Price Drop Alert System

Monitor product prices across e-commerce sites and receive alerts when prices drop by your specified threshold.

Features

• Multi-site support: Amazon, eBay, and generic e-commerce sites
• Price history tracking: Stores previous prices for comparison
• Threshold alerts: Only notifies when price drops exceed your threshold
• Webhook notifications: Send alerts to any webhook URL (Slack, Discord, custom)
• Proxy support: Uses residential proxies for reliable scraping

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
productUrls	array	required	List of product page URLs to monitor
priceDropThreshold	integer	10	Minimum % drop to trigger alert
checkInterval	integer	24	Suggested check interval in hours
webhookUrl	string	null	URL for POST notifications
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify residential	Proxy settings

Example Input

{
  "productUrls": [
    "https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09V3KXJPB",
    "https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08N5WRWNW",
    "https://www.ebay.com/itm/123456789"
  ],
  "priceDropThreshold": 15,
  "webhookUrl": "https://hooks.slack.com/services/xxx"
}

Output

Each product generates a result object:

{
  "productUrl": "https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09V3KXJPB",
  "productName": "Apple AirPods Pro (2nd Generation)",
  "currentPrice": 199.99,
  "previousPrice": 249.99,
  "priceDropPercent": 20.0,
  "lastChecked": "2024-01-15T10:30:00.000Z",
  "alertTriggered": true
}

Webhook Payload

When alerts are triggered and a webhook URL is configured:

{
  "timestamp": "2024-01-15T10:30:00.000Z",
  "alertCount": 2,
  "threshold": 15,
  "alerts": [
    {
      "productUrl": "...",
      "productName": "...",
      "currentPrice": 199.99,
      "previousPrice": 249.99,
      "priceDropPercent": 20.0,
      "alertTriggered": true
    }
  ]
}

Scheduling

For continuous monitoring, schedule this actor to run periodically:

1. Go to your actor's "Schedules" tab on Apify
2. Create a new schedule (e.g., every 6 hours)
3. Set your input configuration
4. Enable the schedule

Supported Sites

Amazon

• Product pages (amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.de, etc.)
• Handles various price display formats

eBay

• Item listing pages
• Supports Buy It Now and auction listings

Generic Sites

• Falls back to common price patterns
• Works with sites using standard HTML structure
• Supports schema.org price markup

Price History

The actor stores price history in a key-value store (price-history). This persists between runs, allowing:

• Comparison with previous prices
• Historical price tracking (last 100 data points per product)

Tips

1. First run: No alerts will trigger on the first run (no previous prices to compare)
2. Proxy usage: Residential proxies recommended for Amazon to avoid blocks
3. Rate limiting: Actor uses max 3 concurrent requests to avoid detection
4. Price extraction: If prices aren't extracted correctly, the site may have changed its HTML structure

Error Handling

Products that fail to scrape are still included in results with:

• currentPrice: null
• error: "error message"
• alertTriggered: false

License

MIT