Build a Price Tracker with Crawlee and Apify

Description and use

A guide to building a price tracker using Crawlee for Python and Apify. It covers setting up a scraper, extracting product data, sending email alerts on price drops, and deploying the solution to the Apify cloud.

Problem

Manually checking product prices is inefficient. Users need an automated way to monitor specific products for price drops and receive immediate notifications.

Outcome

A fully functional Apify Actor that scrapes product details, exports data in various formats, and sends email alerts when prices drop below a set threshold.

Workflow

• Install Apify CLI and create a new project using the 'Python and Crawlee + BeautifulSoup' template.
• Configure the crawler to target a specific product URL (e.g., Raspberry Pi 5 on Central Computer).
• Implement CSS selectors to extract product name and price (handling currency symbols and data attributes).
• Define a price threshold and integrate the 'Send Email' Actor to trigger alerts when the price drops below the threshold.
• Authenticate with Apify using an API token to enable email sending capabilities.
• Test the script locally using 'apify run --purge'.
• Deploy the actor to the Apify cloud using 'apify push'.
• Configure the actor input and schedule runs in the Apify dashboard.

Evidence

Build a price tracker with Crawlee for Python to scrape product details, export data in multiple formats, and send email alerts for price drops, then deploy and schedule it as an Apify Actor.

Source

In this tutorial, we’ll build a price tracker using Crawlee for Python and Apify.

Source