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Competitor price monitoring scraper with change alerts
Employer
Igor
Project parameters
Type of cooperationOne-time project
SectionWeb development, Web programming
Prepaymentwithout prepayment
Payment methodsCash, Bank transfer
Acceptance of requestsfrom today, 10:20 until Sep 1, 2026
Project description
We run a mid-size online store and we are constantly losing margin because we find out about competitor price moves too late. I need a dedicated price-monitoring scraper that watches a defined list of product pages across roughly a dozen retailer websites and records the current price on a fixed schedule, several times per day. For each tracked product the tool should capture price, availability status, and the timestamp, then keep the full history so we can see how a price evolved over weeks rather than just a single snapshot. This is not a coupon or discount-code project and it is not a general data-warehouse pipeline; the entire focus is scraping competitor prices and monitoring how they change over time.
The scraper has to survive the usual real-world obstacles: pages that render prices with JavaScript, mild anti-bot measures, rotating layouts, and occasional structural changes to a product page. I would like configurable selectors per site so that when a retailer redesigns a page I can fix one target instead of rewriting code. The scheduler should be reliable and polite, spacing requests so we do not hammer any single site, with retries and clear logging when a fetch fails. When a monitored price crosses a rule I define (drops below a floor, undercuts our own price, or moves by more than a set percentage) the system must send an alert by email and to a messaging channel, including the product, the old and new values, and a direct link.
I also want a simple dashboard where I can view each product's price history as a chart, compare our price against competitors side by side, and export the data to CSV for the buying team. Please describe your approach to scraper stability, how you handle sites that block automated access, and how you would keep the tracked-product list easy for a non-technical manager to edit.
— Scheduled scraping of a configurable list of competitor product URLs
— Capture price, stock status and timestamp; store full history
— Rule-based alerts (threshold, percentage change, undercut) via email and chat
— Price-history charts and side-by-side competitor comparison
— CSV export and an editable product list for non-technical staff
— Retries, polite request pacing, and clear failure logging
The scraper has to survive the usual real-world obstacles: pages that render prices with JavaScript, mild anti-bot measures, rotating layouts, and occasional structural changes to a product page. I would like configurable selectors per site so that when a retailer redesigns a page I can fix one target instead of rewriting code. The scheduler should be reliable and polite, spacing requests so we do not hammer any single site, with retries and clear logging when a fetch fails. When a monitored price crosses a rule I define (drops below a floor, undercuts our own price, or moves by more than a set percentage) the system must send an alert by email and to a messaging channel, including the product, the old and new values, and a direct link.
I also want a simple dashboard where I can view each product's price history as a chart, compare our price against competitors side by side, and export the data to CSV for the buying team. Please describe your approach to scraper stability, how you handle sites that block automated access, and how you would keep the tracked-product list easy for a non-technical manager to edit.
— Scheduled scraping of a configurable list of competitor product URLs
— Capture price, stock status and timestamp; store full history
— Rule-based alerts (threshold, percentage change, undercut) via email and chat
— Price-history charts and side-by-side competitor comparison
— CSV export and an editable product list for non-technical staff
— Retries, polite request pacing, and clear failure logging
