Build Your Own Price Drop Notifier (Zyte Auto Extract + IFTTT Mobile Alerts)

Holiday season is around the corner and that means a lot of e-commerce sites will be soon announcing their Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas sale. If you are lucky or fast, then you can definitely pick up the product that you are waiting for on discount. But being a developer and web scraper, I don't need to depend on luck or speed for that matter. I can use my web scraping skills and Zite API to get the best deal possible. And that is exactly what we will be building in today's video using Python and Zite API to build a deal tracker that not only tracks the product that you want to buy from your wish list, but also sends you a push notification on your phone with the product URL when the price goes down. So you can buy it right then and there without missing on the deal. So let's go. Hi, my name is Zan. I'm developer advocate here at Zite. Now let me showcase you my weekend project, the Zite deal tracker. All right, this is a sample e-commerce website that we have created to showcase you how we can use Zite API to scrape this. And I want to track the price of this particular product, the Alpine Peak jacket for kids. Currently, it's at $159, but I want to be notified whenever it goes, let's say, below 20% or 50%. So, I'll showcase you how we can do that. But yeah, this is a sample site and similarly, you can uh scrape any website, any product that you want. Let me also quickly walk you through the entire code. So very straightforward, very simple. You can build it over a weekend. Nothing really fancy over here. So the first thing that we are doing is we are defining the product that we want to track. Just copy pasted the URL from here. And I want to also set the desired price. So desired price I have set for 100. No need to set the currency, but you can also do that. I'm going to show you how. So currently this is at $159. I want whenever this price goes equal or below $100, then I want to be get notified. And I'm going to show you how we can do that. So the first thing that we are doing is loading the environment variables using this function and environment variables you need to create env file and you need to keep your zite API key which you can get by logging into zite and then the if key and if event name. I'm going to talk how you can get that in a minute. It's also available in the blog post. So again link in the description below if you want to check it out. Uh but yeah we are just loading this as environment variable so zite API can make the uh calls and yeah that's what we are doing over here. We are just assigning these variables and we are fetching the Z API key, the event name and if D API key from the environment. Small error handling happening over here. If the API key is not available for some reason, if your environment file is missing or it's not the right uh naming convention, then it will just exit it out. So make sure that you have env file before loading this uh uh environment. Uh next is a small function which is going to be triggering the notification. I will talk about this later but first let's h see how the zite API is fetching the product price because that's where the most interesting thing happen. So this is where we are making the client call to the zite. We are creating a client and then we are making a zite API call using the API key of course. And uh the interesting thing to look over here is we are passing this parameter. The number one parameter we are passing is the URL which is again the product URL that we want to track. And the second thing that we're passing is product equal to true. Now what's happening in the background is this is telling the Zite API that the page that we want to scrape has a product and the Zite machine learning engine will automatically look at this page and fetches the price, the SKUs, the product name, the quantity, everything uh relevant information related to any e-commerce product. It will fetch and it will make it available for you. And that's the magic of auto extract machine learning powered site API call. You don't need to do any fiddling with the HTML pages. You don't need to select any CSS selector. Everything will be done automatically. So that's the beauty and that's why Zite API makes it really really easy to scrape such products and you know get the pricing. So we are saving the response from the uh API call in this. The payload will be saved over here and then we are just doing uh what we want. So we need the price of the product and then you can do this product.get price and you will get the price over here. Similarly you can do SKUs, you can do quantity, you can do name of the product. Everything will be in the response call and what things that you can get. You can check the documentation. I'm also going to link it into the description below. So here you can see you can get the name of the product, the price, even the currency. So yes, if you want to have a different currency, then you can first fetch the currency and then you know do some conversion. You can add some logic. Uh currency raw. This is like you don't get the dollar, you also get the USD uh the dollar sign and the USD. And then you can see the availability in stock, the SKU number, a lot of different things that a usual e-commerce product has. Then you can all get it with just single call. The important thing is you mark the product equal to true when you are doing the API request and everything will be handled by the Zite API in the back end. Uh now it's very simple and straightforward. Now we have the product price. we just have to compare it with the desired price and if the desired price has reached equal to or below what we want then we want to trigger the ifd event and if not then we need to keep continuing you can run it as a chron job so it can run every 10 20 minutes every 1 hour 2 hours something like that you can run it in the background you can also add a loop over here so you can run it every 5 minutes or whatever you want