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Full libraryBright DataGoogle SheetsSlack

Get a Slack alert the moment a competitor changes their price

Check a list of competitor product pages on a schedule, log every price to Google Sheets, and post to Slack only when something actually moves.

30 minIntermediate12 steps
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What this looks like

One step on screen at a time. Read it, do it, tap Next.

Get a Slack alert the moment a competitor changes their price

Step 1 of 12

01 / 12Schedule Trigger

Trigger on a schedule

Create a workflow and add a Schedule Trigger running two or three times a day. Competitor prices rarely change more often than that, and checking too aggressively risks getting blocked.

Checkpoint

A Schedule Trigger sits on the canvas set to run a few times daily.

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Before you begin

Tick these off as you sort them. Stopping halfway to create an account is how a fifteen-minute build becomes an hour.

0 of 9 ready

Ticks are saved on this device, so you can come back to them.

  • Account

    You need this to reliably fetch competitor pages that block plain requests. A free trial is enough to build and test this.

    Bright Data
  • API key

    Found in your Bright Data account settings once a zone is created.

  • Have ready

    Columns: ProductName, CompetitorURL, LastPrice. Fill LastPrice with today's price manually to start.

  • Credential

    This is where price-change notifications land, so pick a channel your team actually watches.

  • Know-how

    You'll need to identify roughly where the price sits in the page (a CSS selector or a nearby label) since pages vary in structure.

  • Time

    Most of the time is spent getting a reliable price extraction working for pages that aren't built for scraping.

The basics — ticked once, remembered everywhere

  • Account

    Either the hosted version or a self-hosted install. Everything here works the same on both — the only visible difference is the shape of your webhook URLs.

    Create a workspace
  • Know-how

    Adding a node, connecting two of them, and pressing Execute. If any of that is new, the free primer covers it in about ten minutes.

  • Credential

    You will paste at least one secret during setup. A password manager beats a notes app, and it stops you pasting a live key into a chat window by accident.

The shape of the workflow

The nodes you will end up with, left to right, in the order you add them.

Schedule TriggerGoogle SheetsHTTP RequestHTML ExtractIFSetSlackGoogle Sheets
The finished Get a Slack alert the moment a competitor changes their price workflow on the n8n canvas4 things to set here
  1. 1Schedule Trigger — the trigger — everything starts here
  2. 2Google Sheets — Read the list of products to check
  3. 3HTTP Request — Fetch each competitor page through Bright Data
  4. 4HTML Extract — Pull the price out of the page
The finished workflow on the n8n canvasTap to enlarge

Skip the node hunting

Import a starter file with every node for this build already on the canvas, named after its step and wired in order, each one carrying a sticky note with the values to enter. You still connect your own accounts and fill the fields — that is what the walkthrough takes you through — but you never start at a blank canvas.

In n8n: Workflows → Import from file.

Included with the library

What you will build

Jump straight to any step, or print the list and tick it off beside your n8n tab.

  1. 1Trigger on a schedule
  2. 2Read the list of products to check
  3. 3Fetch each competitor page through Bright Data
  4. 4Pull the price out of the page
  5. 5Compare against the last known price
  6. 6Work out direction and size of the change
  7. 7Post the alert to Slack
  8. 8Update the sheet with today's price
  9. 9Activate the workflow
  10. 10Force a fake price change
  11. 11Run it twice in a row with no real change
  12. 12Test a broken URL

If something goes wrong

Everything ready?

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