Product & Price Drop Tracker

Monitor product prices on any e-commerce website and get notified when prices drop below your target threshold.

Features

• Multi-product monitoring — Track prices for multiple products in a single run
• Automatic price detection — Intelligent price extraction using common CSS selectors (.price, [data-price], [itemprop="price"], meta tags, and more)
• Custom CSS selectors — Specify a custom selector if auto-detection doesn't work
• Price history tracking — Persists prices between runs using Apify key-value store
• Target price alerts — Get notified only when the price drops to or below your target
• Stock status detection — Detects "In Stock", "Out of Stock", and add-to-cart availability
• Webhook notifications — POST price drop alerts to any HTTP endpoint
• Smart output — Configurable to report only price drops or all check results
• Graceful shutdown — Handles abort signals cleanly to save costs

Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
products	array of objects	✓	List of products to monitor
notificationType	string		"changes_only" (default) or "all_runs"
webhookUrl	string		URL for price drop webhook notifications

Product Object

Field	Type	Required	Description
url	string	✓	Full URL of the product page
name	string	✓	Friendly label for the product
targetPrice	number	✓	Alert when price drops to or below this amount
selector	string		Custom CSS selector for the price element (optional)

Example Input

{
  "products": [
    {
      "url": "https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0ABCDEFGH",
      "name": "Sony WH-1000XM5 Headphones",
      "targetPrice": 299.99,
      "selector": ".a-price-whole"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://www.bestbuy.com/site/some-product",
      "name": "Some Electronics",
      "targetPrice": 150.00
    }
  ],
  "notificationType": "changes_only",
  "webhookUrl": "https://hooks.example.com/price-alert"
}

Output / Dataset Fields

Field	Description
timestamp	ISO 8601 timestamp of the check
name	Product label
url	Product URL
currentPrice	Current price extracted (or null)
previousPrice	Price from the previous run (or null)
targetPrice	Target price threshold
priceDropped	Boolean — true if price dropped below target
dropAmount	Dollar amount of the drop
dropPercent	Percentage drop
inStock	Boolean — true/false/null (unknown)
error	Error message if the check failed

A summary record with _summary: true is appended at the end of each run.

Price Detection

The Actor uses a multi-strategy approach to extract prices:

1. Custom selector — If provided, this is tried first
2. Common selectors — .price, [data-price], [itemprop="price"], meta[property="product:price:amount"], .product-price, .sale-price, .current-price, etc.
3. Class/id heuristics — Elements with "price" in their class or id
4. Amazon-specific — .a-price-whole, .a-offscreen
5. Text fallback — Scans text content for price-like patterns

Supported Price Formats

• $1,234.56 — US/UK format with comma thousands separator
• €1.234,56 — European format with dot thousands separator and comma decimal
• £99.99 — Various currency symbols
• Plain numbers with 0-2 decimal places

Notifications

Webhook Payload

When a price drop is detected, the Actor POSTs to the configured webhook URL:

{
  "event": "price_dropped",
  "product": "Sony WH-1000XM5 Headphones",
  "url": "https://...",
  "currentPrice": 278.00,
  "previousPrice": 349.99,
  "targetPrice": 299.99,
  "dropAmount": 71.99,
  "dropPercent": 20.6,
  "checkedAt": "2026-07-04T12:00:00+00:00",
  "inStock": true
}

Notification Types

Mode	Behavior
changes_only	Only pushes price drops and first-time checks to the dataset
all_runs	Pushes every check result to the dataset

State Persistence

Price history is stored in a named key-value store (price-drop-tracker-state) keyed by price-state-{md5(url+|+selector)}. This means prices are tracked across runs — each run compares against the previous run's price.

Use Cases

• Deal hunting — Get notified when products hit your desired price
• Competitor price monitoring — Track competitor pricing over time
• Price drop alerts — Set up recurring runs (e.g., every hour) and receive webhooks when prices drop
• Inventory monitoring — Track stock availability alongside pricing

Local Development

# Install dependencies
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Run locally
APIFY_ACTOR_PYTHON_VENV_PATH=.venv apify run --purge

# Push to Apify cloud
apify push

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing at $0.01 per run — one flat charge per execution regardless of how many products you check.