Taobao

An MCP server exposing browser automation tools, including Taobao product search/detail lookup via Playwright.

Setup

npm install
npx playwright install chromium

Taobao currently requires a logged-in session for both search and product-detail pages — a fresh, unauthenticated browser gets redirected to login.taobao.com. Log in once, manually, and the session is reused:

npm run login:taobao

This opens a visible Chromium window at Taobao's login page. Log in yourself (QR scan or credentials — the script never touches your credentials, it just waits for you). Press Enter in the terminal once you're logged in, and the session is saved to auth/taobao-state.json (override the path with the TAOBAO_STORAGE_STATE env var). Re-run this whenever the session expires.

Run

npm run dev

Runs the MCP server over stdio. Point your MCP client (e.g. Claude Code) at npx tsx src/index.ts in this directory.

By default the browser runs headed (headless: false) so you can see what it's doing; set HEADLESS=true to run headless once you trust it's working.

Tools

• open-page, click, get-page-content, screenshot — generic browser control.
• taobao-search-products — search by keyword, returns a best-effort list of {itemId, title, price, link, imageUrl}.
• taobao-get-product-detail — fetch {title, price, imageUrl} for one item, given an item id or item.taobao.com URL.

Limitations

• Best-effort scraping, not an official API. Taobao has no public product-search API for general use; this drives a real browser and parses rendered HTML/DOM. Selectors and page structure change without notice and may break these tools at any time.
• Login required. Taobao gates search and item pages behind an authenticated session (enforced both via full-page redirects and via background API calls silently redirecting to login.taobao.com). Run npm run login:taobao first.
• No CAPTCHA bypass. If Taobao serves a verification challenge (slider CAPTCHA, risk-control block), the tools detect it and return an explanatory error field instead of attempting to solve it — you'll need to complete it yourself via npm run login:taobao.
• ToS. Automated access to Taobao may violate its Terms of Service. Use at your own risk, keep request volume low, and don't use this for anything resembling scraping at scale.