[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":255},["ShallowReactive",2],{"learn-lesson-competitor-price-monitoring-choose-competitors-and-skus":3},{"course":4,"lesson":68,"index":6,"outline":212,"prev":253,"next":254},{"slug":5,"order":6,"level":7,"time":8,"card_text":9,"seo":10,"hero":16,"outcomes":26,"who":36,"syllabus":47,"faq":50,"lessonCount":67},"competitor-price-monitoring",1,"No coding required","8 lessons, about 90 minutes","From \"we check three competitors by hand on Mondays\" to a feed you trust enough to reprice from. The eight decisions in order, including the two that quietly ruin most projects.",{"title":11,"description":12,"keywords":13,"og_title":14,"og_description":15},"Competitor Price Monitoring: A Free 8-Lesson Course","Build a competitor price monitoring pipeline end to end: pick competitors, find product URLs, extract prices, match to your catalogue, schedule, export, reprice. Free, ungated.","competitor price monitoring, price monitoring course, how to track competitor prices, price tracking pipeline, competitor price tracking tutorial, retail price monitoring","A free course on building a competitor price monitoring pipeline","Eight written lessons on the part nobody covers: matching, data quality, and turning prices into decisions.",{"badge":17,"title":18,"subtitle":19,"cta_primary":20,"cta_secondary":23},"Course one","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.",{"label":21,"url":22},"Start with lesson one","/learn/competitor-price-monitoring/what-is-competitor-price-monitoring",{"label":24,"url":25},"Try the free price checker","/tools/free-competitor-price-checker",{"title":27,"items":28},"What you will be able to do",[29,30,31,32,33,34,35],"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",{"title":37,"for_title":38,"for":39,"not_title":43,"not_for":44},"Who this is for","Written for",[40,41,42],"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",[45,46],"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",{"title":48,"intro":49},"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.",{"badge":51,"title":52,"description":53,"items":54},"FAQ","Before you start","Questions people ask in the first ten minutes.",[55,58,61,64],{"title":56,"description":57},"Do I need a Scrapewise account to follow this?","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.",{"title":59,"description":60},"Is scraping competitor prices legal?","This is not legal advice. Reading a publicly visible price is not the same question as storing it, republishing it, or building a product on it, and the answer changes by jurisdiction and by the site's own terms. Lesson two covers how to keep the collection narrow enough that the question stays simple, but take your own advice before you start.",{"title":62,"description":63},"How often can prices be checked?","This course assumes a daily cycle, which is what most retail pricing decisions actually run on. If you need minute-level reaction — a marketplace buy box, an airline fare — the architecture in lesson six is wrong for you and you want an event-driven system instead.",{"title":65,"description":66},"What if my competitors are not online retailers?","The method holds for any public price list: distributors, wholesalers, rental catalogues. What changes is lesson three, because those sites rarely have a clean product sitemap. Lesson three covers that case directly.",8,{"slug":69,"nav_title":70,"title":71,"summary":72,"time":73,"needs_account":74,"seo":75,"blocks":79,"takeaways":203,"next_step":208},"choose-competitors-and-skus","Choosing what to track","Choosing which competitors and which SKUs to track","How 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",false,{"title":76,"description":77,"keywords":78},"Which Competitors and SKUs Should You Price Monitor?","A method for choosing what to track: rank competitors by overlap and threat, rank SKUs by margin at risk, and cut the list before it cuts your budget.","which competitors to track, price monitoring scope, competitor selection pricing, which skus to price monitor, margin at risk",[80,85,102,107,140,145,151,185,195],{"type":81,"paragraphs":82},"prose",[83,84],"Every price monitoring project starts with somebody saying \"let's track everyone\". It is a reasonable instinct and it is the main reason these projects get cancelled at renewal. A list that is ten times too long costs ten times too much, takes ten times as long to match, and produces a report with so many rows that the person who asked for it stops opening it.","The goal of this lesson is a defensible list: a set of competitors and a set of your own products where you can explain, line by line, why each one is there.",{"type":86,"title":87,"intro":88,"items":89},"steps","Ranking competitors","Score each candidate on two axes. You want the ones that are high on both.",[90,93,96,99],{"title":91,"text":92},"Overlap: how much of your range do they actually carry?","Take your top 100 products by revenue and check, by hand, how many of them the competitor stocks. Twenty minutes of clicking gives you a number. A competitor carrying 8 of your top 100 is not a competitor for pricing purposes, however loudly sales talks about them. A competitor carrying 70 of them sets your market price whether you like it or not.",{"title":94,"text":95},"Threat: does a shopper comparing you to them actually switch?","Price only matters where the alternative is credible. A rival with worse delivery, no stock, or a market the customer will not buy from can be cheaper than you all year and cost you nothing. The honest test is whether your own sales team mentions them in lost-deal notes. If