I build my own Shopee discount alert on Slack channel!

I love discounts and I bet you are too. My fav online shopping platform is Shopee MY. But, how come I can always 24/7 checking on the App to get notified when the seller promotes the products with DISCOUNT? It is not works for me.

So, I build my own Shopee alert.

How to get the information?

The first thing is I need to get the information from the Shopee. But, do I have the Shopee API? No. I don't. My next option is web scraping. By using requests and BeautifulSoup, it is possible to do so with a few tricks.

...
headers = {
    "User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:73.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/73.0",
    "X-Requested-With": "XMLHttpRequest",
    "Referer": link,
}
page = requests.get(URL, headers=headers)

if page.status_code == 200:
    soup = BeautifulSoup(page.content, "html.parser")
...

Where do I store the information?

Next, I must store the data to compare the price/discount before sending the alert. Why do we always need the alert when the price is not the lowest?

I build for my own use; I just need a simple database. Below is the database in my list:

• Google Sheet
• Baserow ✅
• Excel and store in AWS S3

After few consideration, I choose to use Baserow. But why?

• open-source with API capability
• backend using Postgres
• better admin panel

...
res = requests.get(
    url=f"{base_url}database/rows/table/{table_id}/?user_field_names=true",
    headers=headers,
)

if res.status_code == 200:
    data = res.json()
    res_data = data["results"]
    df = pd.DataFrame(res_data)
...

Notification or alert

If the price is the lowest (compared with the historical data), it should alert me.

For this project, I am using Slack channel to get the alert. Slack is one of the easiest alert integration compared to Telegram or Discord.

...
def sendToSlack(itemRes, no_data=False):
    if no_data:
        payload = getPayloadEmpty()
    else:
        payload = getPayload(itemRes)

    slack_webhook = os.environ.get("SLACK_URL")
    requests.post(slack_webhook, json=payload)
...

Now, let's see how the alert looks like

It's contain the discount and link to the product.

Deploy the script

I am using cron job running in the AWS Lightsail instance. Schedule to run the bash script every 3rd hour from 1 AM to 11 PM.

export PYTHONPATH=/home/amzar/Documents/python_env/shopee-tracker/bin/python3 

/home/amzar/Documents/python_env/shopee-tracker/bin/python3 

/home/amzar/Documents/shopee-tracker/app.py

Cron expression 0 1-23/3 * * * /home/amzar/scripts/run_shopee_tracker.sh

Full Code

Github follow the installation step in README.md