Vita Pharmacy Price & Availability Monitor

Track prices, stock and drug shortages (дефектура) across Vita (vitaexpress.ru) — one of Russia's largest pharmacy chains (~1,200 stores, ~24,700 products).

Most RU pharmacy chains hide their catalogue behind anti-bot walls. Vita's own product pages expose a rich data record — this Actor reads it directly and, in Monitor mode, tells you what changed since the last run.

What you get

One row per product, with the fields a pharmacy analyst actually needs:

Field	Meaning
name, fullName, productId, url	Product identity
price, maxPrice, priceCurrency	Price in ₽ (out-of-stock rows keep the last known price)
city, cityId	The city the site rendered (default St. Petersburg / 251). Reported for transparency — Vita's prices and stock are chain-wide, not per-city (verified across Самара / СПб / Саратов / Смоленск)
available, canSell, canDeliver	Stock & sellability
defectureProduce, defectureRus	Vita's own shortage flags — producer shortage / national shortage. Tells you why something is unavailable, not just that it is
mnn, mnnIds	Active ingredient(s) (МНН) — group products across brands
recipe, noRecipe, pku, isTermo, isAlcohol, isAdult	Rx & handling flags
maker, land, form, packaging, shelfLifeMonths, storage	Manufacturer, country, dosage form, packaging, shelf life, storage conditions
brand, category, categoryPath, image, analogsCount	Merchandising data

In Monitor mode, every row also gets: changeType (new / price_up / price_down / stock_change / delisted / relisted / unchanged), previousPrice, previousAvailable, firstSeenAt, lastConfirmedAt, and a 30-day price band (priceLow30 / priceHigh30).

Delisted products are reported, not dropped. If Vita removes a product (its page starts returning 404), you still get a row — delisted: true, available: false, changeType: "delisted" — carrying the last known name and price from the previous run. A product leaving the catalogue is a signal, not missing data. The delisting is reported once — after that it stays unchanged until the product returns, which is reported as relisted.

Use it for

• Price monitoring — track a competitor's or your own prices; get only what moved (onlyChanges).
• Shortage (дефектура) tracking — catch products going out of stock, and whether it's a producer/national shortage.
• Assortment research — by active ingredient (МНН), manufacturer, country, or dosage form.

Input

Option	Description
Product URLs	Specific vitaexpress.ru/product/… pages. Any Vita product URL is normalised.
Crawl the catalogue	Pull products from Vita's product sitemap (~24.7k).
Catalogue filter	Narrow the crawl by slug substring — slugs are latin-transliterated (troksevazin, vitamin, omega).
Max products from catalogue / Max products	Keep a run bounded.
Monitor mode / Only output changes	Compare against the previous run; optionally emit only what changed.
Max concurrency	Parallel page fetches (default 24, max 30). Residential latency (~5 s/request) is the bottleneck, so this scales throughput almost linearly — the default is verified at scale: 1000 products in 3.5 min, zero skips, 4× faster than concurrency 6.
Proxy	Residential Russia is required (see below) and is the default.

Example

{
  "crawlSitemap": true,
  "productFilter": "vitamin",
  "maxProductsFromSitemap": 200,
  "monitorMode": true,
  "onlyChanges": true
}

Run it on a schedule and each run's dataset is a clean list of every vitamin whose price or stock moved.

Notes & limits

• Residential RU proxy is required. Vita rate-limits datacenter IPs (HTTP 503). The Actor defaults to Apify Residential + Russia; keep it that way. If every request fails, the run fails loudly with an explanation rather than returning an empty dataset.
• Prices are chain-wide, not city-specific. Verified by switching the site's city (Самара / СПб / Саратов / Смоленск): price, stock and shortage flags come back identical. The city field just records which city the site rendered (St. Petersburg by default) — you do not need to run the Actor per city.
• Out-of-stock products keep their last known price and are marked available: false, with the shortage flags explaining why.
• Vita intermittently 503s even residential IPs; the Actor retries on a rotated session, which clears it — a 1,000-product run completed 1000/1000 with zero skips.
• Active ingredient (mnn) is only present for medicines and supplements (~1/3 of the catalogue) — cosmetics, hygiene and food products legitimately have none. Every prescription product carries one.
• One request per product — a full 24.7k catalogue sweep is large (~$20 of residential traffic). Use the filter and the caps, or crawl in batches.