E-commerce Price Monitor 💰

Monitor product prices across Amazon, eBay, and Shopify stores automatically. Track competitor pricing, analyze market trends, and get real-time price alerts for your e-commerce business.

Perfect for online retailers, dropshippers, market researchers, and anyone who needs competitive pricing intelligence.

🎯 What This Actor Does

This actor scrapes product data and prices from major e-commerce platforms:

• Amazon - Product prices, ratings, reviews, ASIN, availability
• eBay - Auction/buy-it-now prices, seller info, condition
• Shopify Stores - Product prices from any Shopify-powered store

Get structured, clean data perfect for:

• 💰 Dynamic pricing strategies
• 📊 Competitive intelligence
• 🔔 Price drop alerts
• 📈 Market trend analysis
• 🤖 Automated repricing tools

✨ Key Features

Multi-Platform Support

• ✅ Amazon (all domains: .com, .co.uk, .de, etc.)
• ✅ eBay (global support)
• ✅ Shopify stores (10,000+ stores supported)
• ✅ Generic e-commerce sites (fallback scraper)

Advanced Anti-Bot Protection

• 🛡️ Residential proxy support (Apify proxy integrated)
• 🎭 Browser fingerprint randomization
• ⏱️ Smart rate limiting
• 🔄 Automatic retry on failure
• 👤 Real browser automation (Playwright)

Rich Data Extraction

• Product title and description
• Current price and currency
• Brand and seller information
• Stock availability status
• Product ratings and review counts
• High-quality image URLs
• Platform-specific IDs (ASIN, SKU, etc.)
• Timestamp for price history tracking

📥 Input Configuration

{
  "productUrls": "https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08N5WRWNW\nhttps://www.ebay.com/itm/123456789",
  "maxProducts": 10,
  "headless": true,
  "delaySeconds": 2.0,
  "includeImages": true,
  "debugMode": false
}

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
productUrls	string	✅ Yes	Product URLs to scrape (one per line)
maxProducts	integer	No	Maximum products to scrape (0 = unlimited)
headless	boolean	No	Run browser in headless mode (default: true)
delaySeconds	number	No	Delay between requests in seconds (default: 2.0)
includeImages	boolean	No	Extract product image URLs (default: true)
debugMode	boolean	No	Enable verbose logging (default: false)

📤 Output Format

Each product returns structured JSON data:

Amazon Product Example

{
  "url": "https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08N5WRWNW",
  "platform": "amazon",
  "title": "PlayStation 5 Console",
  "price": 499.99,
  "currency": "USD",
  "asin": "B08N5WRWNW",
  "brand": "Sony",
  "in_stock": true,
  "rating": 4.8,
  "review_count": 45234,
  "image_url": "https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/...",
  "scraped_at": "2025-01-12T10:30:00Z"
}

eBay Product Example

{
  "url": "https://www.ebay.com/itm/123456789",
  "platform": "ebay",
  "title": "Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max 256GB",
  "price": 1099.00,
  "currency": "USD",
  "condition": "Brand New",
  "seller": "authorized_retailer",
  "in_stock": true,
  "image_url": "https://i.ebayimg.com/images/...",
  "scraped_at": "2025-01-12T10:30:05Z"
}

Shopify Product Example

{
  "url": "https://example.myshopify.com/products/sample",
  "platform": "shopify",
  "title": "Premium Wireless Headphones",
  "price": 199.99,
  "currency": "USD",
  "in_stock": true,
  "image_url": "https://cdn.shopify.com/...",
  "scraped_at": "2025-01-12T10:30:10Z"
}

🚀 Quick Start

1. Basic Price Monitoring

Monitor a few products across different platforms:

{
  "productUrls": "https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08N5WRWNW\nhttps://www.ebay.com/itm/123456789\nhttps://store.example.com/products/item"
}

2. Bulk Price Scraping

Scrape up to 100 products with custom delays:

{
  "productUrls": "https://www.amazon.com/dp/PRODUCT1\nhttps://www.amazon.com/dp/PRODUCT2\n...",
  "maxProducts": 100,
  "delaySeconds": 3.0
}

3. Scheduled Price Tracking

Set up the actor to run on a schedule:

• Hourly - Track volatile prices (flash sales, auctions)
• Daily - Monitor regular price changes
• Weekly - Long-term trend analysis

Use Apify's scheduling feature to automatically run and track price history.

💡 Use Cases

1. Dynamic Pricing for Retailers

Monitor competitor prices in real-time and adjust your pricing automatically to stay competitive.

Example: Track top 20 competitors for your bestselling products, update prices every 6 hours.

2. Dropshipping Product Research

Find profitable products by comparing prices across platforms and calculating margins.

Example: Scrape supplier prices on AliExpress vs retail prices on Amazon to find 50%+ margin products.

3. Market Research & Analysis

Analyze pricing trends, seasonal variations, and market positioning across your category.

Example: Track 100 products in your niche weekly to identify pricing strategies and market gaps.

4. Price Drop Alerts

Get notified when products drop below your target price for purchasing or repricing.

Example: Monitor wishlist items and trigger alerts when prices drop 20% or more.

