Japan Market Data › Mercari Price Monitoring

Mercari Price Monitoring

A price watch on a C2C marketplace is only useful if it runs on a schedule. Individual sellers cut prices when an item does not move, and those cuts are the moment a marginal item becomes a good buy.

Running the Mercari scraper on a recurring schedule gives you a time series rather than a snapshot. Diff two runs by listing URL and the price changes fall out directly.

Mercari Japan Search Scraper → All Japanese market scrapers →

What you get

item_nameListing title, used as the human key in alerts.
current_price_jpyPrice at the time of each run — diff this field.
conditionCondition, so a price drop on worse condition is not a false positive.
item_urlStable key for diffing runs and linking the alert.

Field names follow the actor's dataset schema and can differ slightly between actors — check the actor page for the exact input and output schema before wiring it into a pipeline.

Use cases

How a run works

Starting a run: call the Apify API with the actor id fruitful_quintessence~mercari-japan-search-scraper, or press Start on the actor page and download the dataset. Check the actor page for its exact input schema — a run is scoped by the search terms you supply, and billing is per result returned (roughly $0.002 per item).

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/fruitful_quintessence~mercari-japan-search-scraper/runs?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"searchTerms": ["your", "search", "terms"]}'

FAQ

How do I diff runs?
Match records on item_url across runs and compare current_price_jpy; a lower value on the later run is a price drop.
Can I limit monitoring to specific items?
Scope the run to the search terms that identify your watchlist so the result set stays small and cheap.
What should the schedule be?
Daily is a sensible default; increase the frequency only for items where a few hours of lead time has real value.

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