Price and Product Monitoring Tool

What are We Building?

Price and Product Monitoring Tools are software applications or platforms designed to track, analyze, and manage real-time pricing and product information across multiple online channels. They offer a comprehensive suite of features and functionalities to enhance a business's ability to monitor and respond to market dynamics effectively. In this article, we will build a system that can track the prices of Amazon products and alert you if there is a discount on the product's price.

Description of Problem Statement

This project aims to create a system for monitoring the prices of Amazon products. The system will be designed to send email notifications when a discount or deal surpasses a predefined threshold.

Pre-requisites

• Python
• Data Mining
• Web Scraping
• Data Preprocessing

How Are We Going to Build This?

• Firstly, we will create a list of desired Amazon products along with their original prices (MRPs).
• Next, we will implement a Web Scraping system to extract the current prices of the Amazon products.
• Subsequently, if the discount exceeds a predefined threshold, an email notification will be generated using an SMTP server.

Requirements

We will be using below libraries, tools, and modules in this project -

• Pandas
• bs4
• requests
• time
• random
• smtplib
• email

Implementation of Price and Product Monitoring Tool

Let’s build a price and product monitoring tool to track the prices of the Amazon products.

Import All The Required Packages

• Let’s start the project by importing all necessary libraries to build Amazon products' price and product monitoring tool.

Define Functions and Product Lists

• Let’s define the user agent and bucket list of the products, as shown below. Due to Amazon's robust anti-scraping measures, it is crucial to employ appropriate headers to circumvent the detection and blocking of web scrapers. Headers play a significant role in HTTP requests as they convey essential metadata about incoming requests to the destination website. To ensure effective scraping in our case, we have defined the header for the user agent as shown below.
• For this project, I have selected only five products for price scraping, but you can experiment with any Amazon product dataset to track its prices.

• As shown below, let’s define some utility functions to extract the current prices of products and their names.

Extract Prices of the Products

• In this step, we will scrape the prices of the products using the utility functions defined above. We will also compute the price drop in the percentage.

Send Email Notifications

• We will create a function to send an email to notify of a price drop for a given set of product URLs.

• Let’s define the threshold for email notification at 10%, i.e., if the price drop is more than 10%, an email notification will be sent to your gmail address.

What’s Next

• You can experiment with a different Amazon product dataset. You can also run this price monitoring tool every day to collect daily prices and notify in case there is a price drop of more than 10% or any other defined number.