Price Tracker Bot

Overview

This project started with a simple question: are MacBook prices in Turkey actually stable, or do they quietly move with the exchange rate? To answer it with data instead of guesses, I built a Python bot that watches MacBook prices across four major Turkish retailers and records every change.

What it does

  • Scrapes Apple TR, Vatan, MediaMarkt and Teknosa on a schedule
  • Detects and logs every price change into a SQLite database (fiyatlar.db), building a price history over time
  • Designed so the dataset can later power econometric analysis — for example testing how exchange-rate changes pass through to electronics prices
  • A Telegram bot interface is planned for instant price-drop alerts

Challenges

Real-world scraping is messy: one retailer blocks bots with 403 errors, another rejects requests with 400s, and Apple renders prices with JavaScript so a plain request sees nothing. I solved these with warm-up sessions that mimic real browsing, alternative API endpoints, and Apify actors for the most protected sites.

Tech Stack

Python, Requests/BeautifulSoup, SQLite, Apify

A Closer Look