I did a simple scraping automation of my favourite online clothing stores, storing the clothes (prices per size) in Postgres which would notify me via SMS if something I wanted dropped below a price point I set. Also built a simple front-end for it using React / Apollo (with graphQl and express on the backend) and MobX. The gist was you could select a store from a dropdown, plug-in the product code and it'd go fetch the product / save its url in the DB and scan it every 4 hours or so, then scan the products table to see if the price of the product was set below my desired price and then notify (scheduled via node-cron).
Had it working well, but of course it was against T&Cs for each store and ultimately would have been quite brittle, so I didn't polish it off before moving on. Frustrating because I wanted to use it as a demo to get a first web-dev job but it really wasn't worth completing and deploying. Also, twilio SMS in Australia is IIRC 5c per message which is kinda ridiculous for any serious quantity of texts, I planned to hook it up to a Telegram bot instead.
It was actually useful though because clothing retailers don't often send you a notification if what you want drops in price, particularly when it's an individual price drop due to low stock.
Had it working well, but of course it was against T&Cs for each store and ultimately would have been quite brittle, so I didn't polish it off before moving on. Frustrating because I wanted to use it as a demo to get a first web-dev job but it really wasn't worth completing and deploying. Also, twilio SMS in Australia is IIRC 5c per message which is kinda ridiculous for any serious quantity of texts, I planned to hook it up to a Telegram bot instead.
It was actually useful though because clothing retailers don't often send you a notification if what you want drops in price, particularly when it's an individual price drop due to low stock.