Grocery Flyer Scraper — Weekly Deals & Price Drops

Get every grocery store flyer for a US ZIP or Canadian postal code in one run — item name, sale price, brand, and the exact dates the deal runs — across 110+ merchants from a single input.

Then it does the part nobody else does: tells you what changed since last week.

🔄 Since last run (2026-08-03)
26 new · 56 cheaper · 0 pricier · 0 ended

Price drops
| Item                                    | Was   | Now   | Save  | Merchant   |
| Fresh Boneless, Skinless Chicken Breast | $8.19 | $6.69 | $1.50 | Starsky    |
| Long Eggplant                           | $3.48 | $1.98 | $1.50 | Food Depot |

What you get

One row per flyer item:

field	notes
merchant, merchantId	the store
name, brand	product as printed on the flyer
price, priceRaw	sale price (null when the flyer prints no price — see below)
validFrom, validTo	exactly when the deal runs
isMultiProductBundle	⚠︎ flag — see the honesty note
changeType	new · price_drop · price_rise · unchanged
previousPrice, priceDelta	versus your last run
imageUrl	product cutout image
categories, flyerId, postalCode, locale	provenance

Plus OUTPUT.md — a markdown digest in the key-value store: price drops sorted by biggest saving, what's new this week, then the full listing grouped by merchant. Paste it straight into ChatGPT/Claude and ask for a meal plan built around what's actually on sale.

Pick your own stores

Most people shop at four or five places. Run once in discovery mode to see what's available:

{ "postalCode": "M5V3L9", "listMerchantsOnly": true }

That returns every store delivering flyers to your postal code — 115 for downtown Toronto, 51 of them grocery — with name, merchant ID, categories and flyer dates. Pick yours, then:

{ "postalCode": "M5V3L9", "merchants": ["sobeys", "Costco", "3384"] }

The merchants list accepts any mix of:

• store names, case-insensitive and partial — "sobeys" matches "Sobeys"
• merchant IDs from the discovery run — "3384"
• pasted flipp.com links — any 4+ digit run in the URL is read as a merchant ID

Anything that matches nothing is called out by name in the log rather than silently ignored, and an explicit store list is never truncated by maxMerchants (that cap only guards unfiltered runs).

Picking stores also improves the data: a real-grocer list measured 91.3% price fill against 78.9% for the broad category filter.

Why stores and not flyer links

Flipp's website is a single-page app — a bogus flyer id and a real one return byte-identical HTML — so a pasted link can't be validated. And flyer IDs are reissued every week when new flyers publish, so a saved flyer link would break every 7 days. Merchant IDs are stable (verified: no merchant carries more than one), so a saved store list keeps working. Links are still accepted, but they're read as a merchant hint, not a flyer address.

Weekly monitoring

Set an Apify Schedule and each run diffs against the last one for that postal code. Flyers run about seven days (validFrom→validTo), so weekly is the natural cadence — point it at the morning your local flyers drop. Daily works too and costs little; most days will simply report few changes.

• Run 1 writes the baseline and reports no changes.
• Run 2+ label every row and add the "Since last run" section.
• Snapshots are per postal code + locale, so you can track several areas independently.
• onlyChanges: true narrows the dataset to just new + changed rows, ideal for a recurring schedule.

Input

input	default	notes
postalCode	— required	M5V3L9 (Canada) or 10001 (US). Partial codes are rejected.
merchants	—	Your stores: names, merchant IDs or pasted links. Empty = use the category filter.
listMerchantsOnly	false	Discovery run — return the available stores and scrape nothing.
locale	en-ca	en-ca or en-us. US and Canada only.
maxMerchants	15	Uncapped, a dense metro emits ~18,000 items.
categories	Groceries, Pharmacy, Restaurants	Filters flyers before fetching them.
allCategories	false	Take every flyer (mostly hardware/sporting goods).
trackChanges	true	Diff against your previous run.
onlyChanges	false	Emit only what changed (ignored on run 1).
includeMarkdown	true	Write OUTPUT.md.

Pricing

$0.08 per merchant flyer digest — one charge per merchant, not per item. A default 15-merchant run costs about $1.20; all 139 merchants in a dense metro about $11.

Per-item pricing would be dishonest here: a single postal code yields ~18,000 items, so any sane per-row rate bills $45–113 for one run. The merchant-week is also the unit you actually care about. Merchants are charged before their rows are pushed, so if you hit a budget cap you get complete merchant digests rather than a fragment of every one.

Honest limits

• ~78% of items carry a price. Some flyer tiles are image-only or promotional; those come back with price: null rather than a guess.
• ~36% of item names bundle multiple products under one price — "RED BULL or GURU ENERGY DRINK, $5.50". Those are flagged isMultiProductBundle and marked ⚠︎ in the digest. Treat them as an offer, not a per-SKU price. If you are doing per-SKU price intelligence, filter them out.
• US and Canada only. Other locales return no data.
• Change tracking matches on merchant + normalised name, because item IDs are re-issued with each new flyer. About 1.4% of rows share a merchant+name pair and collapse into one tracked item.
• An invalid-but-well-formed code (e.g. 00000) makes the upstream API return an empty list rather than an error; this Actor fails loudly instead of reporting a silent successful empty run.

Data comes from Flipp's public flyer service. You are responsible for complying with Flipp's Terms of Service and for how you use the data.