Plan a personal price tracker for a few products
Plans a small price tracker for a handful of products using alerts, official tools and a gentle script as a last resort.
Task:
Plan a small tracker that tells me when the price of my [number of products] products drops below my target.
Context:
The products are [product list], sold in [shops or countries]. My target prices are [targets]. I want an alert by [email, phone or other] and I can [code a little, use spreadsheets or neither].
Rules:
- Start with what the shops already offer, such as price alerts, wishlists and newsletters, and then free or paid tracking services.
- Describe a script only for shops whose terms and robots.txt allow it, with one check per product per day at most, and a stop on any block message.
- Store the price history in a spreadsheet with the columns date, shop, price and currency.
- Tell me how to avoid false drops caused by shipping costs, variants or out-of-stock pages.
- Do not state what any shop or service offers. Tell me what to check.
Result:
A numbered plan of at most 5 steps with the effort in minutes, then the spreadsheet layout in one line.