#amazonpricemonitoringtool

Learn how to build an Amazon Price Tracker using Python to automatically monitor and receive alerts on price changes for products you are interested in buying.

How To Create An Amazon Price Tracker With Python For Real-Time Price Monitoring?

In today's world of online shopping, everyone enjoys scoring the best deals on Amazon for their coveted electronic gadgets. Many of us maintain a wishlist of items we're eager to buy at the perfect price. With intense competition among e-commerce platforms, prices are constantly changing.

The savvy move here is to stay ahead by tracking price drops and seizing those discounted items promptly. Why rely on commercial Amazon price tracker software when you can create your solution for free? It is the perfect opportunity to put your programming skills to the test.

Our objective: develop a price tracking tool to monitor the products on your wishlist. You'll receive an SMS notification with the purchase link when a price drop occurs. Let's build your Amazon price tracker, a fundamental tool to satisfy your shopping needs.

About Amazon Price Tracker

An Amazon price tracker is a tool or program designed to monitor and track the prices of products listed on the Amazon online marketplace. Consumers commonly use it to keep tabs on price fluctuations for items they want to purchase. Here's how it typically works:

Product Selection: Users choose specific products they wish to track. It includes anything on Amazon, from electronics to clothing, books, or household items.

Price Monitoring: The tracker regularly checks the prices of the selected products on Amazon. It may do this by web scraping, utilizing Amazon's API, or other methods

Price Change Detection: When the price of a monitored product changes, the tracker detects it. Users often set thresholds, such as a specific percentage decrease or increase, to trigger alerts.

Alerts: The tracker alerts users if a price change meets the predefined criteria. This alert can be an email, SMS, or notification via a mobile app.

Informed Decisions: Users can use these alerts to make informed decisions about when to buy a product based on its price trends. For example, they may purchase a product when the price drops to an acceptable level.

Amazon price trackers are valuable tools for savvy online shoppers who want to save money by capitalizing on price drops. They can help users stay updated on changing market conditions and make more cost-effective buying choices.

Methods

Let's break down the process we'll follow in this blog. We will create two Python web scrapers to help us track prices on Amazon and send price drop alerts.

Step 1: Building the Master File

Our first web scraper will collect product name, price, and URL data. We'll assemble this information into a master file.

Step 2: Regular Price Checking

We'll develop a second web scraper to check the prices and perform hourly checks periodically. This Python script will compare the current prices with the data in the master file.

Step 3: Detecting Price Drops

Since Amazon sellers often use automated pricing, we expect price fluctuations. Our script will specifically look for significant price drops, let's say more than a 10% decrease.

Step 4: Alert Mechanism

Our script will send you an SMS price alert if a substantial price drop is detected. It ensures you'll be informed when it's the perfect time to grab your desired product at a discounted rate.

Let's kick off the process of creating a Python-based Amazon web scraper. We focus on extracting specific attributes using Python's requests, BeautifulSoup, and the lxml parser, and later, we'll use the csv library for data storage.

Here are the attributes we're interested in scraping from Amazon:

Product Name

Sale Price (not the listing price)

To start, we'll import the necessary libraries:

In the realm of e-commerce web scraping, websites like Amazon often harbor a deep-seated aversion to automated data retrieval, employing formidable anti-scraping mechanisms that can swiftly detect and thwart web scrapers or bots. Amazon, in particular, has a robust system to identify and block such activities. Incorporating headers into our HTTP requests is an intelligent strategy to navigate this challenge.

Now, let's move on to assembling our bucket list. In my instance, we've curated a selection of five items that comprise my personal bucket list, and we've included them within the program as a list. If your bucket list is more extensive, storing it in a text file and subsequently reading and processing the data using Python is prudent.

We will create two functions to extract Amazon pricing and product names that retrieve the price when called. For this task, we'll rely on Python's BeautifulSoup and lxml libraries, which enable us to parse the webpage and extract the e-commerce product data. To pinpoint the specific elements on the web page, we'll use Xpaths.

To construct the master file containing our scraped data, we'll utilize Python's csv module. The code for this process is below.

Here are a few key points to keep in mind:

The master file consists of three columns: product name, price, and the product URL.

We iterate through each item on our bucket list, parsing the necessary information from their URLs.

To ensure responsible web scraping and reduce the risk of detection, we incorporate random time delays between each request.

Once you execute the code snippets mentioned above, you'll find a CSV file as "master_data.csv" generated. It's important to note that you can run this program once to create the master file.

To develop our Amazon price tracking tool, we already have the essential master data to facilitate comparisons with the latest scraped information. Now, let's craft the second script, which will extract data from Amazon and perform comparisons with the data stored in the master file.

In this tracker script, we'll introduce two additional libraries:

The Pandas library will be instrumental for data manipulation and analysis, enabling us to work with the extracted data efficiently.

The Twilio library: We'll utilize Twilio for SMS notifications, allowing us to receive price alerts on our mobile devices.

Pandas: Pandas is a powerful open-source Python library for data analysis and manipulation. It's renowned for its versatile data structure, the pandas DataFrame, which facilitates the handling of tabular data, much like spreadsheets, within Python scripts. If you aspire to pursue a career in data science, learning Pandas is essential.

Twilio: Regarding programmatically sending SMS notifications, Twilio's APIs are a top choice. We opt for Twilio because it provides free credits, which suffice for our needs.

To streamline the scraper and ensure it runs every hour, we aim to automate the process. Given my full-time job, manually initiating the program every two hours is impractical. We prefer to set up a schedule that triggers the program's execution hourly.

To verify the program's functionality, manually adjust the price values within the master data file and execute the tracker program. You'll observe SMS notifications as a result of these modifications.

Learn how to build an Amazon Price Tracker using Python to automatically monitor and receive alerts on price changes for products you are interested in buying