How Can You Code a Simple Amazon Price Tracker

Introduction

As some of you may know, scraping Amazon is getting harder and harder. Their developers are changing code and making it more dynamic. We tried to use an existing solution - checked YouTube videos, forums, GitHub projects, and nothing worked.

So, we decided to build our very own simple scraper.

The Solution

You are an Amazon seller and want to keep track of products and competitors? Maybe the first thing you want to make sure of is you keep track of their pricing. Unfortunately, there is an immense amount of products whose prices are not constant.
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If you can't afford to spend time daily on doing so, your best chance is to use software and automate the process. You can use data scrapers that will track Amazon Prices for you.
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We will show you step-by-step, or more likely line-by-line, how to leverage modern technology for your business needs. In this blog post you will learn how to code a script that will do this for you:
- Gather all the data and save you a ton of time.
- Store the information in an easy-to-read format.

A blog is certainly not the best media for demonstrating software. The rest of the information is in the following video, which has gathered a lot of interest on the net.

Building An Amazon Price Scraper

We will build a web scraper using Python. It will go and find products whose prices are as close as possible to the price range we are looking for.

Then, we will store all the products' information in a JSON file.

Here, the next step would be to design the software so it comes back later and checks for discounts. In this blog, we will focus only on gathering different data and storing it in a file.

So, the process will look like this:
- Define the price range.
- Find the product.
- Store the information.

Setting up parameters

To better understand what we are about to do, let's first check the settings of the script.
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We got a couple of files, where the main file is "amazon_config.py". In this example, we will use parameters, which are easy to change.
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We will be looking for a PS4 and prices in Euro.
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In the video embedded in this post, you will see all steps for building the script, as well as the script in action.

Information Report

So, let's review the “PS4” JSON report file that our script has just generated. The potentially best-found item from our scraper is this headset.
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As you can see, right now the script is not perfect. We need to configure more parameters to differentiate the gaming consoles from headsets and others. This particular headset has a "PS4" in its name, so that is why our script found it.

Need help?

Now, you can use it to optimize your business as you keep track of products or vendors you are interested in. You saw how to build a script, setup it's parameters and store historical data in a JSON file. However, if you need further assistance with automating a process or feel that a personal consultation will make a difference - please contact us.