Japan Market Data › 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.
item_name | Listing title, used as the human key in alerts. |
|---|---|
current_price_jpy | Price at the time of each run — diff this field. |
condition | Condition, so a price drop on worse condition is not a false positive. |
item_url | Stable 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.
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"]}'