Price Check: This website help

A website, called Servaltracker.com, records the daily historic listed and selling prices of popular products on South Africa’s biggest e-commerce site – Takealot – and presents these in a simple graph. Image: Canva

Price Check: This website helps you find the best deals on Takealot

Just in time for Black Friday! If you are looking for a tool that could inform you of the best time to buy a product, look no further.

Price Check: This website help

A website, called Servaltracker.com, records the daily historic listed and selling prices of popular products on South Africa’s biggest e-commerce site – Takealot – and presents these in a simple graph. Image: Canva

A new website is making it very easy for online shoppers to see whether they are scoring a good price on a discounted product or whether the saving shown to them has been overstated.

In the past, online shoppers accused various online shopping platforms of overstating their prices in order to “catch” people who think they’ve come across a bargain.

Takealot Black Friday – price check

Now, just in time to check Black Friday deals, MyBroadband reports that a website, called Servaltracker.com, records the daily historic listed and selling prices of popular products on South Africa’s biggest e-commerce site – Takealot – and presents these in a simple graph.

To check the pricing history of a particular product, visitors must copy the URL of the product from Takealot’s site.

The generated graph will then show the product’s pricing from the date that Serval started tracking it.

Users can move their cursor over the data points in the graph to view specific pricing for each day.

The site will show users – for example – a discounted Samsung Galaxy Watch on Takealot at the time of publication (23 November), and the pricing history for that product as collected by the site. Image: Servaltracker.com

Price history information

Serval’s creator is Cape Town-based Ashton Hudson, a data engineer who works with time-series information in his day-to-day job.

Hudson told MyBroadband he created the site out of frustration for not having price history information when trying to buy products from Takealot.

“I quickly whipped together a bare-bones project that just displays prices and runs on a cheap GCP (Google Cloud Platform instance),” Hudson said.

Hudson used the Python-based open-source task queue protocol Celery to create a simple “worker” that walks through paginated responses from Takealot’s API and scrape the pricing data.

He reportedly wrote the script within a week.

To limit its impact on Takealot’s servers and minimise the time it takes to scrape the data, Serval does not track all the products on Takealot.

Top-rated products

“It only tracks the top-rated products or products that people explicitly search for on Serval,” Hudson explained.

“Serval is designed to be as polite to the Takealot servers as possible and employs a lot of internal rate-limiting to prevent any perceivable load.”

“There’s a bunch of timeouts, and I have optimised it to only fire a couple of queries a second to vastly limit load against Takealot’s servers,” he added.

Hudson said he currently tracks about 500 000 popular products on Takealot.