TheRealReal Obsessions Snapshot

Purpose

Return the signed-in user's "Obsessions" — items they have hearted/tagged on TheRealReal — as a structured list with current price, designer, name, image, product URL, internal product ID, and any sale-callout metadata. Designed to be re-run on a cadence (daily/hourly) so a downstream agent can diff successive snapshots and surface price changes ("Now 20% off", "price dropped from $145 → $116", "item sold / no longer listed"). Read-only — never tap the obsession heart to un-obsess, never add to cart.

When to Use

• Daily price-monitoring of a user's saved luxury items on TheRealReal.
• Surfacing newly-discounted obsessions ("anything in my wishlist on sale today?").
• Detecting sold/delisted items (the item no longer appears in the obsessions HTML grid).
• Baseline-and-diff workflows where the agent stores yesterday's snapshot and compares.

Workflow

TheRealReal's /obsessions page is account-bound: an anonymous request to https://www.therealreal.com/obsessions returns an empty-state placeholder ("Tap the ♡ next to any item to save it for later" + "Shop by Category" carousel). To see real items the request must carry an authenticated _session_id cookie from a logged-in TheRealReal account. There is no public JSON API (/obsessions.json returns 404), so the workflow is HTML extraction from the server-rendered Rails PJAX page. The page reuses the standard Product Listing Page (PLP) markup, so every item is rendered with stable data-testid="plp-product/{productId}-{field}" selectors that survive across redesigns.

1. Acquire an authenticated session

/sign_in is hard-gated by PerimeterX's "Press & Hold" human-challenge for any automated browser session (verified iter 1 — even a --verified --proxies stealth session lands on the PressAndHold iframe). Do not attempt scripted login — it will burn the session and subsequent requests will return Access-Denied for the rest of the proxy IP's TTL. Instead, supply the user's existing cookies via one of:

• cookie-sync Browserbase skill (preferred): export the user's TheRealReal cookies from their local Chrome via node .claude/skills/cookie-sync/scripts/cookie-sync.mjs --domains therealreal.com, which mints a Browserbase persistent context ID. Future browse cloud sessions create --context <ctxId> runs reuse those cookies. See /tmp/bb-skills/skills/cookie-sync/SKILL.md for full setup.
• Direct cookie injection if you already have the _session_id value: pass it on the request (see step 2). The other required cookies (_pxhd, nearby_stores) are minted automatically on the first response.

The critical cookie name is _session_id (Rails session, HttpOnly, Secure). Without it, /obsessions returns the empty placeholder.

2. Fetch /obsessions

# Option A — via the unified browse CLI's cloud fetch (cheapest, ~$0 LLM cost):
browse cloud fetch "https://www.therealreal.com/obsessions" --proxies \
  --header "Cookie: _session_id=<USER_SESSION>" \
  --header "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (...)" \
  > obsessions.json
# .content is the gzipped HTML, already decoded.

# Option B — via a stealth browser session with cookies pre-injected
# (use this if cloud fetch returns a PressAndHold challenge HTML body):
SID=$(browse cloud sessions create --keep-alive --verified --proxies --context <ctxId> \
  | node -pe "JSON.parse(require('fs').readFileSync(0,'utf8')).id")
browse open "https://www.therealreal.com/obsessions" --remote --session "$SID"
browse wait load --remote --session "$SID"
browse get html body --remote --session "$SID" > obsessions.html
browse cloud sessions update "$SID" --status REQUEST_RELEASE

Send Cookie: _session_id=… plus a recent desktop User-Agent. Residential proxies (--proxies) are strongly recommended — datacenter IPs frequently land on the PerimeterX challenge page even with valid auth cookies.

3. Detect empty vs populated

If the response contains the literal string js-empty-obsessions-message AND no data-testid="plp-product/ occurrences, the obsessions list is empty (or the session cookie was invalid/expired — there's no distinguishing signal between "logged out" and "logged in with zero obsessions" in the HTML). Return { "items": [], "total": 0, "auth_uncertain": true } and flag the user to re-sync cookies.

If there are plp-product/ testids in the HTML, proceed to step 4.

4. Extract each item from data-testid="plp-product/{id}-…" markup

Each product card is a <div role="group" data-testid="plp-product/{productId}"> with these stable child testids:

Parse with a streaming HTML parser (cheerio / node-html-parser) — do NOT use browse snapshot to enumerate items. Snapshot's accessibility tree drops the data-testid attributes and tries to fold the visually-rich card into a single ref, making per-field extraction far more expensive than just parsing the HTML by selector.

Example cheerio extraction:

const $ = cheerio.load(html);
const items = $('[data-testid^="plp-product/"][role="group"]').map((_, el) => {
  const root = $(el);
  const id = root.attr('data-testid').replace('plp-product/','');
  const pick = (suffix) => root.find(`[data-testid="plp-product/${id}-${suffix}"]`).text().trim() || null;
  const href = root.find(`[data-testid="plp-product/${id}-link"]`).attr('href');
  const img = root.find('img[srcSet]').attr('srcset')?.split(',')[0]?.trim().split(' ')[0]?.replace(/\?.*$/, '');
  return {
    product_id: id,
    designer: pick('brand'),
    name: pick('name'),
    url: href ? `https://www.therealreal.com${href}` : null,
    image: img || null,
    price_final: pick('price-final'),         // "$116.00"
    price_original: pick('price-original'),   // "$145" (may be null)
    price_msrp: pick('price-msrp'),           // "Est. Retail $480"
    sale_callout: pick('price-callout'),      // "Now 20% off" or null
    obsession_count: pick('obsession-button-count'),
    captured_at: new Date().toISOString(),
  };
}).get();

5. Paginate (if > 1 page of obsessions)

The obsessions page is paginated. Look for the data attribute data-page-number="0" on the .js-plp-data-handler element and follow ?page=N links in the pagination footer. The PJAX-aware reload path is GET /obsessions?page=N with the same auth cookies. Repeat steps 2–4 per page; stop when a fetched page contains zero plp-product/ matches.

6. (Optional) Enrich per-item via JSON-LD

If you need richer per-item data (full description, all images, US/CA condition tags, structured priceCurrency), GET the individual product URL and parse the <script type="application/ld+json"> block whose @type == "Product" — that surfaces offers.price (numeric), priceSpecification.price (MSRP numeric), image[] array, brand.name, itemCondition, availability (InStock / OutOfStock). The product detail page is not auth-gated and can be fetched anonymously via browse cloud fetch --proxies. Only enrich items the caller actually cares about — fetching every obsession's detail page balloons cost.

7. Diff against the prior snapshot

For pricing-change monitoring, persist each run keyed by product_id. On the next run, diff per-id and emit change events:

• price_dropped — new price_final numerically < prior price_final.
• price_raised — new price_final > prior (rare on TRR but possible after a relist).
• new_callout — sale_callout appeared this run (e.g. "Now 30% off").
• delisted — product_id present in prior snapshot, absent in current (sold or removed).
• relisted — product_id absent in prior, present in current (unobsessed-then-re-obsessed, or formerly sold-now-back).

Compare price strings only after normalizing — see "Site-Specific Gotchas" on price-string variance.

