Encar API: Korean used-car listings in English, in one schema

Is there an official Encar API?

Not one you can sign up for. Encar (encar.com↗) is South Korea's largest used-car sales site, and like most large marketplaces it runs on internal APIs: open the browser's developer tools on a listing and you will see JSON coming back from Encar's own servers. Those endpoints exist to feed Encar's site and apps. They have no public documentation, no developer keys and no terms that allow reuse, and their shape changes whenever Encar ships a new version of a page.

We are not aware of a self-service Encar API with documentation and a sign-up page. If that ever changes, Encar's own site is where it would appear. Until then, an “Encar API” in search results means one of two things:

• A scraper you build. You request Encar's pages or internal JSON yourself, handle blocks and layout changes, translate the Korean and store the result.
• A third-party data API. A service collects publicly visible Encar listings and sells access to the collected data in its own format. AuctionsAPI is one of these, and like the others it is independent and not affiliated with Encar.

Either way, somebody has to solve the same problems: Korean units, Korean model names and three separate documents per car. The rest of this article is about those problems.

What exporters need from an Encar listing

A buyer in Almaty, Bishkek or Amman cannot walk round the car. Everything they decide comes from the listing and its reports, so an export catalog needs much more than a title and a price. These are the fields people ask about first, with the way Encar shows them:

Two of these deserve a word. The performance and condition record (성능·상태점검기록부) is a legal form in Korea: a dealer has to hand it to the buyer, and it shows which panels were repainted or replaced and whether the frame was touched. The insurance history comes from the claims database run by the Korea Insurance Development Institute and shows what insurers paid out for the car. We go through the first one panel by panel in How to read an Encar inspection report.

Why raw Encar data is hard to work with

Getting the HTML or the JSON is the easy part. Turning it into something your filters, your sorting and your client's eyes understand is where the time goes.

Prices in 만원

Korean sites count money in 만 (man), units of 10,000 won. A price of 2,790만원 is 2,790 × 10,000 = 27,900,000 won. Store the text and you cannot sort or filter; strip the non-digits and you get 2,790, a car that costs about two dollars. The raw data behind the page uses the same convention, often as a bare number with no unit at all, so a parser has to know which scale it is reading. Lease and rental listings can also show a monthly figure next to the price.

Korean model names

Model names follow Korean marketing, not the VIN. A fourth-generation Sorento is listed as 쏘렌토 4세대 and its facelift as 더 뉴 쏘렌토 4세대; a Grandeur can be 그랜저 IG, 더 뉴 그랜저 IG or 디 올 뉴 그랜저. As a rule of thumb, 더 뉴 (“the new”) marks a facelift and 올 뉴 or 디 올 뉴 (“all new”) a new generation. Imported brands are transliterated: 벤츠 is Mercedes-Benz, 비엠더블유 is BMW. Trims mix both scripts, as in 2.2 디젤 4WD 시그니처.

If your catalog also carries cars from K Car or KB Chachacha, each site spells the same model slightly differently. Without one dictionary for makes, models and generations, a buyer filtering for “Sorento” misses half the cars.

Dates and model years

Encar dates a car as 21/03식, the year and month it is counted from (March 2021 here). When the model year differs, a label such as (22년형) is often added in brackets. Buyers abroad care about the first registration, some customs offices care about the production date, and the two are not always the same. Keep both fields and never overwrite one with the other.

Three documents for one car

The listing, the performance check record and the insurance history are separate pages in separate formats. The record is a form with a car diagram; the insurance history is a set of counters and dated claims. Joining them to the right car, and noticing when one of them is missing, is part of the job.

How an Encar API request looks

With AuctionsAPI, Encar comes through the marketplace API, the same one that serves K Car, KB Chachacha, Che168 and the other marketplaces. The key goes in the api_key query parameter, and every source enabled for your key is searched together. This request asks for cars from 2020 onward that have an inspection report, priced up to 30,000,000 won (3,000만원), cheapest first:

curl -G "https://api.auctionsapi.com/search" \  -d "api_key=YOUR_API_KEY" \  -d "year_from=2020" \  -d "has_inspections=1" \  -d "currency=krw" \  -d "price_to=30000000" \  -d "sort=cheaper" \  -d "perPage=50" \  -H "Accept: application/json"

/search returns flags such as has_inspections and has_history_reports but not the full reports, which keeps result pages light. When a client opens one car, fetch it by VIN and the reports come attached:

curl -G "https://api.auctionsapi.com/cars/vin/KNARH81BDMS012345" \  -d "api_key=YOUR_API_KEY" \  -d "lang=en" \  -H "Accept: application/json"

If the same Sorento is also for sale on KB Chachacha or K Car, it arrives as one car with several listings and several prices, which is handy when a client asks whether the Encar price is fair. The lang parameter switches option names and report labels to another supported language, Russian and Ukrainian among them.

