Rakuten Price Drop Alerts with n8n, Google Sheets & Gmail

Never miss a Rakuten price drop—automatically

This n8n workflow monitors your saved items on Rakuten Ichiba every day and sends you an alert email via Gmail only when the price is truly worth buying—using the official free Rakuten Web Service API (no paid scraping).

What this workflow does

• Runs on a schedule: it executes daily at 9:00.
• Reads your watchlist from Google Sheets: it loads configuration values and pulls each row containing the product details (including itemCode, reference price, and previously saved values).
• Checks current Rakuten pricing: for every watchlist entry, it calls the Rakuten Ichiba Item Search API to fetch the latest item price and point rate.
• Detects meaningful changes by comparing:
  • current price vs. reference price
  • current price vs. the previously saved price to confirm it dropped enough or dropped since the last check
  • current point rate vs. previous point rate to catch point multiplier increases
• Sends a Gmail message only when an alert condition is met.
• Persists today’s values back to Google Sheets (today’s price and point rate), then waits one second before continuing to the next product.

Use cases

• Deal tracking for repeat purchases: watch staples you buy often and get emailed only when Rakuten drops the price.
• Points-aware shopping: alert when the Rakuten point multiplier increases, not just when price falls.
• SaaS/operator-friendly automation: keep a centralized watchlist in Google Sheets and let n8n handle the rest.

Technical details

• Rakuten Web Service: uses the official free API with your Application ID and Access Key.
• Google Sheets: OAuth2 integration for reading/writing watchlist rows.
• Gmail: OAuth2 integration to send alerts to a configured recipient.
• n8n nodes/workflow tools: if, set, code, wait, gmail, and sticky note.