StoreSignal — Shopify Price & Restock Monitor

Track a small set of public Shopify products and receive structured evidence when a variant's price or availability changes. Designed for ecommerce operators, agencies, and automated workflows that need repeated observations.

What each successful check returns

One dataset item per product: current variant prices and stock states, source URL, capture time, whether this is a first baseline, and the changes since the previous successful run of the same watchlist.

Supported events: price_cut, price_increase, restocked, sold_out, variant_added, and variant_missing. Missing does not mean discontinued. First baselines create no change events. A currency mismatch suppresses price comparisons; unknown stock does not become a false sold-out alert.

Input

{
  "urls": ["https://www.deathwishcoffee.com/products/death-wish-coffee"],
  "watchlist": "coffee-demo"
}

Use 1–20 HTTPS Shopify product pages. Locale prefixes are retained; collection prefixes and tracking parameters are normalized. Change the watchlist name for a fresh baseline. The example URL was checked during development; availability can change.

Repeat monitoring

Run once to create baselines, then run the same input later. Baselines are stored in an Actor-owned named key-value store in the customer's Apify account. Separate watchlist names use separate stores. The console dashboard and this Actor have independent storage.

Create an Apify task with the input and add a daily schedule. Start with daily checks; increase frequency only when customer need and store access preferences justify it. Set a run timeout of 900 seconds and a per-run spending cap. Keep one active run per watchlist. Key-value storage does not provide an atomic distributed lock; overlapping jobs for the same watchlist are unsupported and can duplicate change observations. No schedule is enabled merely by downloading this package.

The dataset can be exported as JSON or consumed through Apify's APIs and workflow integrations. OUTPUT in the default key-value store contains the run summary; ERRORS contains unsuccessful checks. Failure records do not incur the custom success event fee.

Scope and limits

• Public, anonymous Shopify product Ajax responses only. No headless browser, login, proxy rotation, CAPTCHA solving, or checkout access.
• Checks read the store's robots rules and stop on a blocked path, HTTP 403, or HTTP 429. Redirects require the final product URL as new input.
• DNS checks reject non-public address results. This is not a general-purpose URL fetch service.
• Currency is extracted from the corresponding product page. No currency is guessed. Price amounts are Shopify integer units divided by 100, including currencies for which Shopify appends two zeros.
• Prices can vary with locale, location, cookies, and store configuration. The recorded value is one anonymous observation. No estimate of revenue or inventory quantity is made.
• At most 1,000 variants per product. Large, malformed, or incomplete responses fail without replacing the last valid baseline. Missing variants remain explicitly ambiguous.
• Changes are observed only between checks; changes that happen and reverse between runs can be missed.
• No outbound email notifications or automatic price changes are built into this version.

Local run

Requires Node 22. Run npm ci, place the input JSON at storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json, then npm start. The SDK uses local storage when no cloud run environment is present. Named baseline stores persist across runs. Use a new watchlist name to reset.

Deployment

Deploy this directory as an Apify Actor using the CLI or upload its source in Apify Console. Use Limited permissions from the first platform run. The Actor only uses its default storage and named stores it creates itself. Test a baseline, unchanged second run, source failure, and spend-limit stop before publishing. The full release process is in LAUNCH.md.

Pricing status

Prelaunch software. The proposed custom event product-check costs $0.02 per successful product check, covering every returned variant. Platform configuration determines actual billing. Remove the default dataset-item synthetic event if enabling the custom success event, to prevent double charging. Any enabled Actor-start event must be disclosed separately. Test execution costs before finalizing this price. No earnings or uptime claims are made.

References

• Shopify product API
• Apify Actor permissions
• Apify pay-per-event pricing

Implementation and commercial rights belong to the project owner; no third-party product imagery or descriptions are bundled. The merchant named in the example is not affiliated with StoreSignal.