ssc — ShoppingScraper CLI

Price scraper CLI for Amazon, Google Shopping, Bol.com, and Coolblue. Scrape prices, offers, buy-box winners, variants, and reviews from your terminal — or wire it into Claude Desktop / Cursor / Claude Code as a native MCP tool.

🌐 Website: shoppingscraper.com · 🔑 Get an API key: app.shoppingscraper.com · 📖 API docs: apiguide

Agent-friendly command-line tool for the ShoppingScraper API by shoppingscraper.com. Stable JSON envelope on every command, MCP server mode for Claude Desktop / Cursor / Code, ships with a SKILL.md so any LLM picks it up without schema wrapping.

Why

You're an AI agent (or a developer building one) and you need product data — prices, offers, buy-box winners, variants, reviews — from Google Shopping, Amazon, Bol.com, or Coolblue. Today you're hitting the raw HTTP API and writing the same retry/error/credit-tracking glue every time. ssc is that glue, in one binary, with a stable contract.

Use cases:

• Price monitoring CLI — fan out across thousands of EANs from cron / GitHub Actions / your CI.

• E-commerce scraping — match an EAN to a marketplace SKU, pull every offer, watch the buy-box.

• AI agents — give Claude/Cursor live marketplace data via the built-in MCP server.

• Bulk price scraping — ssc batch reads EANs from stdin, streams NDJSON envelopes.

Related MCP server: MCP4Amazon

Install

# Run without installing
npx -y @shoppingscraper/cli credits

# Global install
npm install -g @shoppingscraper/cli

# Or via Homebrew (post-launch)
brew install ShoppingResult/tap/ssc

Quick start

# 1. Set your API key (get one at https://app.shoppingscraper.com)
export SSC_API_KEY="<your-key>"

# 2. Verify
ssc credits
# → {"_v":1,"ok":true,"command":"credits","result":{...},"meta":{...}}

# 3. Get offers for an EAN on a marketplace
ssc offers --site amazon.de --ean 0190198001281

# 4. Pretty output for humans
ssc buybox --site bol.com --ean 0190198001281 --pretty

# 5. Pipe-friendly: get just the result payload
ssc info --site shopping.google.nl --ean 0190198001281 | jq '.result'

# 6. Bulk: 500 EANs from a file, capped at 500 credits
ssc batch offers --input eans.txt --site amazon.de --max-spend-credits 500

Commands

⚠ = high-cost, gets requiresConfirmation: true in MCP tool annotations.

Bulk / streaming

Every scraping command accepts --input <file|->. Reads one EAN/SKU per line, fans out with the configured concurrency (default 5), jitters each request 200–800ms, streams NDJSON envelopes. Lines beginning with # are comments.

# From a file
ssc offers --input eans.txt --site amazon.de --max-spend-credits 500

# From stdin
cat eans.txt | ssc info --site bol.com --input - --max-spend-credits 100

# `ssc batch` is sugar with a mandatory cap
ssc batch buybox --input eans.txt --site amazon.de --max-spend-credits 200

ssc batch requires --max-spend-credits N — there is no default. This is deliberate: agents bypassing this flag is the highest-blast-radius mistake an MCP-driven workflow can make.

Channel API (Google Shopping)

Google Shopping offers and matching run through the channel API on enterprise.shoppingscraper.com — an async batch pipeline instead of one HTTP request per EAN. ssc offers / ssc match for other sites keep the legacy sync endpoints, which now serve Amazon and Bol.com only (Coolblue, Idealo, and the rest were dropped from these two commands).

The blocking form wraps the whole pipeline (submit → poll → drain → ack) and streams NDJSON, one envelope per product:

# Up to 50,000 EANs in one run; 1 credit per EAN
ssc offers --country nl --input eans.txt --max-spend-credits 5000

# Single EAN, catalog matching (returns catalog_id + title, no offers)
ssc match --country de --ean 5055986110651

# Input lines can also be NDJSON objects; a feed title roughly doubles match rate
# {"ean":"5055986110651","title":"Monstershop T-mech Garten Anhängewalze"}

For big batches or cron-driven collection, drive the raw steps yourself:

ssc offers submit --country nl --input eans.txt --max-spend-credits 50000
ssc offers status                       # {queued, claimed, done, failed}
ssc offers results --ack                # one page (max 1000), acked after printing
ssc offers ack --page-token <token>     # manual ack if you collected without --ack

Operational notes:

• Billing is unchanged: 1 EAN = 1 credit, billed at submit.

• Delivery is at-least-once: a page you never ack is redelivered; the blocking form acks only after writing the results to stdout.

• Drain within ~6 hours: completed results that are never collected are pruned. If the blocking form hits --wait-timeout (default 3600s), resume with ssc offers results --ack.

• Submit is non-idempotent: reconcile against the accepted count instead of re-posting a timed-out submit.

