I’m just starting to get into coding (took the Intro to Programming course on Codecademy, a complete beginner), and the first project I want to work on is coding a program that notifies me when a new product that I’m interested in, in my size, is posted on Buyee (a Japanese second-hand seller website). I started doing some research on how this might work using ChatGPT and Perplexity, and they both gave me similar results, suggesting I use Python libraries such as BeautifulSoup and requests for web scraping.

I’m aware the website already has a function that does a similar thing, but I wanted to make it myself to understand how it works. Since I don’t know too much about this, would you say this is too advanced for a beginner to start with?

Also, I researched whether there are any legal issues with scraping on Buyee, and the terms and services don’t mention anything, BUT the website is basically a proxy service for Yahoo Japan Shopping, Mercari, and Rakuten (second-hand online marketplaces), which do have scraping laws. How illegal is this really if it’s for personal use only?

Any other suggestions and advice are gladly welcomed. Thanks!