Amazon Price Tracker

Monitors Amazon product URLs, checks their price on a schedule, stores price history in SQLite, and emails you when a price drops to or below a target you set.

Setup

1. Create a virtual environment and install dependencies

   python3 -m venv venv
   source venv/bin/activate      # Windows: venv\Scripts\activate
   pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Create your .env file

   cp .env.example .env

   Edit .env and fill in:

   • SMTP_EMAIL / SMTP_PASSWORD — a Gmail address and an App Password (not your normal Gmail password; requires 2-Step Verification enabled).
   • ALERT_EMAIL — where alerts get sent by default.
   • CHECK_INTERVAL_SECONDS — how often run re-checks all products (default 3600 = 1 hour).
   • DATABASE_PATH — SQLite file location (default price_tracker.db).

   Never commit .env — only .env.example should be tracked.

Usage

All commands are run from inside price_tracker/:

cd price_tracker

Add a product to track:

python main.py add "https://www.amazon.com/dp/EXAMPLE" 49.99 --email you@example.com

--email is optional and falls back to ALERT_EMAIL from .env.

Run a single check cycle over all tracked products (useful for testing or for running via cron/Task Scheduler instead of the built-in loop):

python main.py check

Run continuously, checking every CHECK_INTERVAL_SECONDS:

python main.py run

How it works

• scraper.py fetches each product page with a realistic browser User-Agent and parses out the title and price with BeautifulSoup. It tries several fallback CSS selectors for price since Amazon's markup varies by product/region, and returns None (without crashing) if the page is out of stock, blocks the request, or the layout has changed.
• When checking multiple products, a random 2-5 second delay is added between requests.
• database.py stores each tracked product and every price observation in SQLite (products and price_history tables).
• notifier.py sends a plain-text email via Gmail SMTP when a checked price is at or below the product's target.
• Failed requests or unexpected errors for one product are logged and skipped — they don't stop the rest of the check cycle.

Notes

• Amazon's HTML changes frequently and scraping may violate Amazon's Terms of Service — this project is intended for personal, low-volume use.
• If prices stop being detected, inspect the target page's HTML and update PRICE_SELECTORS in scraper.py.