Amazon Price Monitor

This is a Python-based web scraping tool that tracks product prices on Amazon UK. It periodically monitors specified product URLs and logs the prices in a CSV file. When a price change is detected, the tool sends an email alert with the updated details.

Features

• Price Monitoring: Automatically scrapes and logs product prices from Amazon UK at regular intervals.
• CSV Logging: Appends the product name, price, and date to a CSV file (priceMonitorDataFeed.csv) for historical tracking.
• Email Notifications: Sends email alerts when price changes are detected.
• Error Handling: Robust handling of network errors or inaccessible product pages.

Setup

Prerequisites

• Python 3.x
• Required Python libraries:
  • bs4 (BeautifulSoup for web scraping)
  • requests (for making HTTP requests)
  • pandas (for CSV data handling)
  • re (regular expressions for extracting price data)
  • smtplib (for sending emails)

Gmail Setup for Email Alerts

1. Ensure two-factor authentication (2FA) is enabled on your Gmail account. If you haven't enabled 2FA, follow this guide.

2. After enabling 2FA, generate an App Password. This password will be used in the script to send email alerts:

   • Go to App Passwords.
   • Under Select App, choose Mail.
   • Under Select Device, choose Other (Custom name) and enter a name like "Price Tracker".
   • Click Generate and copy the generated password.

   Important: Never share this app password with anyone else. It's like a special key that allows the script to send emails through your Gmail account.

3. Store this app password securely. You will need it for the next steps.

Inserting Your User-Agent:

• The script requires your User-Agent string for web scraping.
• To find your User-Agent:
  • Visit https://httpbin.org/get.
  • In the JSON response, locate the "user-agent" field. It will look something like:

  "user-agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36"

  • Copy your User-Agent string
  • Insert it in the headers variable within the code as shown:

  - headers = {
    "User-Agent": "your-user-agent-string-here"
    }

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/yourusername/amazon-price-tracker.git
   cd amazon-price-tracker

2. Install the required dependencies:

   pip install beautifulsoup4 requests pandas

3. Create a file named config.py to store your Gmail credentials securely:

   EMAIL_USER = 'your-email@gmail.com'
   EMAIL_PASS = 'your-app-password-here'

   Replace your-email@gmail.com with your Gmail address and your-app-password-here with the app password you generated in the Gmail setup step.

4. Update the urls list with the Amazon UK product URLs you want to monitor in the check_price function.

Usage

1. Run the script:

   python price_tracker.py

2. The script will monitor prices every 5 minutes (adjustable with the time.sleep() function) and log data into priceMonitorDataFeed.csv.

3. If a price change is detected, an email notification will be sent to the designated email address with the price change details.

Example Email Notification

Subject: Price Updates

Apple Watch Series 10:
Old Price: £399.00 
New Price: £379.00 
Product URL: https://www.amazon.co.uk/product-link

iPhone 16: 
Old Price: £1,199.00 
New Price: £1,149.00 
Product URL: https://www.amazon.co.uk/product-link

CSV Format

The priceMonitorDataFeed.csv file will have the following structure:

Title	Price (GBP)	Date
Apple Watch Series 10	399.00	2024-09-20
iPhone 16	1149.00	2024-09-20
...	...	...

Configuration

• Email Settings: The email_alert function uses Gmail SMTP for sending emails. Update the email and password details in the config.py file, ensuring the password is the app password you generated.

• Monitoring Interval: The interval between price checks is controlled by the time.sleep(300) function, which is set to 5 minutes (300 seconds) by default. You can adjust this as needed.

Notes

• Make sure your Amazon UK URLs are correct and accessible. If the script cannot retrieve the webpage, it will log an error message but continue with the next URL.
• Keep in mind that Amazon can sometimes block scraping activities. If you experience issues, consider adding a proxy or using different headers to simulate a real browser.

License

This project is open-source and available under the MIT License.