So you want to buy a PS5?
A Playstation 5 is pretty hard to get at the moment. I really wanted one and asked in a couple of stores. They all told me that they have a huge waiting list and won't even add me to it. When searching the internet I found a couple of pages where people would notify others when they saw an offer online. One for Switzerland is called https://www.preispirat.ch/. But whenever I saw a new post, it was already gone. So I decided to write my own small bot to notify me in Telegram was soon as one is available. I thought I need to wait for a week or so, but within a day I got multiple notification and was able to get a PS5. The setup is super simple and can be used for other shopping endeavours as well.
I checked https://www.mediamarkt.ch/ and saw that the have a handy text in the DOM, which I can use to determine when they are sold out. In case the text won't show up, I'll notify myself in Telegram.
The bot
The bot itself is a simple python script that requests the page and then checks if the sold-out text is not present. In that case it will send the message.
import telegram_send
import requests
url = "https://www.mediamarkt.ch/de/product/_sony-ps-playstation-5-digital-edition-980-pro-nvme-m-2-ssd-1tb-heatsink-2105983.html"
r = requests.get(url)
if "Produkt momentan nicht verfügbar" not in r.text:
telegram_send.send(messages=[f"PS5 is available on {url}"])
Automation
I was running this on a small cloud server, but you can also run it on your own machine. First install telegram-send pip3 install telegram-send and requests pip3 install requests.
Run telegram-send --configure to configure telegram-send. It will walk you through on how to setup a telegram bot and connect to it.
Check if everything works fine and then setup a cron to run the script every 5 minutes. Edit your crontab:
$ crontab -e
and insert this line:
$ */5 * * * * python3 /bytesonly/ps5-python.py
Then sit back and wait:
Good luck and happy shopping.