Competitor price-monitoring system with history and change alerts

We run a retail business and sell a catalogue of several hundred products that overlap heavily with what a handful of competitor online stores offer. Right now our category managers check competitor prices by hand a couple of times a week, copy numbers into a spreadsheet, and try to react when someone undercuts us. This is slow, error-prone, and by the time we notice a price drop we have often already lost sales. We want to replace this manual routine with an automated price-monitoring system that watches a defined list of competitor product pages on a schedule, records every observed price into a history table, and tells us the moment something meaningful changes.

The core of the project is reliable, scheduled collection and comparison, not a generic scraper. You will build a service that, several times a day, visits the product URLs we configure (mapped to our own SKUs), extracts the current price and stock status, and writes a timestamped record so we accumulate a full price history per product per store. On top of that data we need change detection: when a competitor raises or drops a price beyond a threshold we set, or when an item goes out of stock or back in stock, the system should raise an alert by email and by messenger. Please handle the practical realities of monitoring real stores gracefully, including page-layout changes, temporary errors, retries, and polite request pacing so we are not blocked.

Everything should come together in a dashboard where our team logs in and sees the current price for each product across all monitored stores side by side against our own price, with trend charts showing how each price moved over days and weeks, filters by category and store, and a clear list of recent changes. We would like the matching of competitor pages to our SKUs to be manageable through the interface, and history to be exportable to CSV or Excel for deeper analysis.

— Scheduled collection of price and stock from a configurable list of competitor product pages
— Full timestamped price history stored per product and per store
— Threshold-based change detection with email and messenger alerts
— Dashboard with side-by-side comparison, trend charts, filters and change log
— Robust handling of layout changes, retries, request pacing, plus CSV/Excel export