5. Stock Availability Monitoring

Track when out-of-stock items come back in stock to capitalize on demand.

Example: Monitor limited-edition products and get instant alerts when they're restocked.

🛠️ Integration Ideas

Price Tracking Dashboard

Export data to Google Sheets or Excel for visualization:

• Price history charts
• Competitor comparison tables
• Stock availability timeline

Automated Repricing System

Connect to your e-commerce platform API:

1. Scrape competitor prices
2. Calculate optimal price (competitor avg - 5%)
3. Update your product prices via API
4. Track conversion rate impact

Price Alert System

Set up webhooks to trigger notifications:

• Slack/Discord alerts for price changes
• Email notifications for price drops
• SMS alerts for critical updates

Data Analysis Pipeline

Feed data into analytics tools:

• Historical price tracking in PostgreSQL
• Trend analysis with Python/R
• Machine learning for price prediction

📊 Best Practices

Rate Limiting

• Use delaySeconds: 2-5 for reliable scraping
• Respect platform robots.txt
• Monitor for 403/429 errors

Proxy Usage

• Enable Apify proxy (automatic in Apify Cloud)
• Use residential IPs for best results
• Rotate proxies for high-volume scraping

Data Quality

• Validate prices (check for null/zero values)
• Handle currency conversions
• Store timestamps for price history
• Monitor scraper accuracy regularly

Cost Optimization

• Scrape only changed products (delta updates)
• Use appropriate schedules (not all products need hourly updates)
• Set maxProducts limit for testing
• Disable includeImages if not needed

🔍 Supported Platforms

Amazon

• ✅ Amazon.com (US)
• ✅ Amazon.co.uk (UK)
• ✅ Amazon.de (Germany)
• ✅ Amazon.fr (France)
• ✅ Amazon.ca (Canada)
• ✅ All other Amazon domains

Supported data: Price, title, ASIN, brand, ratings, reviews, availability, images

eBay

• ✅ eBay.com (US)
• ✅ eBay.co.uk (UK)
• ✅ eBay.de (Germany)
• ✅ All other eBay domains

Supported data: Price, title, condition, seller, availability, images

Shopify

• ✅ Any store using Shopify platform
• ✅ Custom domains with Shopify backend
• ✅ Shopify Plus stores

Supported data: Price, title, availability, images, variants

Generic E-commerce

• ✅ WooCommerce stores
• ✅ Magento stores
• ✅ Custom e-commerce sites

Supported data: Basic product info via Open Graph meta tags

⚡ Performance

• Speed: ~3-5 seconds per product
• Reliability: 95%+ success rate with proxies
• Scale: 1000+ products per run
• Cost: ~$0.10-0.50 per 100 products

🚨 Common Issues & Solutions

Issue: Getting 403 Forbidden Errors

Solution:

• Enable Apify proxy
• Increase delaySeconds to 3-5
• Check if platform allows scraping

Issue: Missing Price Data

Solution:

• Some products may not have prices (out of stock, variants)
• Check in_stock field
• Enable debugMode to see detailed logs

Issue: Slow Performance

Solution:

• Reduce maxProducts for testing
• Use headless mode (headless: true)
• Run on Apify Cloud for better infrastructure

Issue: Old/Cached Prices

Solution:

• Prices are scraped in real-time (not cached)
• Check scraped_at timestamp
• Some platforms may show cached data

📈 Pricing

This actor runs on Apify platform with pay-as-you-go pricing:

• Development: Free tier (trial accounts)
• Production: ~$0.25 per 1000 product pages
• Enterprise: Custom pricing for high-volume

Cost breakdown:

• Compute: $0.20 per GB-hour
• Proxy: $0.50 per GB (optional but recommended)
• Storage: Free up to 1GB

🔗 Related Actors

Check out my other data extraction tools:

• Reddit Scraper - Scrape Reddit posts and comments
• Newsletter Scraper - Scrape Substack, Beehiiv & Ghost newsletters

More scrapers coming soon! Follow @benthepythondev for updates.

📝 Legal & Ethics

Important: This actor is for legitimate business purposes only.

✅ Allowed:

• Monitoring your own product prices
• Public competitive intelligence
• Market research
• Price comparison services

❌ Not Allowed:

• Scraping copyrighted content
• Violating terms of service
• DDoS or excessive requests
• Unauthorized data reselling

Always:

• Check platform terms of service
• Use reasonable rate limits
• Respect robots.txt
• Store data securely

This actor scrapes publicly available data only. Users are responsible for complying with applicable laws and platform terms.

🤝 Support

Need help? Found a bug? Have a feature request?

• 📧 Email: support@benthepythondev.com
• 💬 Issues: GitHub Issues
• 📚 Documentation: Apify Docs

🎉 Get Started Now

1. Click Try for free to test with a few products
2. Set up scheduled runs for automatic monitoring
3. Export data to your preferred format (CSV, JSON, Excel)
4. Integrate with your pricing tools via API

Pro tip: Start with 5-10 products to test, then scale up once you're confident in the results!

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Keywords: price monitoring, e-commerce scraper, Amazon scraper, eBay scraper, Shopify scraper, competitive intelligence, price tracking, dynamic pricing, market research, dropshipping tools