Price Tracking Actor

An Apify actor that monitors product prices and availability across major e-commerce sites like Amazon, Walmart, and Target. It scrapes product pages, detects changes, and can send alerts or export data.

Key Features

• Multi-Platform Scraping: Tracks products on Amazon, Walmart, Target, and other generic e-commerce sites.
• Dual Scraping Engine: Uses Cheerio for speed, with a Puppeteer fallback for JavaScript-heavy pages.
• Change Detection: Alerts on price changes (with a configurable threshold) and stock availability updates.
• Notifications: Sends alerts via Slack webhook or SMTP email when changes are detected.
• Data Export: Automatically logs results to a Google Sheet for historical tracking.
• Reliability: Includes configurable retries, request delays, and robust error handling.

How to Use

Basic Setup

1. Provide a list of product URLs in the products input array.
2. Run the actor on the Apify platform. It requires no additional coding.

Enabling Notifications

• Slack: Add your Slack Incoming Webhook URL to the notifySlackWebhook input.
• Email: Provide SMTP server details (host, port, credentials) within an emailNotifications object in your input.

Google Sheets Export

1. Create a Google Service Account and enable the Sheets API.
2. Share your target Sheet with the service account's email address.
3. Add the spreadsheetId and the Service Account JSON key to the googleServiceAccountKey input.

Scheduling

Set up regular runs (e.g., daily) using the Apify platform's scheduling feature for continuous monitoring.

Input Configuration

Required Parameter

• products (array): List of product URLs to monitor.

Common Optional Parameters

• priceChangeThreshold (integer): Minimum percentage change to trigger an alert. Default is 5.
• notifySlackWebhook (string): Your Slack webhook URL for notifications.
• spreadsheetId (string): The ID of your Google Sheet for data export.
• googleServiceAccountKey (string): The JSON key for your Google Service Account.
• requestDelay (integer): Delay (in seconds) between requests. Default is 2.
• maxRetries (integer): Maximum retry attempts for failed requests. Default is 3.
• usePuppeteerFallback (boolean): Enable Puppeteer for dynamic pages. Default is true.

Example Input

{
  "products": [
    "https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01J4MMOQC/",
    "https://www.walmart.com/ip/667977396"
  ],
  "priceChangeThreshold": 5,
  "notifySlackWebhook": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/YOUR/WEBHOOK/URL",
  "requestDelay": 2
}

Output Data

The actor outputs a detailed dataset for each monitored product. The output includes the product URL, title, current price, availability status, and details about any changes detected since the last run.

Example Output Item

{
  "url": "https://www.amazon.com/product-url",
  "title": "Product Name",
  "price": 29.99,
  "availability": true,
  "scrapedAt": "2024-01-15T10:30:00.000Z",
  "priceChange": {
    "old": 34.99,
    "new": 29.99,
    "percentage": 14.3
  },
  "hasChanges": true
}