WooCommerce Catalog & Price Monitor

Track any public WooCommerce store's prices and stock. Get told the moment something changes.

Point it at a competitor, a supplier, or your own shop. The first run exports the whole catalog. Every run after that tells you exactly what moved: price drops, price rises, products going out of stock, new products, discontinued products — and the one thing a Shopify monitor cannot give you, how many units are left.

Runs on a schedule. Sends the summary to Slack. Costs cents per check.

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Who this is for

• Retailers watching competitors — know within the hour when someone undercuts you.
• Brands enforcing MAP — catch resellers pricing below your minimum, with a timestamped record.
• Dropshippers and resellers — know when a supplier's stock is running down before it hits zero.
• Store owners — monitor your own catalog for accidental price changes or products falling out of stock.
• Analysts and AI agents — a clean, consistent JSON feed of catalog and change data.

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What you get

Every run produces:

Full catalog export	One row per product — or per variation, where a product has them. Price, sale price, currency, stock, SKU, categories, tags, brands, attributes, images, weight, dimensions, ratings.
Change events	One row per detected change, with the old value, the new value, and the percentage move.
Low-stock warnings	Fired when remaining units fall into your threshold.
Run summary	Which stores worked, what changed, how long it took.
Cost estimate	Written before the work starts, so you always know what a run will cost.
Slack / webhook alert	A grouped digest per store: every low-stock hit plus the biggest price moves.

The first run for each store is a baseline — it exports the catalog and remembers it. From the second run onwards you get change events. That is how it knows what "changed" means.

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The seven change events

Event	Fires when
price_drop	The price went down. Includes old price, new price, and % change.
price_increase	The price went up.
low_stock	Remaining units fell into your threshold, or fell further while already low.
out_of_stock	A product sold out.
back_in_stock	A product returned.
new_product	A product appeared in the catalog.
removed_product	A product disappeared.

Low-stock alerts do not repeat themselves. If an item sits at 2 units for a week, you get told once — when it drops to 2 — not every single run. A monitor that reports the same three items every fifteen minutes gets muted, and a muted monitor is worthless. Each alert carries the previous count so you can see the movement.

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Getting started

1. Paste one or more store URLs into Store URLs. Any page on the store works — a product page, a category page, the homepage.
2. Set Low-stock threshold to whatever "running low" means for you (default: 5 units).
3. Click Start.
4. Run it again — or better, put it on a schedule — to start receiving change events.
5. Optionally paste a Slack webhook to get the digest in a channel.

That is the whole setup. No API keys, no store credentials, no plugin to install on the store.

Tip: keep the Snapshot key-value store name the same across scheduled runs. That stored snapshot is what makes change detection possible. Changing it starts over from a fresh baseline.

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Not every WooCommerce store can be monitored — check yours first

This is the single most important thing to know before you buy, so it is at the top rather than buried.

The actor reads a store's WooCommerce Store API — the same public endpoint the shop's own website calls to display its products. Most WooCommerce stores expose it. Some do not:

• Some WordPress hosts and SEO plugins publish a rule asking crawlers to stay away from that endpoint. Those stores are reported as skipped and cost you nothing.
• Some stores have the Store API switched off or behind a firewall. Reported as endpoint_unavailable, and again not charged.

You are never charged for a store that cannot be read. Run the actor once against your list of targets to find out which qualify — failed detections are free, so a qualification run on a list of non-WooCommerce domains costs $0.00.

For transparency, from a sample of 42 domains tested while building this actor: 6 ran WooCommerce with the Store API reachable, and 3 of those 6 asked crawlers to stay away from it. Test your own list.

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Pricing

Pay per event. No subscription, no rental.

You are charged	Price
Per store successfully snapshotted	$0.05
Per 1,000 catalog records exported	$0.50
Per change event	$0.002
Per low-stock alert	$0.005
Per Standby API request	$0.001

Nothing is charged for a store that fails, is skipped, or is not WooCommerce. Every charge follows data actually being written.

A low-stock alert is charged instead of a change event, never on top of it.

What a real run costs

Two real stores, 212 products, 286 records including variations:

Line	Quantity	Cost
Store snapshots	2	$0.10
Catalog export	286 records	$0.50
Change events	0 (baseline run)	$0.00
Total		$0.60

Turn the catalog export off and the same monitoring run costs $0.10. That is the pattern most people want: export the catalog once, then run the alert loop hourly for pennies.

You see the cost before the run does the work

Every run calculates what it expects to cost and writes it to COST-ESTIMATE.json before fetching anything — using each store's own published product count, not a guess:

Estimated cost of this run:
  catalog-snapshot        2 × $0.0500 = $0.1000
  variant-exported        1 × $0.5000 = $0.5000
  change-alert            0 × $0.0020 = $0.0000
  low-stock-alert         0 × $0.0050 = $0.0000
  TOTAL                                $0.60

Change and low-stock lines show zero because they honestly cannot be known before the comparison runs — a monitoring run where nothing moved costs nothing beyond its snapshots. Every line explains where its number came from.

Free plan limits

On the Apify free plan, runs are capped at 1 store, 50 records, and no alert delivery. Change events are still detected and still appear in your results — they just are not posted to Slack or a webhook. Any paid plan runs uncapped.

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Settings

Setting	Default	What it does
Store URLs	two demo stores	The stores to monitor. Any URL on the store works.
Export the full catalog	on	Turn off for cheap alert-only monitoring.
Low-stock threshold	5 units	When to warn you. Set to 0 to switch low-stock alerts off.
Snapshot store name	woo-monitor-snapshots	Keep it stable across scheduled runs.
Change event filters	none	Watch only certain products, categories or tags — or only moves above a % threshold.
Slack webhook	—	Where to send the digest.
Alert webhook	—	Any HTTPS endpoint that accepts JSON.
Maximum products per store	5,000	Bounds run time on very large catalogs.
Fetch exact variation prices	on	See "Products with variations" below.
Variation lookup budget	500	How many of those lookups to allow per store.
Proxy	Apify Proxy	Switch to residential if a store blocks datacenter addresses.

Filters only narrow your alerts, never your data

Filters apply to change events only. The catalog export always contains everything. A filter can never silently shrink the data you paid to export.

{
    "nameIncludes": ["ribeye", "wagyu"],
    "categories": ["Beef"],
    "minPctChange": 10
}

That watches only beef products whose name mentions ribeye or wagyu, and only price moves of 10% or more. Stock and low-stock alerts are never filtered out by a percentage threshold.

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How low-stock detection actually works

Most listings would promise "low stock alerts" and leave it there. Here is the honest version, because finding out afterwards is worse.

WooCommerce only publishes a "units remaining" number when a store has stock management switched on and the quantity is already low. Measured on two real stores while building this:

Store	Products checked	Published a units-remaining number
Store A (food retailer)	69	0
Store B (software)	100	5

So the actor uses two signals:

1. The store's explicit remaining-units field, when it publishes one.
2. Otherwise, the number written on the product page itself — "2 in stock", "Only 3 left in stock" — tracked across runs so a falling count triggers the alert.

Every record shows both readings, and every alert says which signal fired it. If a store publishes no quantity at all, no low-stock alert can fire for it — you will see out_of_stock instead, when it finally sells out. That is a real limit of what WooCommerce makes public, not something any tool can work around.

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Products with variations

A variable product — three sizes of the same shirt — is exported as one row per variation, each with its own price, SKU and stock.

WooCommerce does not include variation prices in its main product listing, so the actor fetches them separately, within the budget you set. Rows priced exactly are marked priceSource: "variation". If a catalog has more variations than the budget allows, the remaining rows inherit the parent product's price and are marked priceSource: "parent" — so you always know which number you are looking at.

