Price Tracker

My project demonstrates a way to track online product's prices from websites like Amazon. This project lets the user know when their product is in their budget by sending out an email to them.

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Inspiration

This hackathon motivated me to do something new this time. I was sure to do something using web scraping and here I am. With the help of YouTube and awesome mentors in our discord, I was able to put this project together alone.

What it does

This project is a python script which has a very narrow scope as of now. It takes an Amazon product link and a numerical value ( user's budget ) as input. Using beautiful soup and web scraping I was able to get the prices of amazon products and compare them with user's budget range. Using SMTP I managed to send an email to the user as soon as the product fell into their given budget. This script can run one time and even for 24 hours depending on the user and on his/her will to track the price.

How we built it

I built it using a little help from YouTube tutorials since I didn't know much about web scraping. I used Visual Studio Code as my code-editor to make this script and mac terminal commands to run and configure it.

Challenges we ran into

I ran into some challenges as I didn't know what web scraping is and how it can be used. Now that I've made my project, I've realized how strong web scraping is even though the host website has a request cooldown.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I learnt web scraping, a little bit of flask, used beautiful soup, SMTP module for email sending. I am proud that my script works just fine and it is concluded as of now.

What we learned

Learning web scraping was not that tough, but making the script and learning everything about it in just 24 hours was a challenge which I managed to overcome.

What's next for Price Tracker

I see it as a part of an app that I'll be working on from today onwards. Price Tracker will be using many more online product websites to give the user an interactive and broad network of choosing their products and budgets. This app would also have a "Notepad" feature in which people can keep a track of their products as a checklist and more.

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