Amazon.com Wishlist Tracker

Amazon.com is one of my favorite online retailers. Their prices are [usually] great, they have incredibly fast shipping (free 2-day with Amazon Prime membership), and have an enormous inventory of merchandise. Amazon has a nice feature when you leave things in your cart, in that they will tell you when you return whether your saved cart items have increased or decreased in price. While an awesome feature, the caveat is that you have to check their site multiple times a day to increase your chances of seeing some of the really good deals.

Solution? Amazon.com’s API. Amazon provides an API to their database called Amazon Web Services for free (registration required). This opens up a huge opportunity for some great tools. Take, for instance, an automatic price updater, which automatically tells you when something you’ve had your eye on is having a sale.

The program I wrote to do this runs in three parts. Using a public wishlist where I add my items to track (instead of my shopping cart), the first script loads all my wishlist items and find anything that was added, adding them to a mysql database.

The second script can then run, which looks up all the items in the mysql database and finds their updated prices. If the price of an item has changed, it adds a new record to a table.

The third piece is a php script which shows in a rudamentary way what the current status of your items are. Green highlighted items are currently at the lowest price you’ve seen, red are at the highest, and white have always been the same.

To set the scripts up on a schedule, just add them to your cron. The below example looks for new items in your wishlist every hour on the hour, and new prices five minutes later.

00 * * * * /home/jon/amazon/updateProductsFromWishlist.pl
05 * * * * /home/jon/amazon/updatePrices.pl

I’ve uploaded all the source code. I plan to add more features as time permits, and depending on Amazon’s license I hope to open a full site where user’s can sign up for automated alerts.