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Sample output

A catalog row (prices are exact — held as integer cents internally, so a price that did not move can never look like it did):

{
    "kind": "record",
    "target": "examplestore.com",
    "status": "ok",
    "collectedAt": "2026-08-16T15:29:13.551Z",
    "source": "wc/store/v1",
    "name": "Infinity Bundle Lifetime License – Payment Plan (6 – Pay)",
    "permalink": "https://examplestore.com/product/infinity-bundle-6-pay/",
    "type": "subscription",
    "price": 500,
    "priceCents": 50000,
    "regularPrice": 1700,
    "salePrice": 500,
    "currency": "USD",
    "onSale": true,
    "isInStock": true,
    "stockAvailability": "2 in stock",
    "stockCount": 2,
    "lowStockRemaining": 2,
    "categories": [],
    "imageSrc": "https://examplestore.com/wp-content/uploads/infinity-bundle.jpeg",
    "priceSource": "product"
}

A low-stock alert:

{
    "kind": "change",
    "type": "low_stock",
    "target": "examplestore.com",
    "name": "Infinity Bundle Lifetime License – Payment Plan (3 – Pay)",
    "url": "https://examplestore.com/product/infinity-bundle-3-pay/",
    "lowStockRemaining": 2,
    "previousRemaining": 9,
    "signal": "low_stock_remaining",
    "threshold": 5,
    "detectedAt": "2026-08-16T15:29:13.555Z"
}

A price drop:

{
    "kind": "change",
    "type": "price_drop",
    "target": "examplestore.com",
    "name": "LifterLMS Powerpack",
    "oldPrice": 298,
    "newPrice": 149,
    "oldPriceCents": 29800,
    "newPriceCents": 14900,
    "pctChange": -50
}

Every row from every actor in this series carries the same envelope — kind, target, status, collectedAt, source — so you can wire up one integration and reuse it.

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Use it from an AI agent

MCP. The actor is available as a tool through Apify's MCP server at https://mcp.apify.com. Your agent can ask for a store's catalog, or for what changed since last time, and gets structured JSON back.

Standby HTTP API. With Standby enabled the actor answers instantly over HTTP, with no run to schedule:

GET https://<your-actor>.apify.actor/?storeUrls=examplestore.com&lowStockThreshold=3
GET https://<your-actor>.apify.actor/health

The response is the same JSON a scheduled run produces. Health checks are free.

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Reliability

Measured on this build, 2026-08-16:

Runs completed successfully	10 of 10
Typical run, two stores, 286 records	under 1 minute
Products captured vs. published by the store	69/69 and 143/143 — nothing missed
Repeat run with nothing changed	0 false alerts
Pointed at a non-WooCommerce site	Completed successfully, charged $0.00
Automated tests	199 passing

When a source breaks, you will know. If a store starts returning data in an unexpected shape, the actor records it in your results as a health row rather than quietly returning nothing. A run that finds no usable data tells you why — it never reports success while handing you an empty file.

Support

Report problems through the Issues tab on this actor's page. Broken-source issues get a first response within 3 business days and a fix or documented workaround within 7.

What this actor does not do

• It cannot read stores that ask crawlers away from their product API, or that have it disabled. Both are reported clearly and cost nothing.
• It cannot report a stock quantity a store does not publish.
• It does not read Shopify stores — those use a completely different system.
• It does not see prices behind a login, member pricing, or per-customer pricing. Public prices only.
• It does not keep price history for you. It compares the last run with this one. Keep your results if you want a long-term series.
• It does not use a browser, so it cannot get past a JavaScript bot wall or a CAPTCHA.
• It does not touch carts, orders, or customer data. It reads the public product catalog and nothing else.

Is this allowed?

The actor reads the same public product data any shopper's browser downloads when they visit the shop — names, prices, and stock status. It reads nothing private, sends nothing to the store, and respects each store's stated crawler preferences, skipping those that ask to be left alone. It is intended for competitive price research, MAP enforcement, and monitoring your own catalog.