If you depend on information from partner websites—think pricing, product listings, or terms—you know how fast things can change. Missing an update can cost you. This guide is for folks who want to actually know when something changes, without babysitting a browser tab or getting buried in useless notifications. We’ll walk through how to use Crawlbase to monitor partner sites and get real alerts when it matters. No hype, just what works (and what doesn’t).
Why Monitor Partner Sites in the First Place?
- Stay ahead of changes: Don’t get blindsided if a partner updates their pricing, inventory, or terms.
- Automate the boring stuff: Manual checks are a waste of time.
- Catch errors early: Sometimes partners break things. You’ll want to know.
This isn’t just for big companies. If you’re a SaaS startup, a small agency, or even a solo operator, this is the sort of automation that saves you headaches.
What Crawlbase Actually Does (and Doesn’t Do)
Crawlbase is a web scraping platform. It handles the messy parts—rotating proxies, dealing with CAPTCHAs, pretending to be a real browser—so you can focus on getting the data you care about.
- It works well for: Pages that don’t need a login, or ones you can access with cookies or session info.
- Not magic: If your partner’s site is locked down behind heavy authentication, or uses a ton of tricky JavaScript, expect some trial and error.
- No built-in “alert system”: You’ll need to wire up your own notifications (email, Slack, etc.), but Crawlbase gives you the raw data to make it possible.
Step 1: Decide What to Watch
Don’t try to monitor everything. You’ll drown in noise or burn through your Crawlbase credits for nothing.
Questions to ask: - What pages actually matter to your business? - What parts of those pages do you care about? (Price, description, availability, etc.) - How often do you really need to check? (Hourly, daily, weekly…)
Pro tip: Less is more. Start with a handful of key URLs and expand later if it’s working.
Step 2: Set Up Crawlbase to Fetch the Pages
First, get a Crawlbase account and your API key. Then, set up your project.
Quick Example: Fetching a Page
Here’s a basic cURL example for fetching a page using Crawlbase’s Crawling API:
bash curl "https://api.crawlbase.com/?token=YOUR_API_KEY&url=https://www.example.com/partner-page"
You’ll get back the HTML of the page. You can run this from a script, a server, or even a scheduled cloud function.
Things to watch out for:
- If you get blocked or see weird content, try setting &premium=true or &js=true to enable premium proxies or JavaScript rendering.
- For pages behind a login, you might need to pass cookies. Check the Crawlbase docs for the right params.
Don’t overthink it: Start simple. If your partner’s site blocks you, then look at advanced options.
Step 3: Extract the Data You Care About
Now you’ve got the page HTML. But you don’t want the whole page—you want specific info.
There are a few ways to do this:
a) Use Crawlbase’s Extractor API
Crawlbase has a point-and-click Extractor tool. You show it what data to grab, and it spits out JSON.
- Good if your pages are predictable and you hate writing code.
- Less great if pages change a lot or have weird HTML.
b) Write Your Own Scraper
For more control, use BeautifulSoup (Python), Cheerio (Node.js), or whatever you like to parse the HTML.
Example (Python + BeautifulSoup):
python from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
with open('page.html') as f: soup = BeautifulSoup(f, 'html.parser') price = soup.select_one('.price').text print(price)
Tip: Keep your selectors simple and resilient. If you match on huge blocks of HTML, you’ll get false positives on every little change.
Step 4: Store the Results and Compare Them
You need a way to know what’s changed since last time.
Lightweight approach: - Save the last “known good” value for each page (in a file, database, or spreadsheet). - Each time you run your check, compare the new value to the old one.
If it’s different, that’s your change event.
Pitfalls: - Watch out for cosmetic changes (dates, ads, rotating banners) that don’t matter. Only monitor what you need. - Some sites randomize HTML or use dynamic IDs. If your selectors keep breaking, rethink your approach or ask your partner for a feed (seriously).
Step 5: Send Alerts When Something Changes
Crawlbase doesn’t send notifications itself. You’ll need to set this up.
Common alerting options: - Email: Use SMTP or a service like SendGrid. - Slack: Use a webhook to post to a channel. - SMS: Twilio works, but gets expensive fast.
Sample pseudo-code:
python if old_value != new_value: send_slack_alert(f"Price changed from {old_value} to {new_value}")
Don’t go overboard: Only alert on real changes. No one wants 100 emails about a penny difference.
Step 6: Automate the Whole Thing
You don’t want to do this by hand every day. Automate it.
How? - Cron jobs: For most teams, a simple cron job or scheduled cloud function does the trick. - Serverless: AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, or similar. Cheap, easy, and no servers to maintain. - CI pipelines: If you’re already using GitHub Actions or similar, you can run scrapes there.
Pro tip: Start with daily checks. If you truly need faster (say, for pricing wars), ramp up frequency—but watch your Crawlbase usage and avoid getting your IP blocked.
What to Ignore (at Least for Now)
- Crawling entire domains: Overkill, slow, and probably against the terms of use. Stick to pages you have a business relationship with.
- Monitoring every tiny CSS or layout tweak: Focus on the content that affects you.
- Expensive “change detection” tools: Most add bloat you don’t need. Crawlbase plus a little scripting covers 90% of use cases.
Real-World Gotchas and How to Handle Them
- Anti-bot measures: Some sites will block you no matter what. Try premium proxies, or talk to your partner to get whitelisted.
- Frequent small changes: If your partners tweak something minor every hour, you’ll get alert fatigue. Add logic to ignore “trivial” changes.
- Broken pages: Sometimes, your crawl will fetch a broken page (maintenance, downtime, etc.). Don’t fire off alerts for every 404 or error—add retries and sanity checks.
TL;DR: Keep It Simple, Iterate, and Don’t Trust Hype
Start small. Monitor what matters. Store and compare just the data you care about. Send yourself real alerts, not noise. Most “automated monitoring” is overkill—Crawlbase plus a little scripting puts you in control without lock-in or bloat. Try it, tweak it, and build up as you go. That’s how you actually stay on top of partner site changes—without losing your mind.