Three ways to get Korean car data
There are exactly three, and the right answer depends on how fresh your data has to be and how much engineering time you want to spend keeping it that way.
Written by Shend Llapashtica·Updated
The options
Build your own scraper
Cheapest on paper and the most expensive in practice. You need Korean residential proxies, you need to re-read the markup every time Encar ships a change, and you carry the reliability risk yourself. Teams that do this well spend about a developer-week a month on maintenance, forever. Teams that do it badly find out when a customer phones about a car that sold in March.
Buy a bulk export
A nightly CSV or a database dump. Fine for market analysis and price research, where yesterday is close enough. Wrong for a public stock page, because the gap between the dump and reality is exactly the set of cars that just sold — the ones your visitors are most likely to be looking at.
Call a live API
What this is. The read happens when the request happens, so there is no staleness window to reason about, nothing of yours to keep in sync, and a sold car tells you it is sold. The trade is that you depend on someone else's uptime, which is why the demo on the home page is a real call rather than a screenshot.
When not to use this
If you need the entire market in one file for a statistical model, an API with a daily allowance is the wrong shape and a bulk export is the right one — ask us and we will say so. If your users look at individual cars and expect them to be buyable, a live API is the only option that does not eventually embarrass you.
Get your API key
Free tier · 100 requests a day
Keep reading
One number a month, no per-call billing to forecast and no setup fee. The free tier is a real tier, not a trial that expires.
Not logos. Three live businesses importing Korean cars into three different markets, each serving its public inventory from these endpoints.
Three endpoints, one header, JSON out. Everything below is the complete reference — there is no second, paid tier of documentation.