| name | decodo-price-monitoring |
| description | Track and compare product prices across Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Google Shopping with Decodo — check a current price, find the cheapest seller, or watch a product for price drops over time. A workflow on top of the Decodo CLI, which handles JS rendering, anti-bot, and geo/currency. Reach for this when the user wants to monitor or compare prices, detect a discount or price drop, or build a price-tracking log — instead of scraping retail pages by hand with curl, requests, or Playwright. |
| license | MIT |
Price monitoring with Decodo
A workflow for pricing tasks, built on the Decodo CLI: get a current price, compare across
retailers, and track prices over time to catch drops. It assumes the decodo CLI is set up —
for installation/auth, see the decodo-web-scraping skill.
When to use
- "What does product X cost right now?"
- "Compare the price of X across retailers / find the cheapest."
- "Tell me if X drops below $Y" / "track this price over time."
- Building a price log, deal alert, or competitive pricing report.
Prerequisites
This builds on the decodo CLI. Quick check:
decodo whoami
If it isn't installed or authenticated, set it up first via the decodo-web-scraping skill
(npx @decodo/cli, then DECODO_AUTH_TOKEN / decodo setup --token). Everything below assumes
the CLI works.
Pricing targets
| Need | Targets |
|---|
| Price for a known product (ID/URL) | amazon-pricing / amazon-product (ASIN), walmart-product, target-product, or generic ecommerce by URL |
| Find the product first (keyword) | amazon-search, walmart-search, target-search |
| Compare many sellers in one call | google-shopping-search |
Run decodo targets for the full list and decodo <target> --help for flags — note --parse
(structured JSON), --geo (storefront/locale), and --currency (Amazon).
1. Get a current price
Use a parse-enabled target with --parse. Price field paths are target-specific — inspect with
jq 'keys' if unsure. Verified examples:
decodo amazon-pricing B09H74FXNW --parse | jq -r '.results.pricing[].price'
decodo google-shopping-search "logitech mx master 3s" --parse \
| jq -r '.results.results.organic[] | "\(.price_str)\t\(.title)"'
2. Find the cheapest seller
Show the lowest listings with merchant + title and let the user/agent judge — don't blindly
take the global minimum. Google Shopping results mix in accessories (skins, cases, grips), used
items, and variants, so the cheapest row is often not the product (e.g. an $18.99 "Skins &
Wraps" outranking the $36 mouse).
decodo google-shopping-search "logitech mx master 3s" --parse \
| jq -r '[.results.results.organic[]] | sort_by(.price) | .[0:5][]
| "\(.price_str)\t\(.merchant.name)\t\(.title)"'
To narrow to the actual product, filter out accessory titles first:
... | jq -r '[.results.results.organic[]
| select(.title | test("skin|wrap|case|cover|grip|protector"; "i") | not)]
| sort_by(.price) | .[0] | "\(.price_str) — \(.merchant.name)"'
3. Record a price over time (NDJSON log)
Append one timestamped line per check; the file becomes your time series.
ts=$(date -u +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ)
price=$(decodo amazon-pricing B09H74FXNW --parse | jq -r '.results.pricing[0].price')
printf '{"ts":"%s","sku":"B09H74FXNW","price":%s}\n' "$ts" "$price" >> prices.ndjson
4. Detect a drop
Compare the two most recent records:
tail -2 prices.ndjson | jq -s 'if (.[1].price < .[0].price)
then "DROP \(.[0].price) → \(.[1].price)" else "no drop (\(.[1].price))" end'
Schedule step 3 (e.g. a cron job) to build history; run step 4 after each append to alert.
Tips & gotchas
- Keep
--geo (and --currency on Amazon) fixed across runs so prices stay comparable —
storefront/locale changes both price and availability.
price is a number; price_str keeps the currency symbol (e.g. $79.99), price_old is the
pre-discount price when present.- Out-of-stock or blocked variants may omit
price — guard jq with // empty or // "n/a".
- Exit 5 (rate limited) → lower frequency / back off. Exit 3 (auth) → recheck the token (see
decodo-web-scraping). Exit codes are listed in that skill.
Links
