Hemanth.
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2024Backend & Systems

Peeppa: Price Tracker Engine

A cross-retailer product scraping engine that automatically tracks price drops across major outlets like Amazon, Best Buy, and Target.

Source

Rationale

Why Peeppa? To solve the fragmented shopping experience. Reconciling structured item data across highly dynamic, structurally volatile e-commerce DOMs required robust HTML parsing adapters and reliable document-based persistence.

Tech Stack

PythonFlaskMongoDBBeautifulSoupHTML/CSS

Key Highlights

  • ▹Real-time and historic price tracking across automated scrapers spanning diverse e-commerce structures.
  • ▹Dynamic threshold-based email alerts triggering notifications when products drop below target prices.
  • ▹Historical pricing charts mapping price fluctuations dynamically from MongoDB.

Architecture Details

A monolithic Python application focused on resilient HTML scraping and unstructured data tracking.

1. BeautifulSoup Scraping Adapters

  • Target-specific scraping endpoints for diverse retailers (Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy) handling uniquely rendered HTML structures.
  • Parses live product DOMs to extract current pricing strings and normalization.

2. MongoDB Persistence & Email Alerts

  • Aggregates unstructured historical price snapshots into MongoDB for quick charting lookups.
  • A background evaluator tests current live prices against user-defined thresholds, triggering a configured SMTP server to dispatch alerts immediately upon price tanking.