UK Grocery EAN Price Tracker (Weekly) with Apify, Sheets & Gmail

Track UK grocery price changes every week—automatically alerting you when EAN prices move

This n8n workflow runs weekly to fetch UK supermarket pricing for a fixed list of grocery EANs using the Apify UK Supermarket Price Scraper. It stores weekly history in Google Sheets, compares against the most recent prior week, and sends a Gmail alert only when prices change beyond a configurable threshold.

What this workflow does

• Runs every Monday at 08:00 using a schedule trigger.
• Builds a deduplicated basket request from your EAN list (limited to 200 items), and routes invalid lists to an email problem report.
• Calls the Apify Actor Standby `/basket` endpoint to retrieve weekly-snapshot prices (optionally including loyalty prices).
• Validates the HTTP response and snapshot freshness; if usable pricing data isn’t returned, it emails a plain-English problem report.
• Flattens pricing results into one row per retailer and matched EAN, then reads the full existing price history from Google Sheets.
• Compares this week’s effective prices against the latest earlier week for each retailer/EAN.
• Appends new week rows (only when the week isn’t already recorded) and calculates price-move alerts based on your threshold.
• Sends an HTML alert email via Gmail when there are significant movers or items no longer priced.

Use cases

• SaaS operators monitoring competitor pricing for a curated product portfolio.
• Automation engineers collecting weekly UK grocery price history by EAN for reporting.
• Teams tracking volatility and receiving email alerts only when meaningful price movement occurs.

Technical details

• n8n nodes/types: if, set, code, gmail, split out, sticky note.
• Apify integration: uses an Apify API token added as HTTP header auth to run Actors.
• Data storage: Google Sheets weekly price history; comparison vs the most recent prior week.