Price & Availability Drift Monitor

Summary

Track detectable product feed health, price, and stock drift across scheduled runs.

Description

Run it on an Apify Schedule when you need a lightweight record of how feed availability, parsed row count, feed price, page price, and stock signals changed since the previous run. It reuses the Merchant Feed Preflight feed-vs-page checks, then stores a redacted state snapshot and reports drift findings on the next run.

The first run saves a baseline and returns the normal feed-vs-page report. Later runs add drift findings for feed fetch/parse/count changes, price changes, availability flips, newly mismatched products, resolved mismatches, new products, and removed products.

Good fit

• ecommerce operators monitoring price or stock sync after feed automation changes
• agencies watching a small scheduled product sample
• developers who need dataset rows showing drift detected in the current run
• feed operators checking fetch status, parse status, and parsed product-count drops
• QA workflows that already use Apify Schedule and max cost/run controls

Not a fit

• failure notification service
• threshold alerting
• guaranteed detection of every feed or page change
• account recovery
• appeal writing
• policy/legal review
• managed feed repair
• login/CAPTCHA/proxy bypass

Input

• feedUrl: public product feed URL. State keys store only a hash of this URL.
• storeUrl: optional storefront URL
• sampleLimit: 1-200 products
• country: report context
• currency: default comparison currency
• recordRobots: record robots.txt status
• stateStoreName: named Apify Key-Value Store for previous snapshots

Output

• dataset rows, one per finding
• JSON report
• HTML report
• Markdown report
• drift Evidence Pack with redacted URLs, state feed hash, state keys, and checked item metadata

Drift Findings

• drift.price_changed
• drift.availability_flipped
• drift.feed_unreachable
• drift.feed_parse_failed
• drift.feed_count_dropped
• drift.newly_mismatched
• drift.resolved
• drift.new_product
• drift.removed_product
• drift.baseline_saved on first run

Billing note

Pay-per-event billing is based on reachable product pages only.

Monitoring runs can happen daily or weekly, so users should set Apify max cost/run before enabling a frequent Schedule. Monthly exposure should be estimated as:

scheduled runs per month x max cost/run

Choose a sampleLimit that matches the desired maximum reachable products per run, then set max cost/run so a repeated Schedule cannot create an unexpected bill.

Boundaries

This is an informational diagnostic record of detectable drift in the current run. It does not promise failure notifications, threshold alerts, guaranteed detection of every feed or page change, account recovery, policy repair, ad performance, or platform approval.

Feed-health drift is separate from price and availability value drift. It records whether the feed could be fetched, whether product rows could be parsed, and whether the parsed product count dropped sharply. It does not store raw feed bodies.

Related tools

• Merchant Feed Preflight - Use when you need a one-off feed/page preflight before setting up drift monitoring.
• Meta Catalog Feed Preflight - Use when Meta catalog records are the source of the feed risk.
• Apify Dataset Drift Monitor - Use when the changing source is an Apify dataset instead of a product feed.