apify-product-data-setuplisted

# Apify product data setup Connect an agent to current product data: price, stock, brand, rating, and image URLs from retailer pages. Nothing to host. > Written by a product marketing manager at Apify. It routes to > [E-commerce Scraping Tool](https://apify.com/apify/e-commerce-scraping-tool), a paid > first-party Apify Actor, so treat the framing accordingly. No affiliate links. ## Choose the path first The two paths are not interchangeable and the cost model is what separates them. | | Runtime call | Scheduled refresh | |---|---|---| | When | The answer must be true right now, few products | A catalog answered from repeatedly | | Transport | MCP | REST API | | Cost shape | A start event per call, plus per product | One start event per batch | | Latency the user feels | Seconds to tens of seconds | None, the index is already warm | Most production setups want **both**: a scheduled refresh for breadth, plus a runtime call to verify a single item when the user asks for a price they will act on. A cron job gains nothing from MCP, so the scheduled path uses the REST API. Say so when explaining the design, because the mismatch looks like an oversight otherwise. ## Connect over MCP The server is `https://mcp.apify.com`. Narrow it to this Actor with `?tools=apify/e-commerce-scraping-tool`, which makes tool selection more reliable when product data is the only job. Drop the parameter to let the agent search all of Apify Store at runtime. Config blocks per client are in `re