• Key scopes: offers and matching both use channel:google — one key covers both.

• --application-id isolates submissions/results per application on one key.

Output format

Every command emits a stable JSON envelope on stdout (one line for batch/streaming):

{
  "_v": 1,
  "ok": true,
  "command": "offers",
  "result": { /* endpoint payload */ },
  "error": null,
  "meta": {
    "credits_remaining": 12483,
    "duration_ms": 412,
    "request_id": "ssc_01a2b3c4d5e6f708"
  }
}

On failure: ok: false, result: null, error.code is one of AUTH_MISSING | AUTH_INVALID | RATE_LIMITED | UPSTREAM_ERROR | NETWORK_ERROR | SPEND_CAP_EXCEEDED | NOT_FOUND | INVALID_RESPONSE | USER_ERROR.

Exit codes:

• 0 ok · 1 user error · 2 auth · 3 rate-limit · 4 upstream · 5 network · 6 spend-cap exceeded.

Pass --pretty for a human-readable view; --quiet to suppress stdout (only the exit code matters).

Authentication

Resolution order:

1. --api-key <key> flag (avoid — lands in shell history)

2. SSC_API_KEY environment variable (recommended)

3. ~/.config/ssc/config.json with {"api_key": "..."} (mode 0600 recommended)

The CLI sends the key as a query-string parameter (?api_key=...) to the legacy hosts (api. / app.shoppingscraper.com), matching the deployed ShoppingScraper API contract. The channel API host (enterprise.shoppingscraper.com) authenticates with the X-API-Key header instead — the key never appears in channel URLs. All URLs and header values are redacted before they appear in logs, error envelopes, or meta.request_id.

MCP — Model Context Protocol

ssc mcp serve

Run as a stdio MCP server, exposing every command as a tool (ssc_offers, ssc_info, ssc_buybox, …). Tool input schemas are auto-derived from the same zod schemas the CLI uses, so agents and humans see the same contract.

Claude Desktop

Add to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "shoppingscraper": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@shoppingscraper/cli", "mcp", "serve"],
      "env": { "SSC_API_KEY": "<your-key>" }
    }
  }
}

Cursor / Claude Code

Same shape — point any MCP-compatible host at npx -y @shoppingscraper/cli mcp serve with SSC_API_KEY in the env.

Tool annotations

High-cost tools (ssc_variants, ssc_match with --deepsearch, anything bulk) carry requiresConfirmation: true. This annotation is advisory — well-behaved hosts prompt before invoking; hostile or headless clients ignore it. The real spend-cap brake is --max-spend-credits and the server-side cap on your ShoppingScraper API plan.

Spend-cap defenses

Three layers, in order of strength:

1. Server-side (strongest) — the ShoppingScraper API enforces max_credits_per_call and per-key daily caps. Returns HTTP 402 with credits_required. Cannot be bypassed by anything.

2. Client-side mandatory — ssc batch refuses to run without --max-spend-credits N.

3. Client-side advisory — global --max-spend-credits (default 100) on every command; per-tool soft caps; MCP requiresConfirmation annotations.

To disable client-side caps for a power-user workflow:

ssc batch offers --input eans.txt --site amazon.de --max-spend-credits none

Programmatic use

import { HttpClient, endpoints, resolveConfig } from "@shoppingscraper/cli";

const cfg = resolveConfig();
const client = new HttpClient({
  apiKey: cfg.apiKey,
  baseUrl: cfg.baseUrl,
  appBaseUrl: cfg.appBaseUrl,
  channelBaseUrl: cfg.channelBaseUrl,
  timeoutMs: 30_000,
  retries: 2,
});
// Legacy sync (Amazon / Bol.com)
const r = await endpoints.offers(client, { site: "amazon.de", ean: "0190198001281" });
console.log(r.creditsRemaining, r.data);

// Channel API (Google Shopping): submit → status → results → ack
const sub = await endpoints.channelSubmit(client, "offers", {
  country: "nl",
  items: ["0190198001281"],
});
console.log(sub.data.accepted, sub.data.rejected);
await client.close();

Development

npm install
npm run typecheck
npm test
npm run build
node dist/cli.js --help

Security

See SECURITY.md. Found a vulnerability? Email security@shoppingscraper.com. Please do not open a public issue.

About ShoppingScraper

ssc is built and maintained by ShoppingScraper — the e-commerce price-scraping API for Amazon, Google Shopping, Bol.com, Coolblue, and 30+ other marketplaces. EAN-precise, real-time, and built for AI agents.

• 🌐 Website: shoppingscraper.com

• 🔑 Get an API key: app.shoppingscraper.com

• 📖 API docs: app.shoppingscraper.com/apiguide

• 📨 Contact: hello@shoppingscraper.com

License

MIT — © ShoppingScraper