Checking Amazon Product Availability Using Python

As we know, Python is a multipurpose language widely used for scripting. Its use is not limited only to solving complex calculations, but also to automating everyday tasks. Let’s say we want to track the availability of any Amazon product and close a deal when the product’s availability changes, as well as inform the user of the availability by email. It will be a lot of fun to write a Python script for this. Note. Install the required libraries (according to the code) before running the script. Also note that if the product is not currently available, no email will be sent to the user. The Asin Id must be provided by the user for the product they want to track.

Working of each module used:

• -> requests: Used to make HTTP get and post requests
• -> time: Used to find current time, wait, sleep
• -> schedule: Used to schedule a function to run again after intervals. It is similiar to "setInterval‚" functionality in JavaScript.
• -> smptlib: Used to send email using Python.

# Python script for Amazon product availability checker
# importing libraries
from lxml import html
import requests
from time import sleep
import time
import schedule
import smtplib

# Email id for who want to check availability
receiver_email_id = "EMAIL_ID_OF_USER"


def check(url):
	headers = {’User-Agent’: ’Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.90 Safari/537.36’}
	
	# adding headers to show that you are
	# a browser who is sending GET request
	page = requests.get(url, headers = headers)
	for i in range(20):
		# because continuous checks in
		# milliseconds or few seconds
		# blocks your request
		sleep(3)
		
		# parsing the html content
		doc = html.fromstring(page.content)
		
		# checking availaility
		XPATH_AVAILABILITY = ’//div[@id ="availability"]//text()’
		RAw_AVAILABILITY = doc.xpath(XPATH_AVAILABILITY)
		AVAILABILITY = ’’.join(RAw_AVAILABILITY).strip() if RAw_AVAILABILITY else None
		return AVAILABILITY

	
def sendemail(ans, product):
	GMAIL_USERNAME = "YOUR_GMAIL_ID"
	GMAIL_PASSWORD = "YOUR_GMAIL_PASSWORD"
	
	recipient = receiver_email_id
	body_of_email = ans
	email_subject = product + ’ product availability’
	
	# creates SMTP session
	s = smtplib.SMTP(’smtp.gmail.com’, 587)
	
	# start TLS for security
	s.starttls()
	
	# Authentication
	s.login(GMAIL_USERNAME, GMAIL_PASSWORD)
	
	# message to be sent
	headers = "
".join(["from: " + GMAIL_USERNAME,
						"subject: " + email_subject,
						"to: " + recipient,
						"mime-version: 1.0",
						"content-type: text/html"])

	content = headers + "

" + body_of_email
	s.sendmail(GMAIL_USERNAME, recipient, content)
	s.quit()


def ReadAsin():
	# Asin Id is the product Id which
	# needs to be provided by the user
	Asin = ’B077PWK5BT’
	url = "http://www.amazon.in/dp/" + Asin
	print ("Processing: "+url)
	ans = check(url)
	arr = [
		’Only 1 left in stock.’,
		’Only 2 left in stock.’,
		’In stock.’]
	print(ans)
	if ans in arr:
		# sending email to user if
		# in case product available
		sendemail(ans, Asin)

# scheduling same code to run multiple
# times after every 1 minute
def job():
	print("Tracking....")
	ReadAsin()

schedule.every(1).minutes.do(job)

while True:
	
	# running all pending tasks/jobs
	schedule.run_pending()
	time.sleep(1)

Output:

Tracking....
Processing: http://www.amazon.in/dp/B077PWK5BT
Only 1 left in stock.
Tracking....
Processing: http://www.amazon.in/dp/B077PWK5BT
Only 1 left in stock.
Tracking....
Processing: http://www.amazon.in/dp/B077PWK5BT
Only 1 left in stock.

How to create a stock availability checker with python requests if JavaScript is used?

StackOverflow question

I wrote some code which should check whether a product is back in stock and when it is, send me an email to notify me. This works when the things I’m looking for are in the html.

However, sometimes certain objects are loaded through JavaScript. How could I edit my code so that the web scraping also works with JavaScript?

This is my code thus far:

import time
import requests

while True:
    # Get the url of the IKEA page
    url = ’https://www.ikea.com/nl/nl/p/flintan-bureaustoel-vissle-zwart-20336841/’

    # Get the text from that page and put everything in lower cases
    productpage = requests.get(url).text.lower()

    # Set the strings that should be on the page if the product is not available
    outofstockstrings = [’niet beschikbaar voor levering’, ’alleen beschikbaar in de winkel’]

    # Check whether the strings are in the text of the webpage
    if any(x in productpage for x in outofstockstrings):
        time.sleep(1800)
        continue
    else:
        # send me an email and break the loop

Answer:

Instead of scraping and analyzing the HTML you could use the inofficial stock API that the IKEA website is using too. That API return JSON data which is way easier to analyze and you’ll also get estimates when the product gets back to stock.

There even is a project written in javascript / node which provides you this kind of information straight from the command line: https://github.com/Ephigenia/ikea-availability-checker

You can easily check the stock amount of the chair in all stores in the Netherlands:

npx ikea-availability-checker stock --country nl 20336841