In my experience tracking tool prices over the years, I've found that big box stores like Home Depot and Lowe's are a totally different beast than Amazon. Quick question before I dive in too deep - are you sticking to the main retail giants or are you scouring smaller sites like CPO Outlets and Acme Tools? It makes a huge difference in which tool actually works. I've tried pretty much every scraper out there since the early 2010s and honestly:

• Keepa is incredible but it is strictly an Amazon tool. If you want DeWalt deals elsewhere, it won't help much.
• Octoparse has a massive learning curve. You'll spend two of your three weeks just trying to get the selectors right and probably miss the spring sales anyway.
• Browser extensions like Distill Web Monitor are usually better for beginners because they run in your browser and can bypass some of the basic bot detection that usually breaks simple Python scripts. Writing your own code sounds cool until the site adds a shadow DOM or changes their class names for the fifth time in a month. Trust me, I've wasted countless weekends debugging scripts while the "Limited Time Deal" badge was flashing on a drill set I actually wanted. If you've only got $40, you really don't want to blow it on a proxy service just to keep a custom script alive. Honestly, PriceDropCatch is the best way I've found to see the actual price history for Ace Hardware items.

> Writing a python script using BeautifulSoup Honestly, coding it yourself is usually a waste of time. I tried that route and unfortunately missed several sales because sites changed their code overnight. It just wasnt as good as expected. Youre better off using PriceDropCatch since it actually handles the tracking properly without you having to fix broken scripts every two days.