How To Build an Amazon Product Price Tracker using Python

Wanna Buy some items on Amazon? But afraid that the current pricing of the product doesn’t match your budget?

Well, you can wait for the price to drop. But when will it drop?

In this tutorial, we are going to build an Amazon Price Tracker using our old favorite programming language ‘Python’. We will first scrape prices from any Amazon product and then will set an alert when the price drops a certain number.

Table of Contents

Requirements

I hope you have already installed Python 3.x on your machine. If not then you can download it from here. After this, we will create a folder in which we will keep this project. I am naming the folder as scraping.

mkdir scraping
cd scraping

Now, we will install all the libraries that we need in this tutorial.

requests– This will be used to make a GET request to the API which provides Amazon pricing.
smtplib– This will be used to email when the price drops.
time– To create a delay between two consecutive function calls. We will talk about this later.

We just need to install requests as the other two libraries are pre-installed.

pip install requests

We also have to sign up for a free Amazon Scraping API which will help us pull pricing of any product in real time. The trial package comes with a generous 1000 free credits. So, it is enough for testing.

Scraping Amazon Product Pricing

We will be scraping the price of this product page. In this section, we are going to scrape Amazon prices using the API.

import requests
import time
import smtplib
from email.mime.text import MIMEText

def check_price():
    api_url = 'http://api.scrapingdog.com/amazon/product?api_key=YOUR-API-KEY&domain=com&asin=B0BSHF7WHW'

    try:
        response = requests.get(api_url)

        price = int(float(response.json()['price'].replace("$","").replace(',', '')))

        print(f"Current price: {price}")

        if int(price) < 2147:
            print(price)
    except requests.RequestException as e:
        print(f"Error fetching price: {e}")

check_price()

Imports:

requests– A Python library used for making HTTP requests.
time– A Python library providing various time-related functions (though it’s not used in this function).
smtplib and email.mime.text.MIMEText-Libraries for sending emails, but these are not used in the provided function.

2. The check_price Function

api_url– This is a URL string that points to an API endpoint. It appears to be for an Amazon product’s price, fetched using the Scrapingdog API service.
The function makes an HTTP GET request to the API using requests.get(api_url).
It then parses the JSON response to extract the product’s price.
response.json()[‘price’] gets the price from the JSON response.
.replace(“$”,””).replace(‘,’, ”) removes the dollar sign and commas from the price string. This is necessary to convert the price from a formatted string (like $2,147.42) to a number.
int(float(…)) first converts the cleaned string to a float (to handle decimal points) and then to an integer. This effectively truncates any decimal part.
Our budget is anything below $2147. So, we have set a condition that if the price is less than 2147 we will send ourselves an email. We will write the email function in the next section.
The try-except block catches exceptions related to the network request (like connectivity issues, or errors returned by the API).

3. Calling check_price

Finally, the function check_price() is called to execute the code.

Remember you have to use your API key in the above code.

Once you run the code you will get this.

Setting Price Alert Email

In this section, we will write an email function that will help us send an email if the price of the product is under our budget.

def send_email(price):
    sender_email = "[email protected]"
    receiver_email = "[email protected]"
    password = "your-password"

    message = MIMEText(f"The price has dropped below $2147! Current price is: ${price}")
    message['Subject'] = "Price Alert!"
    message['From'] = sender_email
    message['To'] = receiver_email

    try:
        with smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com', 587) as server:
            server.starttls()
            server.login(sender_email, password)
            server.sendmail(sender_email, receiver_email, message.as_string())
            print("Email sent successfully!")
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error sending email: {e}")

Let me explain the above code step by step.

def send_email(price)– This line defines a function named send_email that takes one argument, price.
sender_email– The email address that will send the notification.
receiver_email– The email address that will receive the notification.
password– The password for the sender’s email account. For security reasons, hardcoding passwords like this is not recommended in a production environment.
MIMEText– This is a class from the email.mime.text module used to create an email body. The email body in this case includes a message about the price drop and the current price.
The Subject, From, and To headers of the email are set to appropriate values.
The function uses smtplib.SMTP to connect to Gmail’s SMTP server at smtp.gmail.com on port 587 (the standard port for SMTP with TLS).
server.starttls()– This command starts TLS encryption for the connection, ensuring that the email contents and login credentials are securely transmitted.
server.login(sender_email, password)– Logs into the SMTP server using the provided credentials.
server.sendmail(sender_email, receiver_email, message.as_string())– Sends the email.
If the email is sent successfully, “Email sent successfully!” is printed. If there’s an error during this process, it’s caught in the except block and printed.

Setting a Time Interval

Only one thing is left which is to set a time interval between two consecutive calls. For this, we will use the time library.

while True:
    check_price()
    time.sleep(3600)

This code will run the check_price() function every hour. Our motive is to constantly monitor the pricing of the product and as soon as the price comes under our budget we will send an email to ourselves.

Complete Code

import requests
import time
import smtplib
from email.mime.text import MIMEText

def send_email(price):
    sender_email = "[email protected]"
    receiver_email = "[email protected]"
    password = "your-password"

    message = MIMEText(f"The price has dropped below $2147! Current price is: ${price}")
    message['Subject'] = "Price Alert!"
    message['From'] = sender_email
    message['To'] = receiver_email

    try:
        with smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com', 587) as server:
            server.starttls()
            server.login(sender_email, password)
            server.sendmail(sender_email, receiver_email, message.as_string())
            print("Email sent successfully!")
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Error sending email: {e}")

def check_price():
    api_url = 'http://api.scrapingdog.com/amazon/product?api_key=YOUR-API-KEY&domain=com&asin=B0BSHF7WHW'

    try:
        response = requests.get(api_url)

        price = int(float(response.json()['price'].replace("$","").replace(',', '')))

        print(f"Current price: {price}")

        if int(price) < 2147:
            send_email(price)
    except requests.RequestException as e:
        print(f"Error fetching price: {e}")

while True:
    check_price()
    time.sleep(3600)

Test Email

For testing purposes, we can set the price budget above or equal to $2147 and see if the code works or not.

So, once you run the code you should see this on your console.

And you should receive an email.

With this our Amazon Price Tracker is ready. Now, you can track the pricing of any product and send yourself an email.

You can even create an app using this Amazon Scraping API which helps other people track the pricing of their favourite products.

Conclusion

In this blog, we understood how you can keep track of products on Amazon when they drop a certain level. Just like Amazon, you can use Python to track prices from other marketplaces as well, such as walmart & eBay.

If you are a beginner in Python, I would recommend you go through this comprehensive guide on web scraping with Python.

If you liked the article do share it with your social network.

Happy Tracking!!

How to Build Amazon Price Tracker with Python

Requirements

Scraping Amazon Product Pricing

Setting Price Alert Email

Setting a Time Interval

Complete Code

Test Email

Conclusion

Additional Resources

Manthan Koolwal

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