Multi-Product Price Monitoring and Notification Workflow
This workflow can automatically monitor price changes of multiple e-commerce products at scheduled intervals, capturing and extracting price information in real-time while supporting simultaneous monitoring of multiple products. The system compares the current price with the historical lowest price and automatically sends email notifications in case of price anomalies or price drops, ensuring that users receive timely alerts for the best purchasing opportunities. Through automation, users do not need to manually refresh web pages, significantly improving monitoring efficiency and data accuracy, making it suitable for e-commerce operators and consumers alike.
No Workflow Diagram
Workflow Name
Multi-Product Price Monitoring and Notification Workflow
Key Features and Highlights
This workflow automates the scheduled scraping, monitoring, and comparison of prices for multiple e-commerce products. It can detect price changes in real-time and send email notifications accordingly. By leveraging flexible CSS selectors, it extracts specific price information from web pages, supports simultaneous monitoring of multiple products, and automatically maintains historical lowest price data. The workflow is well-designed to include automatic alerts for abnormal price data, ensuring the accuracy and reliability of monitoring results.
Core Problems Addressed
- Automates product price monitoring, eliminating the need for manual frequent page refreshes;
- Timely detection of price drops to seize optimal purchasing opportunities;
- Automatic maintenance and updating of historical lowest price data for products;
- Handles price extraction anomalies to guarantee monitoring accuracy;
- Enables batch monitoring of multiple products, improving operational efficiency.
Application Scenarios
- E-commerce operators monitoring competitor price dynamics;
- Consumers automatically tracking price changes of desired products;
- Backend data collection for price comparison platforms;
- Market analysts obtaining real-time price trend data.
Main Workflow Steps
- Scheduled Trigger (Cron): Automatically initiates the monitoring process every 15 minutes.
- Initialize Monitoring List (FunctionItem): Defines multiple product monitoring entries, including unique product identifiers (slug), product URLs, price CSS selectors, and currency types.
- Process Each Product Entry (Loop):
- Fetch product webpage data via HTTP request;
- Extract price text using the HTML Extract node based on CSS selectors;
- Parse and convert the extracted price to a numeric value and validate its correctness.
- Price Data Comparison and Storage:
- Read existing historical price files to check for stored data;
- Compare current price against historical lowest price and update if a new low is found;
- Save the latest price data locally in JSON format.
- Abnormal Price Detection:
- Automatically send alert emails if price extraction fails or data anomalies occur.
- Price Drop Notification:
- Automatically notify relevant personnel via email when a new price lower than the historical price is detected.
Involved Systems and Services
- n8n Automation Platform: Serves as the workflow execution and node management environment;
- HTTP Requests: For fetching target product webpage content;
- Email Service (SMTP): For sending price change and anomaly alert notifications;
- Local File Storage: Stores historical price data in JSON format.
Target Users and Value
- E-commerce operators and market analysts, assisting in competitor price and market trend monitoring;
- Price-sensitive consumers, enabling automatic access to the best purchase timing;
- Automation enthusiasts and developers, providing a reference-level solution for multi-product web data scraping and price comparison;
- Any scenarios requiring scheduled web content scraping and data monitoring.
By integrating scheduled scraping, data extraction, conditional logic, and email notifications, this workflow delivers a stable and efficient automated product price monitoring system, significantly enhancing users’ control over price information and responsiveness.