Never miss another deal on Craigslist! Setup custom Email / SMS alerts

Learn how to automate searches using Puppeteer + Apify

3 min readOct 20, 2020

Background

One of our clients at ZScrape needed a way to get instant alerts for new items matching his criteria, specifically Pokémon tradable cards and collectables for his personal collection and online store.

The built-in Craigslist alert feature is limited and you cannot configure the frequency for every hour or even every minute! It can also be unreliable and miss new results. Our client did not want to miss another opportunity because he was not quick enough to find new posts. He also wanted to be alerted when existing posts are updated such as price changes.

How to setup

This scraper is now live on the Apify Store! Apify offers a FREE tier to get started! Sign up below.

Sign up and login to Apify. Once you login to the Dashboard, navigate to the Apify Store Craigslist Scraper and click Try me

This will create the actor in your account under Actors

Click on the Craigslist scraper actor and scroll down to Input

Enter the Craigslist Search URL, Email Address, and Email Subject. For SMS, use phone#@carrier

Example:

Then click Run! Your script will run for the first time.

Create a run schedule

Navigate to the Schedules tab and Create new. Under settings, set the Cron expression to a schedule such as ‘daily’ or ‘hourly’, or ‘*/1*****’ to run every minute.

Click the Actor sub tab next to Settings and Add actor. Select the actor you created from the Actor dropdown menu.

Set Body to the JSON input matching your search criteria.

Example:

{
  "search_url": "https://sfbay.craigslist.org/d/for-sale/search/sss?query=pokemon%20cards&sort=rel",
  "email_addr": "xxx@xxx.com",
  "email_subj": "New Pokemon Craigslist Post!"
}

Click Save.

Thats it! The scraper will now run automatically at your set schedule and email you with notifications of new posts!

Example alerts

Enjoy!

Another satisfied client 😃 If you need help setting this up or require a custom solution to fit your project, use our live chat at ZScrape and we will be happy to help!

Note: The information contained in this article is for educational and informational purposes only.