Stop losing sales: The secret to automated competitor price tracking

Pricing is a key area to outshine competitors. With the right discounts and promos, you can capture customers from your rivals and increase your market share.

However, monitoring rivals’ prices manually is too daunting, particularly for large e-commerce businesses. Instead of refreshing dozens of tabs to monitor prices, software tools automate this task for you.

I’ve created this guide to explore the best software tools for this task and how to use competitive pricing information to win more sales.

The best price monitoring tools

1. Price2Spy

Price2Spy is a leader in the price monitoring software niche. It offers an all-in-one solution for monitoring your competitors' prices, receiving price change alerts, tracking historical pricing trends, and instantly adjusting your online store's prices based on competitors' price movements.

With Price2Spy, you’ll deploy web scraping bots to scour through your rival’s websites for pricing information. You’ll also integrate Price2Spy with your e-commerce platform, enabling it to adjust product prices automatically.

Price2Spy has direct integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Magento, the most popular e-commerce platforms used by businesses, so you shouldn't have a problem with integration.

You can use the 14-day free trial to test Price2Spy before deciding if it’s worth paying for.

2. Prisync

Prisync offers similar features to Price2Spy. It uses web scraping bots to monitor prices on your competitors’ product pages, then sends alerts or automatically adjusts your store’s prices based on competitive behavior.

Even when your competitor’s prices are listed in another currency, PriSync automatically converts them to your currency and makes the necessary adjustments.

Apart from automatic price adjustments, Prisync also sends instant email alerts based on your threshold– for example, you can receive an alert when a specific product’s price falls below $20. Prisync also sends daily emails summarizing your competitors’ price changes.

You can use Prisync’s 14-day free trial to test its features. If satisfied, you can upgrade to a paid plan: $99 per month for up to 100 products, $199 per month for up to 1,000 products, or $399 per month for 5,000 products.

3. Oxylabs

Oxylabs isn’t a designated price monitoring tool. Rather, it’s a web scraping API platform with many use cases, including scraping pricing information from e-commerce sites.

You can use Oxylabs’ crawlers to scrape real-time pricing data from your competitors’ sites. Oxylabs provides a pool of 102 million+ residential and datacenter IP addresses, so if your rival’s site detects and blocks one IP, you can always switch to another.

Oxylabs charges as low as $0.5 per 1,000 scraped results. It’s more affordable when you only need to scrape several sites. You’ll only pay for the results you scrape instead of a costly monthly subscription, as with Pricesync and Price2Spy.

However, the drawback is that Oxylabs lacks native e-commerce features like Prisync and Price2Spy. It can’t automatically update your store’s prices based on scraped data– it only helps you scrape the data, but you’ll have to make the changes yourself.

4. Bright Data

Bright Data is another web scraping API provider. Like Oxylabs, it has millions of IP addresses enabling its bots to scrape pricing data from online stores.

You’ll choose which URLs to scrape, and Bright Data will fetch and deliver real-time data. Along with pricing information, you can discover whenever a rival adds a new product or when their product is out of stock. You can also monitor your rival’s customer reviews and learn how to capture their customer base.

For smaller scraping tasks, Bright Data offers a pay-as-you-go option starting from $1.5 per 1,000 records. You’ll only pay for the pricing data you scrape from a competitor’s site.

However, for large scraping tasks (500,000+ records and above), you’re better off with Bright Data’s monthly or annual packages– in the long run, you’ll pay less than $1.5 per 1,000 records.

5. ScrapingBee

With ScrapingBee, you can easily extract product prices from your competitors’ sites to your dashboard, then use this information to adjust your prices. Like Oxylabs and Bright Data, ScrapingBee has a massive amount of IP addresses at its disposal, enabling its scraping bots to bypass CAPTCHAs and fetch pricing information.

ScrapingBee doesn’t have a pay-as-you-go option. Rather, you'll pay a monthly fee and get access to a fixed amount of credits. $49 per month provides 250,000 credits; $99 unlocks 1 million credits, $249 unlocks 3 million credits, and $599 provides 8 million credits.

Each scraping request on your rival’s website costs anywhere from 5 to 75 credits, so there’s enough to go around each month.

Unfortunately, ScrapingBee doesn’t let users roll over credits from one month to another. All your monthly credits must be used within the same month it’s issued, and you’ll receive the same number in the following month.

Which is better? A price monitoring tool or a web scraping API?

Generally, a dedicated price monitoring tool is better than using a web scraping API platform. The former not only scrapes data but also makes automatic price adjustments based on this data.

However, web scraping APIs only scrape pricing data, and you’ll have to manually adjust prices or create a custom integration (at extra cost) to do it automatically.

The downside of price monitoring tools is their higher cost compared to web scraping APIs. You’ll pay more for the same volume of scraped data, but if you can afford it, you’ll enjoy the convenience of automatic price adjustments.

The process of leveraging price monitoring to win more sales

1. Data collection

The process starts with collecting pricing data from your competitors’ sites. You can do this with a designated price-monitoring tool or a web scraping platform.

The key is selecting your most important rivals– the more websites to monitor, the higher the cost, so you should focus only on your true competitors.

For example, if you sell formal men's and women's shoes, your true competitors are brands selling similar formal shoes, not those selling sneakers.

You shouldn’t spend money tracking sites that sell other shoe types, even though you all operate in the broader footwear market.

Ideally, select up to five main competitors to monitor. Your monitoring tool will continuously check these sites for pricing information and send alerts as needed.

2. Real-time analysis

Software tools don’t just collect real-time pricing information. They can analyze this information and make automatic changes based on your parameters.

For example, if the price of a competitor’s product decreases by 10%, your own price can automatically be reduced by the same 10%. If the competitor’s price increases, your price can follow suit.

Automatic price adjustment requires integrating the price monitoring tool with your e-commerce platform, e.g., Shopify.

Fortunately, e-commerce platforms have made it easy to set up such integrations– the steps vary depending on the software tool, but following the on-screen instructions is all it takes.

3. Price forecasting

Price monitoring tools aren’t only about keeping tabs on prices. Some tools use artificial intelligence (AI) to forecast your competitors’ future prices based on their past pricing data.

For instance, AI models can analyze your rival’s Christmas sales deals for the previous 5 years and forecast what percentage to reduce your own prices this Christmas. Some models can analyze much deeper to make price forecasts.

As with AI models, price forecasts aren’t 100% accurate. You shouldn’t rely solely on their forecasts but, instead, combine them with personal research to adjust product prices.

How to implement competitive price monitoring

1. Select your tool

Choose your price monitoring tool, preferably one mentioned in this guide. This tool determines how many competitors you’ll be able to track in real-time and save considerable time compared to doing it manually.

After making your final choice, sign up for the platform and choose a pricing plan. If available, start with a free trial to test the platform before paying.

2. Enter competitor URLs

Add the URL addresses of each competitor you want to track. Earlier, I mentioned tracking up to five competitors as the ideal number, but you can go further if your tool permits.

3. Set automated pricing rules

You can set automated pricing rules based on data pulled from your competitors’ websites. Some price monitoring tools don’t offer this feature, but if yours does, you’ll need to integrate it with your e-commerce platform to enable this feature. Then, you can set rules like:

• Match the rival’s exact price.
• Stop repricing if your rival has low stock.
• Stay $2 below your rival’s price.
• Only adjust the price if the gross profit margin is above 25%

4. Receive price alerts

Sometimes, you just want to receive alerts about your rival’s product prices, without yours being automatically updated. You can do this easily with your price monitoring tool– it’ll send email and SMS alerts based on your custom rules. You can also choose to receive these alerts in addition to automatic price updates for your products.