🛒 Costco Price Tracker

A Python-based web scraper that monitors Costco product prices, stores historical data in Google Sheets, and sends alerts when prices change.

Overview

This project automatically scrapes product prices from Costco’s website on a set schedule and logs them to a Google Sheet. Over time, it builds a price history that lets you spot trends, compare prices across dates, and get notified when a price drops (or spikes).

Features

• 🔍 Web scraping — Pulls live prices from Costco.com using requests + BeautifulSoup
• 📊 Google Sheets storage — Logs each price check with a timestamp to a connected spreadsheet
• 📈 Price history — Tracks how prices change over time per product
• 🔔 Price alerts — Notifies you when a price drops below a threshold
• 📉 Price comparison — Compare current vs. historical prices across tracked items

Tech Stack

Setup

1. Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/yourname/costco-price-tracker.git
cd costco-price-tracker

2. Install dependencies

pip install requests beautifulsoup4 gspread google-auth

3. Set up Google Sheets API

1. Go to Google Cloud Console
2. Create a new project and enable the Google Sheets API and Google Drive API
3. Create a Service Account and download the JSON credentials file
4. Share your Google Sheet with the service account email (as Editor)
5. Save the credentials file as credentials.json in the project root

4. Configure your products

Edit config.py to add the Costco product URLs and alert thresholds you want to track:

PRODUCTS = [
    {
        "name": "Kirkland Olive Oil 2L",
        "url": "https://www.costco.com/...",
        "alert_below": 15.00
    },
    {
        "name": "Organic Whole Milk 3-pack",
        "url": "https://www.costco.com/...",
        "alert_below": 10.00
    }
]

SHEET_NAME = "Costco Price Tracker"
ALERT_EMAIL = "you@example.com"

How It Works

Scraping prices

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

def get_price(url):
    headers = {"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0"}
    response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, "html.parser")

    price_tag = soup.find("div", {"class": "price"})  # update selector as needed
    if price_tag:
        price_text = price_tag.get_text(strip=True).replace("$", "").replace(",", "")
        return float(price_text)
    return None

Logging to Google Sheets

import gspread
from google.oauth2.service_account import Credentials
from datetime import datetime

SCOPES = ["https://spreadsheets.google.com/feeds", "https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive"]

def log_price(sheet_name, product_name, price):
    creds = Credentials.from_service_account_file("credentials.json", scopes=SCOPES)
    client = gspread.authorize(creds)
    sheet = client.open(sheet_name).sheet1

    timestamp = datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M")
    sheet.append_row([timestamp, product_name, price])
    print(f"Logged: {product_name} — ${price} at {timestamp}")

Sending price alerts

import smtplib
from email.mime.text import MIMEText

def send_alert(product_name, price, threshold, recipient):
    subject = f"💰 Price Drop: {product_name}"
    body = f"{product_name} is now ${price:.2f} (your alert was set at ${threshold:.2f})"

    msg = MIMEText(body)
    msg["Subject"] = subject
    msg["From"] = "your_email@gmail.com"
    msg["To"] = recipient

    with smtplib.SMTP_SSL("smtp.gmail.com", 465) as server:
        server.login("your_email@gmail.com", "your_app_password")
        server.send_message(msg)
    print(f"Alert sent for {product_name}")

Main runner

from config import PRODUCTS, SHEET_NAME, ALERT_EMAIL

for product in PRODUCTS:
    price = get_price(product["url"])
    if price:
        log_price(SHEET_NAME, product["name"], price)
        if price < product["alert_below"]:
            send_alert(product["name"], price, product["alert_below"], ALERT_EMAIL)

Automating with Cron

To run the tracker automatically (e.g. every morning at 8am):

crontab -e

Add this line:

0 8 * * * /usr/bin/python3 /path/to/costco-price-tracker/main.py

Google Sheet Structure

Notes

• Costco’s website structure may change over time — update CSS selectors in the scraper if prices stop being detected
• Use a Gmail App Password (not your regular password) for email alerts
• Be mindful of scraping frequency — don’t hammer the site; once or twice a day is plenty