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Still checking competitor prices by hand? I built a price tracker, and a real run caught 3 bugs my tests had missed.
What it does:
Paste a product URL: it scrapes the price, stock and rating.
Every scrape is saved, so you get the full price history, not just today's number.
Each new price is compared with the last one, up or down, in %.
Current, lowest, highest and average price on a dashboard and a REST API.
The real run: 7 products scraped live from a public store built for scraping practice. Then three bugs showed up:
Every live page came back empty. The scraper asked for compressed pages it couldn't decode.
That empty result wiped a saved product's title and price. Now an unreadable page is refused, and your data stays safe.
The price chart never appeared. The page's own security policy blocked the chart library, so the app now serves it itself.
Each fix has a test that fails without it. 99 tests in total.
Case study and code: https://contra.com/p/YZLvPrXg-e-commerce-price-tracking-scraper-and-price-history
Which prices do you check by hand every week? Tell me the sites, and I'll tell you how I'd track them.
For the REST API, I'd expose the last successful scrape time alongside the latest attempt's status. Can a caller tell "price unchanged" apart from "refresh failed, showing the previous price"?
Good question, and today the answer is only half yes. A refresh that fails returns an error to the caller, so it never hands back the old price as if it were new. And every successful check is saved with its time, even when the price didn't move, so the history shows when it was...
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