An example normalised Encar record

Here is a shortened response for a made-up 2021 Kia Sorento. The field names are the real ones; the values are an example.

{  "data": {    "id": "car-8f2a61c0",    "year": 2021,    "month": 3,    "vin": "KNARH81BDMS012345",    "brand": { "name": "Kia" },    "model": { "name": "Sorento" },    "fuel": { "name": "diesel" },    "has_inspections": true,    "has_history_reports": true,    "option_ids": [101, 102, 103, 104, 105],    "listings": [      {        "external": {          "id": "39012457",          "domain": { "name": "fem.encar.com" }        },        "odometer": 98760,        "seller_type": { "name": "dealer" },        "price": {          "price": 27900000,          "currency": { "name": "krw" },          "history": [            { "price": 29500000, "created_at": "2026-08-01T09:00:00Z" },            { "price": 27900000, "created_at": "2026-09-20T12:00:00Z" }          ]        }      }    ],    "inspections": [      {        "conclusions": {          "accident_status_key": "ok",          "water_damage_status_key": "ok",          "fire_damage_status_key": "ok"        },        "checked_items": [          {            "part_key": "front_fender_right",            "result_key": "issue",            "issue_type_keys": ["replaced"]          }        ]      }    ],    "vehicle_history_reports": [      {        "summary": {          "owner_change_count": 2,          "insurance_claim_count": 2,          "total_loss_count": 0        }      }    ]  }}

Two things are worth seeing here. The replaced front fender does not make this an accident car under the Korean record: a bolted-on outer panel counts as a simple repair, while any work on the frame does not. And two insurance claims say little on their own; the amounts matter, which is why the full history arrives as dated events with sums rather than a yes or no.

Converting won to dollars without surprises

Exporters quote in dollars, Encar prices in won. Keep the won price as the source of truth and calculate the dollar figure when you show it:

1. Read the price as a whole number of won: 27,900,000.
2. Divide by the current rate. At an example 1,400 won per dollar: 27,900,000 / 1,400 = 19,928.57, shown as about $19,930.
3. Store the rate and the time you used it, so a quote can still be explained a week later.
4. Never save the converted number as if it were the listing price. When the rate moves, recalculate.

Remember that the Encar price is the price of the car standing in Korea. Deregistration, inland transport, port charges and freight come on top, and so do the duties at home, as the guide to importing a car from Korea shows step by step.

Keeping Encar data fresh

Encar listings change all the time: dealers cut prices, cars sell and disappear, new stock arrives through the day. A catalog that was right on Monday shows sold cars by Friday. Three habits keep it honest:

• Refresh prices as well as adding cars. Store every price with its date. A drop from 2,950만원 to 2,790만원 over seven weeks tells a buyer the dealer may be ready to talk; the API keeps that history in price.history.
• Mark removed cars instead of deleting them. When a listing stops appearing, flag it as gone. A client who saved the car sees that it sold, and you keep its last price for your own statistics.
• Re-check reports before money moves. A dealer can have a car inspected again after a repair, and the insurance history can gain a claim. Fetch the car by VIN once more on the day your client commits.

For day-to-day browsing, /search pages through up to 10,000 results per set of filters. For a full export of everything enabled for your key, the marketplace API also has a cursor-based /cars endpoint that walks every active car with its reports, batch by batch.

Scraping Encar yourself or using an Encar data API

Plenty of exporters start with a scraper, and for a few hundred cars a week it can work. The trouble starts when it has to run every day for a year, through Encar redesigns and blocked IP addresses.

If you need a handful of cars for one client, browsing Encar with a browser translator is fine. If the cars feed a website, a Telegram bot or a CRM, the scraper becomes a second product you have to keep alive.

Where to start

Open the Encar API page to see the request builder and a full example record, or look through the other Korean and Chinese sites on the sources page. A free demo key is enough to check the format on real data before you change anything in your catalog. If your buyers ask about panels and frame damage, and they will, read the inspection report guide next.