Building a web scraper that automatically scrapes a website for prices on a daily basis can be a powerful tool for businesses that need to stay on top of dynamic pricing changes. In this section, we'll walk through a practical example of how to set up such a scraper using Vector Shift.

The key steps involved are:

1. Input the URL: Start by providing the URL of the website you want to scrape.
2. Scrape the Data: Use the URL Loader node to scrape the website and extract the relevant data, such as product names, quantities, and prices.
3. Extract the Table: Leverage the Extract Table node to parse the tabular data from the website and organize it into a structured format.
4. Write to Google Sheets: Seamlessly integrate the scraped data into a Google Sheet for easy access and analysis.
5. Automate the Process: Set up a cron job to run the scraper on a daily basis, ensuring that your pricing data is always up-to-date.

By following this step-by-step approach, you can build a robust and efficient web scraper that will save you time and effort in monitoring and managing your product pricing.

To streamline the scraping process, we'll start with a single URL and then expand it to handle multiple URLs. Here's how it works:

1. Single URL Scraping:

   • We'll use an Input Node to provide the URL we want to scrape.
   • The URL Loader node will fetch the content of the URL.
   • The Extract Table node will extract the data from the HTML table into a structured format, with columns for the item name, quantity, and price.
   • The extracted data will be written to a Google Sheet.

2. Multiple URL Scraping:

   • We'll use a Google Sheet Read node to read the list of URLs from a Google Sheet.
   • The Duplicate node will create multiple copies of the extraction prompt, matching the number of URLs.
   • The URL Loader node will scrape each URL in the list, and the Extract Table node will extract the data from the corresponding HTML table.
   • The extracted data from all URLs will be written to the Google Sheet.

3. Scheduling the Pipeline:

   • To automate the scraping process, we'll use the Cron trigger to run the pipeline daily at a specified time (e.g., 7 AM Eastern Time).
   • The Google Sheet node will be set as a dependency of the Cron trigger, ensuring that the data is updated in the sheet every day.

By following this approach, you can easily set up a scraping pipeline that automatically retrieves the latest prices from multiple URLs and updates the data in a Google Sheet on a daily basis.

Building a web scraper that automatically scrapes a website for prices and updates a Google Sheet on a daily basis can be a powerful tool for businesses that need to stay on top of rapidly changing product pricing. In this section, we'll walk through a step-by-step process of creating such a scraper using Vector Shift.

First, we'll start with a single URL and demonstrate how to extract the relevant data into a table format. We'll then expand the pipeline to handle a list of URLs, automatically scraping each one and populating the Google Sheet with the extracted data.

To make this process even more efficient, we'll set up a cron job to run the pipeline daily, ensuring that the Google Sheet is always up-to-date with the latest pricing information.

By the end of this section, you'll have a robust and automated solution for monitoring and tracking product prices, empowering your business to make informed decisions and stay ahead of the competition.

To schedule the automated scraping pipeline and ensure daily price updates, we'll leverage the cron job functionality in Vector Shift. Here's how it works:

1. Go to the "Triggers" section of the pipeline.
2. Click on the "Cron" option to set up a recurring schedule.
3. Select the desired frequency, in this case, "Daily".
4. Choose the time of day you want the pipeline to run, for example, 7 AM in Eastern Time.
5. Since the Google Sheet node doesn't have any inputs, we'll use the "Dependencies" feature to link the cron job to the rest of the pipeline. Select the Google Sheet node and choose "Upon completion of the cron job".
6. Review the rest of the pipeline to ensure it's set up correctly:
   • The pipeline will fetch the list of URLs from the Google Sheet.
   • It will then scrape each URL and extract the data into a table.
   • The extracted data will be written back to the Google Sheet.

With this setup, the pipeline will automatically run every day at the specified time, updating the Google Sheet with the latest price information.