Collecting Lowe’s Data
Lowe’s carries thousands of products across many stores and makes all of this information (product, inventory & pricing) available on its app and website. This data is constantly updated daily (if not nightly), allowing anyone to know the inventory & price of any Lowe’s product at any store. It would be wonderful if Lowe’s supported an official API for accessing this data, however one does not exist - even though the information is displayed publicly.
Unofficial Lowe’s API
If we take a look at the Lowe’s mobile app’s web traffic, we can reveal its underlying API that Lowe’s uses to send and receive data to and from the app on your phone. Since this API is exposing public data (accessible on its publicly distributed app), we could collect select contents to use as an unofficial API, allowing us to access structured data back from Lowe’s.
Product Catalog
If you’re starting from scratch and want to build a list of Lowe’s items you’re interested in, you can import the Lowe’s Product Search Formula which could collect all the Lowe’s products matching a keyword, UPC, brand name, etc… just like how their search works on the mobile app. You can also supply a physical Lowe’s Store ID so you only get results that are carried at a specific store.
Store Prices & Inventories
If you have a list of Lowe’s products and want to check the prices & inventories accross multiple stores, you can import the Lowe’s Price & Inventory - Multiple Products & Stores Formula to see how you could collect this data. This would allow you to see which physical store has the lowest price for a list of products, saving you money if you’re looking to purchase.
You can also learn more in general about collecting local store inventories from this video:
