Can I use Nordstrom web scraping to track price changes over time?

Yes, you can use web scraping to track price changes over time for products on the Nordstrom website or any other e-commerce site, provided you comply with the site's terms of service and any legal requirements. It’s important to note that many websites, including Nordstrom, may have terms that prohibit scraping, and scraping may also be subject to legal limitations depending on your jurisdiction. Always ensure that your scraping activities are legal and ethical.

Assuming that you have determined that scraping is permissible, you could set up a scraper to periodically check the prices of specific items and record the data over time. Here's a simplified example of how you might do this using Python with libraries such as requests and BeautifulSoup for HTML parsing.

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import time
import csv

# Function to scrape the price of an item from Nordstrom
def scrape_nordstrom_price(url):
    headers = {'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0'}
    response = requests.get(url, headers=headers)
    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')

    # You will need to inspect the Nordstrom product page to find the correct selector
    price_selector = 'span[class="your-price-selector"]'
    price_element = soup.select_one(price_selector)

    if price_element:
        price = price_element.text.strip()
        return price
    else:
        return None

# Function to record the price into a CSV file
def record_price_change(product_url, price):
    with open('nordstrom_price_tracking.csv', mode='a', newline='') as file:
        writer = csv.writer(file)
        timestamp = time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")
        writer.writerow([timestamp, product_url, price])

# The product page URL you want to scrape
product_url = 'https://shop.nordstrom.com/s/your-product'

# Scrape the price and record it
price = scrape_nordstrom_price(product_url)
if price:
    record_price_change(product_url, price)

This code is a basic example and would need to be run periodically, either manually or using a job scheduler like cron on Linux systems or Task Scheduler on Windows.

Here's a quick cron example to run the script every day at noon:

0 12 * * * /usr/bin/python3 /path/to/your_script.py

For JavaScript, you could use Node.js with a library like puppeteer or axios with cheerio for scraping. However, JavaScript-based scraping is more complex because it often involves dealing with dynamic content that's loaded by JavaScript on the client side.

If you choose to scrape a website, remember:

• Respect the website's robots.txt file, which may disallow scraping of certain pages.
• Do not overload the website's server by sending too many requests in a short period.
• Check and comply with the website's terms of service and any relevant laws.
• Handle your data responsibly, especially if it includes personal information.

Lastly, consider using official APIs if they are available, as they are a more reliable and legal method for accessing data from websites.