it's totally up to you it's a script then you can definitely you know uh do whatever you want with it now the function that I want to talk about is this the IF function. Uh so if D is an uh a no code automation service so what it does it it works on a principle of if this then that and that's literally its uh you know full form. So what's exactly it's doing is uh we have connected two different service of IFD. The first service is where we are making a API call to the if D and we are saying that whenever you get an API call with a payload and the payload over here is the the URL of the product then we want to send a trigger notification. So if this then that. So if API call comes then send a mobile notification. So on your phone you need to have an IFD mobile application installed and when the API call is triggered you will get the notification on your phone itself where you can you know just click on the product page and just buy it. So the deal is still there and you will be the first one to be informed. It doesn't get out of stock. It doesn't you know you don't miss it basically. That's the overall idea. So how to create the IFT applet? It's pretty straightforward. You need to first download the if application. Uh and I'm also going to link my blog in the description below. So everything every step is mentioned over there. So yes download the IFD application. It's available on iOS, it's available on Android. Uh then you need to create a new applet. So the way it works is if this then that then so in the if part we need to choose the webbook service and uh in the uh then you need to just give up event name. So over here I have given it price drop. You can give it any event name but make sure it matches the environment variable over here. Uh the same name have to be there otherwise it will not work. So that's all you need to you know check in the then notification you have to select that trigger a notification with the JSON uh payload. So that's what you need to select everything is mentioned in my blog. Uh now when you do that uh you will get an API key from ifd and that API key again you need to put in your environment variable file and that's it. So essentially the logic is if the price goes below uh your desired price then it will trigger a notification and it will send the URL as a payload. So that's the URL that we are sending as a payload and whenever you get the notification you can just click the URL and you can just purchase the product that you're tracking. So that's simple uh and straightforward and yeah that's where the API call is happening. Uh so currently uh the product is uh at $159 as you can see and I want to get notification when my desired price reach 100. So it will not trigger the notification if I run this uh file. So, let's check it out. But it will definitely show me the current price as you can see in just a minute because it's going to be crawling it. So, you can see the price is $159. And I haven't get any notification. I haven't got it because again it's not my desired price. I cannot change the price over here. This website is not controlled by me. But what I can show you is if I do the desired price 200. So now my desired price is 200 and the product price is 159. So I will be getting a notification. So if I run it over again, let me also turn on the uh screen recording on my phone so I can show you how the notification looks. So So if I just run it over here again, then you will see that uh the new price uh sorry the old price will be displayed but the notification will also be triggered. So you can see notification triggered and yes anytime now I have got the notification on my phone. You can see over here and if I just click it then it will just take me to the website and then I can just make the purchase. So that's how simple it is and uh everything is working super fine. So uh you can just clone this project from my GitHub. Uh the link will again in the description below and what you can do is you can change the uh product URL over here and then you can change the desired uh price and you can use it to track any product. You can run it as a chron job. So it runs every hour, it runs every 5 hours, once a day, whatever you want. Uh but yeah uh that's the power of Zite API especially the auto extract feature. I really wanted to highlight that and uh just uh if you want to get any more details you can read the documentation over here. Here we have name of the product price currency regular price availability SKUs. uh so you just have to pass this product equal to true uh in the API call that you are making uh to the zite and everything else will be handled by the zite very straightforward very simple and yeah this product equal to true that's so the power of the machine learning engine that the zite API is running in the back end and it makes job really really simple no CSS selector no HTML uh anything that you want to do manually so again I'm still very new to the world of web scraping but I managed to put this project together in less than uh 2 days and that's the power of site API that which I wanted to showcase you and especially in the holiday season it's a great use to you know track the product that you want and get the best deal possible in the past I have used different telegram bots different chrome extension but to be honest nothing really works and the satisfaction of getting the notification on your phone uh with the script that you have made it's quite phenomenal so I highly encourage you to test out this project and let me know if you have any questions you can uh drop in our discord channel uh to get any support related web scraping and zite API. The link will be again in the description below. And again, every link including the documentation, the blog, the uh sample product URL and also the GitHub will again in the description below. So do share your feedbacks in the discord channel or in the comment section below and I look forward to see you again. Uh happy holidays. Hope you get the best deal possible and I see you in the next