Supported stores
External Importer allows you to import products from many (but not all!) public eCommerce websites from around the world.
We've developed a set of special parsers to extract product data from target HTML pages.
External Importer retrieves data directly from store websites. As such, target websites must comply with the following general requirements:
- The website's content must load without JavaScript or Ajax.
- The target website must not block bot access.
- Your server IP must not be blocked on the target website.
These parsers are for a fixed list of popular online stores around the world.
The biggest advantage advanced parsers offer is being able to extract complete product data:
- Title
- Image
- Price
- Currency
- Availability
- Description
- Gallery images
- Old price
- Brand
- Category path
- Specifications
- User reviews
These parsers usually also support:
- Listing pages
- Automatic pagination
The only disadvantage of this approach is that every store requires a unique parser to be developed.
These are generic parsers that can extract data from pages containing structured data and schema markup. Supported markup formats:
- JSON-LD
- RDFa
- Microdata
- Open Graph
- Twitter Card
- and others…
The amount and volume of available data depend on the store. Usually, structured data parsers can extract less product info than advanced parsers.
External Importer holds the fort even if standard data markup, JSON-LD, or Microdata is missing. The plugin will continue performing further HTML parsing to extract necessary product data or reparse listing pages. We call these parsers 'magic' because sometimes even we can't figure out how they work.
We've tested Structured data parsers + Magic parsers on more than 500 real websites with affiliate programs. The test showed that the plugin can extract data from around 75-85% of random eCommerce websites.
If you've installed our other plugin, Affiliate Egg Pro, you can use its parsers inside External Importer (including custom parsers).
Make sure you are using the latest Affiliate Egg version.