Prices on retail sites never sit still. A competitor runs a weekend promotion, quietly raises a price back up, or undercuts you on a single SKU, and unless someone is checking by hand every day, you find out long after the moment to react has passed. The data is public. It's just spread across dozens of product pages and changing all the time.
In this guide, we'll use E-commerce Scraping Tool to pull live pricing from any retailer's product page, then turn that into a monitor that runs on its own. You'll learn how to:
- Set up a run and scrape current prices, names, and currencies from product URLs
- Read the output and pick the fields that matter for tracking prices
- Wire it into an n8n workflow that logs every check to a Google Sheet and emails you when a price drops
By the end, you'll have an automated price monitor: a spreadsheet that updates itself on a schedule, keeps a running price history, and tells you the moment a competitor moves.
How to scrape e-commerce data
E-commerce Scraping Tool is one of the thousands of scrapers available on Apify Store - the world's largest marketplace of web data collection tools. You can use it via the UI or programmatically through the API. The UI is the fastest way to start, so that's what we'll show here.
Prefer video? Watch the tutorial below:
Step 1. Go to E-commerce Scraping Tool on Apify Store
You can find the tool by typing E-commerce Scraping Tool in the search bar or browsing the e-commerce category. Click Try for free to get started.
If you're logged in to your Apify account, you'll be taken to Apify Console - your dashboard for running and configuring automation tools. Otherwise, you'll be prompted to sign in or sign up first, which you can do easily with your email or GitHub account and without a credit card.
Step 2. Choose your input type and configure the run
Once you're logged in, you can configure the tool in Apify Console.
The tool supports three input methods:
| Input type | What it is | When to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Product detail URLs | URLs pointing directly to a single product page | Monitor known products, track specific items for price changes |
| Category listing URLs | Search results or category pages with multiple products | Discover many products, monitor whole categories |
| Keyword search | Search marketplaces by keywords | Fast product research - no need to gather URLs first |
For this example, we'll use product URLs to compare prices of the Sony WH-1000XM5 headphones across three major retailers: Amazon, Walmart, and Target. Paste the URLs into the Product detail URLs field:
Configure basic settings:
- Scrape mode: Leave on "Auto" - this handles different site structures automatically
- AI summary options: Skip these for basic price monitoring - the standard product data is what matters
Optional: Adjust run settings
To avoid timeout errors when scraping multiple products, you can adjust the Run options at the bottom of the page. Increase the Actor timeout if needed, or enable the No timeout toggle for larger runs.
Step 3. Save, run, and export your data
Before running, you can save your configuration as a task so you can easily run it again and schedule it later.
Give your task a name - Sony Headphones Price Monitor, and click continue.
Now click Start to run your saved task. The tool will visit each retailer, extract the product information, and organize it into a dataset.
When the run finishes, click the "Output" tab. You'll see a table displaying:
- Product name from each retailer
- Current price and currency
- Brand information
- Image URLs
- Product URLs
Switch between a table and JSON views to see the data in different formats.
Export your data:
Click the Export button to choose from multiple data export options:
- CSV - Opens directly in Excel and Google Sheets
- JSON - For integrations and APIs
- Excel - Pre-formatted spreadsheet
- XML or HTML - For specific use cases
Step 4. Schedule automatic runs
To track prices over time, set up a schedule for automatic runs:
- Go to Saved tasks in the left sidebar
- Find your task and click the three dots menu
- Select Schedule
- Configure it to set your preferred time
- Click Enable
The tool will now run automatically and track price changes over time. You can view historical data by checking past runs in your task's run history.
That's it! You've set up a system to track product data and prices across multiple retailers. As you get comfortable with the system, you can add more URLs to monitor additional products, track different retailers, and adjust the run interval based on how frequently you need fresh data.
Automate the whole thing with n8n
Running E-commerce Scraping Tool in Apify Console is already useful, but the price monitoring process can run automatically - for that, you can connect Apify to n8n and build a no-code workflow that runs the Actor on a schedule, sends the scraped product prices to Google Sheets, checks whether a product price dropped, and sends an email notification when it does.
This is useful if you want to monitor products continuously without manually starting scraper runs or checking spreadsheets every day.
Import the n8n workflow template and make sure you have the following credentials to get started:
- An Apify account with an active Apify API token (setup guide)
- An n8n instance (self‑hosted or cloud)
- Google account
What the n8n workflow does
The workflow uses the same product URLs from the demo above, from Amazon, Walmart, and Target. Each node has a specific job:
The Schedule Trigger starts the workflow automatically. In this example, it runs once a day at 8:00, but you can change the interval depending on how often you want to check prices.
The Apify node runs E-commerce Scraping Tool and returns the dataset directly to n8n. You don’t need to export a CSV or manually download results from Apify Console. Copy your input from the Apify platform and paste it into the n8n node:
{
"additionalProperties": true,
"detailsUrls": [
{
"url": "<https://www.amazon.com/Sony-WH-1000XM5-Canceling-Headphones-Hands-Free/dp/B09XS7JWHH>"
},
{
"url": "<https://www.walmart.com/ip/Sony-WH-1000XM5-The-Best-Wireless-Noise-Canceling-Headphones-Black-International-Version/8107061528>"
},
{
"url": "<https://www.target.com/p/sony-wh-1000xm5-bluetooth-wireless-noise-canceling-headphones-black/-/A-86314264>"
}
],
"scrapeMode": "AUTO"
}
The Google Sheets - Append Price Snapshot node saves every scraped result as a new row in a spreadsheet. Instead of overwriting the previous price, it creates a price history over time.
The Google Sheets - Get Rows node reads the spreadsheet again after Google Sheets has calculated whether a price drop happened.
The IF node checks whether you should be notified about a price change.
If the condition is true, the Gmail node sends an email alert.
Prepare your spreadsheet
The Append Price Snapshot node uses a Google Sheet that needs to be prepared in advance. Name a sheet inside Price history and add the following columns to map the datapoints to:
scraped_at
product_name
url
old_price
new_price
difference
drop_percent
currency
notify?
In the n8n Google Sheets node, drag and drop the scraped fields from Apify into the sheet as follows:
scraped_at → timestamp from the schedule trigger
product_name → product name from Apify
url → product URL from Apify
new_price → current price from Apify
currency → price currency from Apify
Use the following formulas for the price change calculations:
- =IF(E2="","",F2-E2) for the difference
- =IF(E2="","",(F2-E2)/E2) for the drop_percent
Take your workflow further
This automation separates the work clearly. You don’t need code nodes, custom scripts, or manual exports. Once the workflow is active, it can run every day, collect new prices, update your sheet, and notify you when a retailer lowers the price.
This is also easy to expand. You can add more product URLs to the Apify input, monitor more retailers, change the price-drop threshold in Google Sheets, or replace Gmail with Slack, Discord, Telegram, or any other notification channel supported by n8n.
Start scraping e-commerce data
E-commerce data collection helps you understand competitors, research products, track pricing, and make informed business decisions. The E-commerce Scraping Tool offers a flexible solution that works across almost any online retailer.
