WooCommerce Catalog & Price Change Monitor

Export products from public WooCommerce Store APIs, or run a recurring monitor that returns the changes since the last complete catalog snapshot. No API key, browser or proxy is required for supported stores.

Use this for competitor assortment checks, supplier availability monitoring, and product exports. Every row includes its store, observation time and catalog completeness. Every run writes a per-store SUMMARY report.

Quick start

Run with empty input to retrieve up to 50 products from WordPress Mercantile:

{}

Export another supported store:

{
  "storeUrls": ["https://mercantile.wordpress.org"],
  "mode": "catalog",
  "maxProductsPerStore": 200
}

The supplied URL must be a WooCommerce store base URL, optionally with a WordPress installation subdirectory. The store must expose /wp-json/wc/store/v1/products and allow it in robots.txt. Stores that disable or restrict this endpoint are reported as failed sources. This Actor does not bypass HTTP 401/403 responses or robots restrictions.

Monitor changes

{
  "storeUrls": ["https://mercantile.wordpress.org"],
  "mode": "changes",
  "maxProductsPerStore": 1000,
  "baselineKey": "merch-monitor",
  "minimumPriceChangePercent": 0
}

The first changes run emits all initial products with changeTypes: ["baseline"]. A subsequent unchanged run succeeds with zero rows and a warning. To repeat the initial comparison, select a new baselineKey.

The named key-value store woocommerce-catalog-monitor-state-v1 holds baselines independently of individual run storage. Each scope includes the normalized store URL, search, category IDs, availability filter, sale filter, and baseline namespace. Changing any of those starts a separate scope. Changing the run limits or price threshold does not start a new scope. Catalog mode never writes or advances baselines.

A partial crawl never replaces a baseline or emits removals. Product limits, page limits, timeouts, bad pages, changing source totals, and duplicate products across pages make a crawl incomplete. Observed products may still produce changes, with catalogComplete: false. Check SUMMARY and raise limits if the intended scope is larger. Exactly reaching the product limit can still be complete when the source headers confirm the full count.

Baselines advance only after output is saved. Avoid overlapping runs using the same baseline key and scope. A pre-write check detects many concurrent updates, but the key-value store does not provide an atomic lock.

If the dataset charge limit prevents another row from being saved, the run stops cleanly, preserves that store's previous baseline, and reports SUMMARY.stoppedOnChargeLimit: true. Emitted counts reflect saved rows; remaining stores appear in notProcessed. Earlier saved rows are retained.

Inputs

Field	Default	Meaning
storeUrls	WordPress Mercantile	Up to 20 stores; omitted or empty uses the sample.
mode	catalog	Current products, or changes compared with a complete baseline.
maxProductsPerStore	50	1–5,000 observed products per store. Removal events can add output rows.
maxPagesPerStore	100	1–100 pages; up to 100 products per page.
search	none	Public Store API text search, up to 200 characters.
categoryIds	none	Up to 50 store-specific integer category IDs.
onSale	false	True restricts to sale products; false includes all.
stockStatus	any	any, instock, outofstock, or onbackorder.
minimumPriceChangePercent	0	Minimum current-price movement for the price_changed label.
baselineKey	default	Independent monitor namespace; letters, digits, _, -; 1–80 characters.
maxRunSeconds	240	30–3,600 seconds, also limited by the platform deadline.

The threshold applies to current price only. Availability, currency, regular/sale price and other detail changes can still emit a record. A move from a zero current price always qualifies. Below-threshold changes still advance the complete baseline, so thresholds measure changes since the previous complete run, not cumulative movement since the last emitted event.

Output

One dataset row represents a current product, or a product leaving a completely read scope. Standard Apify exports support JSON, CSV and Excel; JSON preserves nested before/after records.

Fields	Meaning
storeUrl, productId, productUrl, name, sku, type	Source identity.
currency, currencyMinorUnit, price, priceMinor, regularPrice, salePrice, priceRange	Public prices; decimal amounts are strings to preserve precision.
onSale, isInStock, isOnBackorder	Public status, or null when absent. These are not inventory quantities.
averageRating, reviewCount	Public product rating summary, when supplied.
categories, imageUrls, variationCount	Public catalog details; image URLs are capped at 20 and categories at 100 per product.
observedAt, catalogComplete	Observation time and whether the entire scope was read.
changeTypes	One or more labels listed below.
previousValues, currentValues	Before/after normalized product records; null where no side exists.

Change labels: snapshot (catalog export), baseline (initial changes run), added_to_scope, removed_from_scope, price_changed, availability_changed, currency_changed, and details_changed.

removed_from_scope means absent from a complete current response for that scope. A product may have stopped matching a filter, become unpublished, or been removed; the Actor does not claim to know which. Removed rows retain the last observed product fields at the top level; currentValues is null.

SUMMARY reports observed/emitted counts, expected source totals, pages read, errors, completeness, stop reasons and baseline updates. One failed store does not discard other usable results. If no products were observed and no source completed legitimately, the Actor fails with a source diagnostic. A complete empty scope and an unchanged comparison succeed with warnings. Error rows are never written to the paid dataset.

Prices and limitations

Launch price: $2 per 1,000 emitted records ($0.002 each) on Free/Bronze, with an Actor Start event of $0.00005. Silver is 20% lower and Gold/Platinum/Diamond 40% lower. Changes mode charges only emitted records, including initial baseline and removal records. Consult the live Pricing tab for the applied rate.

• This reads the official public WooCommerce Store API, not the authenticated WooCommerce management API.
• It returns publicly published products. It does not log in, supply product passwords, access customers/orders, or change carts.
• Public prices may depend on a merchant's currency or tax plugins. price is what the API returned in its declared currency. Product price ranges are retained; exact variation prices and inventory quantities are not promised.
• Optional fields can be null or empty. This Actor does not infer sales volume, revenue, inventory quantity, or store ownership.
• An API is not a transactional database snapshot. Stable sorting, total checks and duplicate checks reduce unsafe comparisons, but changes during collection can still affect results.
• A source can block cloud IPs or return different results from different locations. Such failures are reported, without proxy fallback.
• Use store data in accordance with the merchant's terms and your authorization.

Development

npm test runs fixture tests for money precision, filters/scopes, baseline safety, pagination, error-shaped responses, robots denial, deadlines and bounded retries. The shared src/runtime.js supplies bounded requests with public network validation and redirect checks. Use isolated CRAWLEE_STORAGE_DIR directories for local execution.

Three catalog-only example task inputs are in tasks/. They are drafts for verification before publication; none schedules a monitor or changes external settings.