accepted them, copyright if you copy photos and descriptions, the database right in Europe if you take a whole catalog, and personal data about sellers or reviewers.

It is not a crime to read Walmart's public product pages, but Walmart's Terms of Use bar robots and similar tools without its prior written permission, and many pages show a bot check. Getting past that check repeatedly is where the legal risk grows; Walmart's Developer Portal is the licensed route for partners.

Selling it is the risky part. Zillow's Terms of Use bar automated queries and scraping, listing photos and descriptions are often owned by agents and photographers, and agents' and owners' contact details are personal data; reselling a copy of the listings combines all three risks. Aggregated market statistics derived from public data carry far less risk.

Airbnb's Terms of Service, last updated February 5, 2026, say "Do not use bots, crawlers, scrapers, or other automated means to access or collect data or other content from or otherwise interact with the Airbnb Platform", and forbid circumventing its security measures. Host names and photos are personal data in Europe.

Reading Target's public prices is not a crime, and prices are facts. Target's robots.txt disallows account, list, registry and search-filter paths for all crawlers, so stay on product pages, keep the rate low and read Target's terms, especially before scraping from a Target account.

Each Shopify store is a separate business with its own terms, so the answer depends on the store. Public prices and availability are facts and low risk; product photos and descriptions belong to the merchant, so reusing them needs permission.

Craigslist forbids it in unusually broad terms: no collection "via robots, spiders, scripts, scrapers, crawlers, or any automated or manual equivalent (e.g., by hand)". In 2013 a federal court held in Craigslist v. 3Taps that scraping on after a cease-and-desist letter and an IP block could violate the CFAA, so stop when Craigslist tells you to.