Ecommerce Change Intelligence

Turn ecommerce pages into a structured change feed. This Actor stores a persistent baseline for every monitored URL and reports meaningful changes in price, availability, product identity, and page content on later runs.

Best for

• Competitor price monitoring
• Product availability tracking
• Promotion and merchandising intelligence
• Supplier and marketplace listing monitoring
• Scheduled ecommerce audits
• Feeding alerts, dashboards, BI tools, agents, Make, Zapier, or custom workflows

What it detects

• Price changes
• In-stock / out-of-stock changes
• Sale and discount signals
• Free-shipping signals
• Product name, brand, and SKU from structured product data when available
• Page title and broader content changes
• Weighted change score from 0 to 100

How it works

1. Add one or more product, category, or landing-page URLs.
2. The first successful check stores a baseline.
3. Run the Actor again manually or on a schedule.
4. The Actor compares the current page against the stored baseline.
5. Results are written as structured dataset items.

Persistent snapshots are kept between separate runs, so the Actor can function as a real monitoring tool rather than a one-off scraper.

Input example

{
  "urls": [
    "https://www.example.com/product/example"
  ],
  "monitorId": "competitor-a",
  "compareMode": "commerce",
  "outputMode": "all",
  "changeThreshold": 1,
  "maxPages": 10
}

Input options

• urls — pages to monitor.
• monitorId — optional namespace for separate monitoring projects. This lets the same URL have independent baselines in different projects.
• compareMode — commerce, content, or all.
• outputMode — all returns every check; changesOnly suppresses unchanged rows while still returning baselines, changes, and errors.
• changeThreshold — minimum weighted score required before a page is marked as changed.
• maxPages — safety limit for pages processed in a single run.

Output

Each result can include:

• status: baseline_created, unchanged, changed, error, or no_input
• changeType and changedFields
• changeScore
• current and previous prices
• currencies
• availability signals
• product name, brand, and SKU
• HTTP status
• first-seen and checked timestamps
• monitoring namespace (monitorId)

Recommended monitoring workflow

For ongoing monitoring, save the Actor input as an Apify Task and schedule it to run at the interval that matches your use case. Use outputMode: changesOnly when you want downstream automations to receive only actionable records after the initial baseline is created.

Pricing

The planned Store model is Pay per event. The primary event is a successful ecommerce page check: a page is fetched, parsed, compared with its stored baseline, and prepared as a monitoring result.

Initial event price: $0.005 per successful page check.

For example, 100 successful page checks correspond to $0.50 in Actor event charges, before any platform-usage charges that may be passed through separately by Apify. Failed fetches are not intended to be billed as successful page checks.

Verified behavior

The monitoring core has been tested with a real ecommerce product page across separate Actor runs: the first run created a baseline and a later run successfully retrieved the previous snapshot and returned unchanged when no relevant commerce signal had changed.

The current version also supports independent baseline namespaces through monitorId and selective output through outputMode.

Limitations

Some websites block automated requests or render commerce data only after JavaScript execution. Those pages may return an error or limited signals in this lightweight HTTP version. Failures are reported per URL so one blocked page does not stop the rest of the run.

Apify platform workflow

The Actor can be used with Apify Tasks, Schedules, API calls, datasets, integrations, and downstream automation tools. Limited permissions are used so the Actor remains compatible with Apify's agentic-payment eligibility requirements when Pay-per-event monetization is enabled.

Publication status

The Actor core is verified and Store monetization configuration is prepared in the repository. Final Store publication and monetization activation are completed in the Apify Console Publication tab after billing/payout details and pricing are reviewed.