Amazon is a service known for convenience and efficiency. However, it is often frustrating to buy a product on Amazon only to find out that another site was selling it for less, or that the item was sold at a discount shortly after. This dilemma is contradictory to the benefits of online shopping mentioned above, with little efficiency and convenience in having to manually search for the best prices.
Recently, I have been learning about Microsoft Azure, and found the PERFECT way to save myself lots money and frustration! Through serverless computing, automating the task of observing a product’s price becomes a fun and affordable challenge. The result I came up with was PriceScraper, a web app that takes in an Amazon link and some basic information and sends a message if an item fluctuates in price. In this tutorial, I will walk you through how to create your own PriceScraper app to gain a better understanding of Azure as well as price fluctuations on Amazon.
*Project Flowchart*
The program interface is a basic form with fields for a link to a product, a phone number, the number of days the user wants to receive notifications, and a baseline discount percentage for the item. The website triggers an Azure Function HTTP trigger, which inputs the data into a SQL database. Then, a timer trigger checks the price of the item every day, updates the database, and sends a text message to the user under three conditions. The user is notified if an item’s price increases from the time the user submits the form, the price decreases to the desired discount value, or the notification period is reached.
In order to do anything, we need to have access to Azure! This means creating an account and subscription. As mentioned above, Azure comes with a free $200 credit, which is PLENTY for our purposes. If you already have an account, then create a new subscription or resource group in order to store everything related to your project.
We are using Python as the language for our functions, and sadly, the Azure Portal is very limited in terms of use with Python than it is with other runtime stacks. Because of this issue, we are using Visual Studio Code as an alternative. VSCode has GREAT integration with Azure, as both the editor and the platform were created by Microsoft. We will be using the Azure Portal for administrative configurations (mainly with creating resources and managing the remote app), but VSCode is where most of the work will be done.
So, with that information in mind, it is time to download VSCode! This is a relatively straightforward process; all you have to do is search ‘download VSCode’ or follow this link. After installing the editor, I would highly reccomend signing into Github through the editor. While this tutorial does not involve version controlling anything, it is the wisest decision to keep track of your code so you can: