About Our Monitoring System

How It Works

Matcha Alert Club uses an automated monitoring system to check product availability across 15+ premium Japanese tea retailers. Here's how it works:

1. Continuous Monitoring

Our system checks product pages every 5-15 minutes (frequency varies by retailer) to detect stock status changes. When a product goes from "Out of Stock" to "In Stock", we immediately send alerts to all users tracking that product.

2. Respectful Scraping

We respect retailers' servers and follow best practices:

• Reasonable request intervals (no more than 1 request per 5 minutes per retailer)
• Proper user-agent identification
• Respect for robots.txt files
• No login or authentication bypass
• Public information only - no private data

3. Data We Track

For each product, we monitor:

• Stock status - In stock, out of stock, low stock
• Product name - To identify the item
• Price - To detect price changes (coming soon)
• URL - Direct link to purchase

4. Alert Delivery

When a tracked product restocks:

1. Our system detects the status change within 5-15 minutes
2. We send email notifications to all users tracking that product
3. Push notifications (if enabled) are sent instantly
4. The product appears in your dashboard with "NEW STOCK" badge

Accuracy & Reliability

What We Guarantee

• ✅ Real data: All information comes from official retailer websites
• ✅ Regular checks: Products monitored every 5-15 minutes
• ✅ Fast alerts: Notifications sent within minutes of restock

What We Don't Guarantee

• ⚠️ Instant detection: There's a 5-15 minute delay between restock and alert
• ⚠️ Product availability: Stock may sell out before you can purchase
• ⚠️ Pricing accuracy: Retailers can change prices without notice
• ⚠️ Website changes: If a retailer redesigns their site, it may temporarily break monitoring

Supported Retailers

We currently monitor 15+ premium tea retailers, including:

• Ippodo Tea
• Marukyu Koyamaen
• Kettl
• Ippuku & Matcha
• Hibiki-an
• And more...

View all supported brands →

Request New Retailers

Want us to monitor a retailer we don't currently support? Submit a request and we'll evaluate adding it to our system.

Privacy & Data Usage

All product data we collect is publicly available information from retailer websites. We:

• Do NOT create accounts on retailer sites
• Do NOT access private or authenticated pages
• Do NOT store credit card or payment information
• Do NOT share data with third parties (except service providers)

For more details, see our Privacy Policy.

For Retailers

If you're a tea retailer and have concerns about our monitoring:

• We drive traffic to your site - every alert includes a direct purchase link
• Our monitoring is respectful and follows industry best practices
• We can adjust monitoring frequency if needed
• We can add your brand logo and description (free promotion!)

Contact us at retailers@matchaalertclub.com

Technical Details

For developers and curious users:

• Technology: Node.js + Puppeteer for JavaScript-heavy sites, Axios for static sites
• Frequency: 5-15 minute intervals per retailer (rate-limited)
• Storage: PostgreSQL database with change history
• Hosting: Distributed servers for reliability