Postman Collection: I Give You Best Price

#postman #collection #automation #scraping

Looking to buy something soon? Make sure you get the best price.

Disclaimer: I recently started working at Postman, and this post is in an attempt to explore what the app can do and it's abilities in terms of automation.

Introduction

This is a simple collection that you can run/monitor to search for a specific product on various e-commerce websites (made for Indian markets) and shows you a graph of all the prices, along with where you get the product the cheapest.

It also sends you a slack notification at the end with information about the daily deal.

Test Run

Try the collection right here by clicking on the button and running on Postman. Be sure to create an environment before you start :)

Workflow

For example, I've been looking to buy a simple keyboard for my secondary PC that my dad works on. I've been looking at the Dell KB216 for some time now, but just looking for the best deal.

I've set up the collection as shown below to look for the Dell KB216 on various websites.

Each request has an associated Test Script along with it to be able to scrape the data off of the HTML body. Here's the test script for Amazon India.

const $ = cheerio.load(responseBody);
const firstProductElement = $('.s-result-item').first();
const priceElement = firstProductElement.find('.a-price-whole');
const price = parseFloat(priceElement.text());

pm.test("Amazon has returned a valid price", function () {
    pm.expect(price).to.be.a('number');
    pm.environment.set("amazon_price", price);
});

Going through individual websites like Flipkart, Snapdeal, Shopclues and eBay, it collects the price information and stores it as environment variables in the workspace.

Finally, using Postman's Visualize Tab, I draw up a chart courtesy of Charts.js and pit against the prices from all the sites.

This eventually sends out a notification on a Slack Channel that I've made specifically for this purpose.

As you can see here, over the course of waiting just a single day, I've saved ₹100. Do this over and over again, and you'll be a millionaire in no time! :)

That's my time, hope you found this useful!