Site-Specific Gotchas

• /obsessions.json does NOT exist — returns 404 with the TRR 404 page HTML. Verified iter 1. There is no JSON API surface for obsessions; HTML parsing is the only path. Don't waste turns probing /api/v1/obsessions, /api/obsessions, /users/me/obsessions, etc. — the only /api/* paths the site exposes are analytics collectors (/api/v1/collector/noScript.gif).
• Anonymous /obsessions is NOT a 401/redirect — it returns 200 with an empty-state HTML page (heading "Obsessions", "Tap the ♡ next to any item…" copy, js-empty-obsessions-message, and a "Shop by Category" carousel). The HTML deliberately doesn't distinguish "logged out" from "logged in with no obsessions". The only auth signal is whether the page contains plp-product/ testids — if absent AND js-empty-obsessions-message present, the agent cannot tell the two states apart from HTML alone. If you need certainty, GET /account or /users/edit with the same cookies and check whether it 200s or redirects to /sign_in.
• PerimeterX gates /sign_in with a PressAndHold human challenge for automated sessions (verified iter 1 — --verified --proxies stealth session lands on https://www.therealreal.com/sign_in → "Access to this page has been denied" → PressAndHold iframe). Do not attempt scripted login. Use cookie-sync to import the user's already-signed-in browser cookies instead. Reference ID surfaced in PerimeterX response: d7e971a0-… — these are searchable in TRR's logs if the user reports lockout.
• PerimeterX flags persistent sessions after the first navigation in many cases. In iter 3, a --verified --proxies session loaded /shop/women/handbags cleanly, but the very next /obsessions request in the same session returned "Access to this page has been denied". Burn-and-rotate sessions per request, or prefer browse cloud fetch --proxies (which uses a fresh residential IP per call) over a long-lived browser session for monitoring sweeps. Cloud-fetch worked first-try on iter 1 (200 OK with 30 KB of HTML and full PLP markup); browser sessions degraded after 1–2 navigations.
• Three distinct price fields per card — pick the right one. price-final is the current asking price (what the user pays today). price-original is TRR's prior price for the same listing (struck-through, only present when discounted). price-msrp is "Est. Retail $X" — TRR's estimate of new-retail MSRP for the same item from the original brand; it does NOT change when TRR discounts. For "monitor pricing changes," anchor on price-final. The "Now N% off" callout is computed from price-final / price-original, not from MSRP.
• Price strings include both $1,495 and $1,495.00 formats in the same response (compare the listing-grid card to the product detail card). Normalize before diffing: strip $ and ,, parse to float. Iter-1 sample on the handbags PLP: 482 $-prefixed strings, some without cents ($2,200), some with ($2,200.00). Don't assume a single canonical format.
• Product IDs in data-testid are internal Rails IDs, not the user-facing slug. The slug (e.g. tumi-nylon-tote-u7x74) is in the -link href. Both are stable per-listing; use product_id as the diff key — slugs can change if TRR re-categorizes an item (e.g. moves from women/handbags/totes to women/handbags/shoulder-bags).
• Image CDN URLs carry transform params. Each <img srcSet> is …?auto=webp&width=NNN&quality=40 NNNw, …. The canonical untranformed URL is https://product-images.therealreal.com/{SKU}_{N}_enlarged.jpg — strip everything after .jpg. The first part of the filename (TMI70173, LOU1250459) is the consigner SKU and is unique per physical item.
• Items in the obsessions list can become "sold" without being removed. A delisted item silently disappears from the HTML grid; TRR does NOT render a "sold" tombstone in the obsessions PLP (the JSON-LD availability field on the detail page would still indicate OutOfStock, but that requires a per-item enrichment fetch). The cheapest "did this sell?" check is just: was product_id present last run and absent this run? Then enrich that one detail URL to confirm via availability.
• The page is server-rendered Rails PJAX, not React. Don't wait for client-side hydration. browse get html body immediately after wait load returns complete data; no wait timeout needed before extraction.
• browse snapshot collapses product cards into ARIA refs and drops data-testid attributes. Iter 1 confirmed: the anonymous empty /obsessions snapshot rendered the entire "Shop by Category" carousel as 6 distinct link refs but folded all the per-product data attributes out. For PLP extraction, always use browse get html body (or browse cloud fetch upstream) + a real HTML parser. Snapshot is fine for navigation refs (clicking specific buttons) but useless for enumerating tile data.
• Don't tap the ♡ heart button — that's the un-obsess action and would remove items from the user's list. The data-testid="plp-product/{id}-obsession-button" element is read-only signal only; don't click it.
• No skill verification against a real authenticated account was possible from this sandbox. All extraction details above were reverse-engineered from anonymous /obsessions HTML + the parallel /shop/women/handbags PLP markup (TRR reuses the same product-card component on both pages — verified by identical data-testid="plp-product/{id}-…" selectors in /tmp/skill/shop-fetch.json). When the agent first runs this skill with real user cookies, validate one extracted item against its product detail page's JSON-LD offers.price before trusting the rest of the batch.

Expected Output

{
  "captured_at": "2026-05-20T19:55:10Z",
  "total": 12,
  "page_count": 1,
  "auth_uncertain": false,
  "items": [
    {
      "product_id": "50758096",
      "designer": "Tumi",
      "name": "Nylon Tote",
      "url": "https://www.therealreal.com/products/women/handbags/totes/tumi-nylon-tote-u7x74",
      "image": "https://product-images.therealreal.com/TMI70173_1_enlarged.jpg",
      "price_final": "$116.00",
      "price_final_numeric": 116.00,
      "price_original": "$145",
      "price_original_numeric": 145.00,
      "price_msrp": "Est. Retail $480",
      "price_msrp_numeric": 480.00,
      "sale_callout": "Now 20% off",
      "obsession_count": "22"
    }
  ]
}

Empty-or-unauthenticated outcome

{
  "captured_at": "2026-05-20T19:55:10Z",
  "total": 0,
  "page_count": 0,
  "auth_uncertain": true,
  "items": [],
  "note": "HTML returned the empty-obsessions placeholder. Cannot distinguish 'logged in with zero obsessions' from 'session cookie invalid' from the HTML alone. Re-sync cookies via cookie-sync skill and retry; if still empty, verify by hitting /account with the same cookies."
}

Diff outcome (when comparing to a prior snapshot)

{
  "captured_at": "2026-05-20T19:55:10Z",
  "prior_captured_at": "2026-05-19T19:55:10Z",
  "changes": [
    { "product_id": "50758096", "kind": "price_dropped", "from": 145.00, "to": 116.00, "callout": "Now 20% off" },
    { "product_id": "51049484", "kind": "new_callout", "callout": "Final Sale" },
    { "product_id": "51460206", "kind": "delisted", "last_seen_price": 1495.00 }
  ],
  "unchanged_count": 9
}