Build a competitor price monitoring pipeline
Price monitoring looks like a scraping problem for about a week. Then you discover that scraping was the easy part, and the project actually lives or dies on which competitors you picked, whether their listings are really the same product as yours, and whether anyone notices the morning the feed comes back half empty. This course is those eight decisions, in the order you have to make them.
What you will be able to do
- Say which competitors matter to your margin, and defend the list to a finance director
- Collect competitor product URLs without copying them one at a time
- Decide which fields you actually need, and which ones are a trap
- Judge a match rate honestly, including the denominator that most vendors quietly change
- Spot a feed that has silently degraded before a buyer acts on it
- Put the numbers where the decision is made, instead of in a dashboard nobody opens
- Write a repricing rule that survives contact with a competitor who is out of stock
The eight lessons
Each one ends where the next one starts. Four lessons are pure method; the ones that walk through our product say so in their own heading.
- 01What competitor price monitoring actually isThe four stages of a price pipeline, why only two of them are scraping, and the one question to ask before you build anything.9 min read Read lesson 1 →
- 02Choosing which competitors and which SKUs to trackHow to build a list that is small enough to afford and large enough to matter, using margin at risk rather than gut feel.11 min read Read lesson 2 →
- 03Finding every competitor product URL without copying them by handNeeds an accountFour ways to get a competitor's full product URL list, ranked by how much work they are, and what to do when none of them work.12 min read Read lesson 3 →
- 04Getting price, stock and shipping off the pageNeeds an accountWhich fields to extract, why the sale price is two fields and not one, and the four ways a price appears on a page.12 min read Read lesson 4 →
- 05Matching competitor listings to your own catalogueThe stage that decides whether your feed is intelligence or fiction, and the denominator trick that makes bad match rates look good.13 min read Read lesson 5 →
- 06Scheduling runs and catching silent data lossHow often to actually check, and the four alerts that catch a degrading feed before someone reprices from it.11 min read Read lesson 6 →
- 07Getting the data into Sheets, BI or your ERPNeeds an accountFour delivery routes ranked by how likely they are to actually get used, and the column contract that stops downstream jobs breaking.9 min read Read lesson 7 →
- 08Turning price data into repricing decisionsWhy "match the cheapest" destroys margin, what a rule needs besides a competitor price, and how to start without automating anything.12 min read Read lesson 8 →
Who this is for
Written for
- Pricing, category and e-commerce managers who own the number
- Marketplace sellers repricing against a handful of named rivals
- Anyone evaluating price monitoring vendors who wants to ask better questions
Not written for
- Engineers who want a tutorial on CSS selectors and headless browsers — that is a different and much shorter problem
- Anyone looking for a sub-second price feed; nothing here runs faster than daily
Before you start
Questions people ask in the first ten minutes.
For five of the eight lessons, no. Lessons three, four and seven walk through doing the thing in our portal and are marked as needing an account. A new account comes with five free requests and no card, which covers those lessons.
Start at lesson one
The four stages of a price pipeline, why only two of them are scraping, and the one question to ask before you build anything.