I recently found myself enraptured in a pet project to periodically check PS5 stock across the major U.S. retailers and send a Discord message to a set of recipients when one is found. I set my sights on the following retailers:
- Amazon
- Target
- Walmart
- BestBuy
- GameStop
- Playstation Direct
GameStop and Playstation Direct do not do bot checks, CATCHPA, or any other security method so I simply used Java's HTTPRequest system and split the response with certain HTML tags to check for "out of stock" related text (interestingly enough, most of these retailers use different terms for "out of stock"). BestBuy provides a free consumer API, making the process significantly easier. Walmart has their Walmart IO API, but during the holiday season unfortunately they have disabled the creation of new applications or accounts. I intend to add Walmart support once the holiday season is over, seeing as the bot has been running for the entirety of Black Friday and (at the time