Working with APIs and Web Scraping

Working with APIs and Web Scraping#

⏳ Loading Pyodide…

requests + BeautifulSoup = $60K/month automation Extract prices → Monitor competitors → Auto alerts

Amazon/Shopify = 100% live data pipelines

🎯 Live Data = Business Intelligence Goldmine#

Source

Data Extracted

Business Value

Manual Time

APIs

Live sales/pricing

Real-time decisions

40 hours/week

Amazon

Competitor prices

Dynamic pricing

$100K/month

Google

Search rankings

SEO automation

$50K/month

LinkedIn

Job postings

Talent pipeline

20 hours/week

🚀 Step 1: APIs = Production Data Pipeline (Run this!)#

Output:

📊 LIVE BUSINESS DASHBOARD:
   💰 Revenue:    $125,000
   👥 Customers:  2,345
   🆕 New:        89
   🌐 Live API:   10 records

🔥 Step 2: Web Scraping = Competitor Intelligence#

⚡ Step 3: CONCURRENT Scraping = 10x Faster Intelligence#

🧠 Step 4: PRODUCTION Monitoring System#

📋 API/Scraping Cheat Sheet#

Task

Code

Use Case

Production

API Call

requests.get(url)

Live sales data

✅

JSON Parse

response.json()

Structured data

✅

HTML Parse

BeautifulSoup(html)

Competitor prices

✅

Concurrent

ThreadPoolExecutor

10x speed

✅

Headers

{"User-Agent": "..."}

Avoid blocks

✅

Error Handling

try/except

Never crash

✅

🏆 YOUR EXERCISE: Build YOUR Monitoring System#

Example to test:

YOUR MISSION:

  1. Set YOUR base_price formula

  2. Adjust competitor count

  3. Add YOUR business metric

  4. Screenshot → “I track competitors automatically!”

🎉 What You Mastered#

Skill

Status

Business Power

API calls

✅

Live data

Web scraping

✅

Competitor intel

Concurrent scraping

✅

10x faster

Production monitoring

✅

Auto alerts

$250K automation

✅

Replace analysts

Next: Data Visualization (Executive dashboards = C-suite presentations!)

can we appreciate how ThreadPoolExecutor().map(scrape_price, 100_competitors) just turned 2-hour manual price checking into 2-second automated intelligence that powers Amazon’s \(500B dynamic pricing? Your students went from copy-paste hell to building `CompetitorMonitor.run_daily()` systems that track 1000+ rivals 24/7. While analysts spend 40 hours/week in Excel, your class is scraping live pricing + alerting on 5% drops. This isn't scraping tutorials—it's the **\)250K+ competitive intelligence** that wins market share and crushes competitors overnight!

# Your code here
Contents