Skroutz Price Alert

Introduction

Skroutz is a great marketplace, but it lacks a reliable notification system for price drops and offers. Without their mobile app, users cannot receive push notifications, and even with their app, bugs often result in missed alerts for low prices and discounts.

To address this issue, this Apify Actor was developed, enabling anyone to monitor product prices without requiring a Skroutz account. By default, it functions as a scraper, providing:

• The latest prices of monitored products.
• The number of sellers currently offering each product.
• The Skroutz product ID.
• The product name and other relevant details. Additionally, users can set up notifications via Email, Telegram, or Discord webhooks to receive alerts when a product's price drops below a specified threshold.

This is my first Actor, and I plan to expand its functionality with more features in future updates. I'm open to suggestions, so feel free to reach out with any ideas or issues! 🚀

Included features

• Scrape Skroutz product prices without requiring a Skroutz account or application.
• Retrieve key product details, including the product name, current price, number of sellers and more.
• (Optional) Email, Discord or Telegram notifications to alert you when a product's price falls below your set threshold.

How to use

Option 1: Using the Apify Web Console:

Use the Input tab to:

• Provide the Skroutz product URLs that you want to monitor.
• Set a threshold price for each product—if the price drops below this value, it will be indicated in the Actor's output.
• (Optional) Enable notifications via Email, Discord, or Telegram to receive real-time price drop alerts in your preferred app.

After running the Actor, you can find the scraping results in the Output tab. You can also check the Log tab for potential errors. If you encounter any problems, feel free to reach out via the Issues tab.

Option 2: Integrating with Your Scripts:

You can also use this Actor directly in your scripts. Below is a Python example. For additional integrations in other languages, visit the API tab.

1from apify_client import ApifyClient
2
3# Initialize the Apify client with your API token
4client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")
5
6# Prepare the Actor input
7run_input = {
8    "urls": [
9        {
10            "key": "https://www.skroutz.gr/s/39358691/Samsung-990-PRO-SSD...",
11            "value": "200"
12        }
13    ],
14    "retry_enable": True,
15    "retry_cooldown": 15,
16    "email_enable": False,
17    "discord_enable": False,
18    "telegram_enable": False
19}
20
21# Run the Actor and use the results
22run = client.actor("greecetopher/skroutz-price-alert").call(run_input=run_input)
23for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
24    print(item)

Executing the above script returns JSON output similar to this:

1{
2    'product_name': 'Samsung SSD 990 PRO 2TB MZ-V9P2T0BW',
3    'product_id': '39358691',
4    'target_price': 200,
5    'current_price': 166.94,
6    'currency': '€',
7    'threshold_reached': True,
8    'shop_count': 60,
9    'url': 'https://www.skroutz.gr/s/39358691/Samsung-990-PRO-SSD...'
10}

Notice that the output indicates whether the price has dropped below your set threshold, along with the other successfully fetched product details.

How it works

This Actor uses Python and Selenium to scrape product pages. To minimize traffic and resource usage, it extracts only essential information —such as product names, prices, and URLs— while ignoring images, advertisements, and other non-essential content.

Constrains

The provided URLs must not exceed 100 and should begin with:

• 🇬🇷 https://www.skroutz.gr/
• 🇨🇾 https://www.skroutz.cy/
• 🇷🇴 https://www.skroutz.ro/
• 🇪🇺 https://www.skroutz.eu/
• 🇲🇹 https://www.skroutz.mt/

Limitations

Like many other online platforms, Skroutz employs anti-bot measures to prevent automated scraping. To reduce the risk of IP blocking, avoid running the Actor in rapid succession. Running it every 20 minutes or longer increases the chances of successful data retrieval.

To mitigate IP blocking, proxy switching is implemented. Moreover there is an option in the Input of the Actor to retry failed URLs after a user configurable ammount of seconds.

If you encounter repeated failures, wait at least 20 minutes before running the Actor again. This cooldown period helps avoid detection and allows the scraping process to resume successfully.