How to Monitor Price Using Python and Beautiful Soup?

Preparation

To start with, you will require the following:

• Python 3.x installed on your system.
• Installed Beautiful Soup 4 and Requests library. You can install them using pip.

Step 1: Project Setting

First, you need to create a new library for your project and navigate to it:

Now, to write the code, create a Python file.

Step 2: Fetching of Product Information

If you wish to fetch the product information, specify the URL of the product page you want to monitor. Below, we are using the dummy URL:

Step 3: Parsing HTML content using Beautiful Soup

We have web page content with us. Parse the HTML and extract product information from the page using Beautiful Soup.

Step 4: Modifying Product Price

On inspecting the product page’s HTML structure, we see that the product price is within the specific HTML element. In the below example, the price lies within the span element having the class ‘price.’ You have to modify it as per the actual structure of the website you are monitoring.

Step 5: Price Monitoring Set Up

Now we understand how to extract product price; we will set the monitoring script to track the price at regular intervals. Here we are using Python’s time.sleep() function to add lapse between the requests.

Step 6: Price Drop Notification

You can also improvise your price monitoring script by sending a notification once the price falls below the specified threshold. You can also send notifications via email using Python’s smtpl ib library.

Conclusion

In this article, we have given complete information on creating a price monitoring script with the help of Python and Beautiful; Soup. This script is essential for tracking product prices on several e-commerce websites. However, while web scraping, ensure you don’t infringe on the website’s policy. Respect its terms of service and robot.txt file. Never use the scraped data for commercial purposes without permission.

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