they never come up, they are a benchmark, not a threat — and benchmarks can be checked monthly instead of daily.",{"title":97,"text":98},"Separate marketplaces from retailers","A marketplace listing is not one competitor, it is a rotating cast of sellers behind one URL, and the price you capture is whoever won the buy box at the moment you looked. That is still useful, but treat it as a market signal rather than as a named rival, and do not build a repricing rule that chases it directly.",{"title":100,"text":101},"Cut to between three and eight","Almost every retailer we have worked with ends up with a daily list in that range, no matter how big they are, plus a longer tail checked weekly or monthly. If your daily list has twenty names on it, two things are true: you cannot name what you would do differently based on fifteen of them, and you are paying for all twenty.",{"type":81,"title":103,"paragraphs":104},"Ranking your own products",[105,106],"The competitor list is the easy half. The expensive half is deciding which of your own SKUs are in scope, and here the useful metric is margin at risk, not revenue.","Margin at risk is roughly: units sold, times your margin per unit, times how price-sensitive that line is. A high-revenue product where you are the only stockist in the country has almost no margin at risk — nobody is going to undercut you. A mid-revenue product sold by four rivals within two percent of each other has enormous margin at risk, because a single competitor move changes your conversion rate that week.",{"type":108,"title":109,"intro":110,"headers":111,"rows":116},"table","A worked cut","A mid-size electronics retailer, roughly 9,000 SKUs. This is the shape of the exercise, not a template to copy.",[112,113,114,115],"Segment","SKUs","In scope?","Why",[117,122,127,132,136],[118,119,120,121],"Top sellers, 3+ rivals stock them","180","Daily","This is the margin at risk. Everything else is a rounding error against it.",[123,124,125,126],"Top sellers, sole stockist","60","Monthly","Nobody to be undercut by. Checked only to catch a new entrant.",[128,129,130,131],"Long tail, any rival","6,200","No","Individually immaterial; collectively would be 90% of the bill.",[133,134,120,135],"New lines, first 90 days","~120 rotating","Launch pricing is where mistakes are cheapest to catch and most expensive to leave.",[137,138,130,139],"Own-brand / exclusive","2,400","No comparable listing exists, so there is nothing to match against.",{"type":141,"variant":142,"title":143,"text":144},"callout","warning","The own-brand trap","Exclusive and own-brand lines are the single biggest source of wasted scope. They look like normal products in your catalogue, they get included by default when someone exports \"all active SKUs\", and they can never be matched to anything because no competitor sells them. They inflate your page count and then depress your match rate, so the project looks like it is failing at stage three when it is actually failing at stage one.",{"type":81,"title":146,"paragraphs":147},"Do the arithmetic before you commit",[148,149,150],"Your daily page count is competitors times in-scope SKUs that each competitor actually carries. Not competitors times your whole catalogue — a rival who stocks 40% of your in-scope range only contributes 40% of those pages.","For the example above: 180 daily SKUs, five competitors, average carriage of about 60%, gives roughly 540 pages a day, or about 16,000 a month. That is a number you can take to whoever signs off the budget, and it is small enough that you can afford to check it twice a day later if the business case justifies it.","Now run the same sum for the \"track everything\" version: 9,000 SKUs across five competitors is in the region of 800,000 pages a month. Same project, fifty times the bill, and a report nobody can read.",{"type":108,"title":152,"intro":153,"headers":154,"rows":160},"Worked example: ranking four lines by margin at risk","Margin at risk is monthly margin times the share of it a cheaper competitor could plausibly take. Revenue puts these four lines in the order A, C, D, B. Margin at risk puts them in the order C, A, D, B — promoting the second-biggest line by revenue to the top, and demoting the fattest-margin product in the business to nothing at all, because nobody else sells it.",[155,156,157,158,159],"Line","Monthly revenue","Monthly margin","Share a cheaper rival could take","Margin at risk",[161,167,173,179],[162,163,164,165,166],"A. Branded 55-inch TV, every rival stocks it","€180,000","€7,200","90%","€6,480",[168,169,170,171,172],"B. Own-brand HDMI cable","€36,000","€24,000","0%","€0",[174,175,176,177,178],"C. Branded coffee machine, three rivals stock it","€110,000","€20,000","70%","€14,000",[180,181,182,183,184],"D. Sole-stockist power tool","€60,000","€18,000","10%","€1,800",{"type":186,"title":187,"intro":188,"items":189},"list","What usually goes wrong","The selection stage has no error messages, so these are only ever discovered through the bill or through a report nobody trusts.",[190,191,192,193,194],"Scoring competitors on how often the sales team mentions them. Irritation is not overlap. Twenty minutes of clicking through your top 100 is the only input here that survives scrutiny.","Letting the list grow by one competitor per meeting. Every name added is a permanent multiplier on every future run, and nobody ever proposes removing one.","Tracking own-brand lines because they are top sellers. They cannot be matched to anything, so they generate pages, cost money and return nothing — line B above is the whole argument.","Treating one marketplace as one competitor. A single listing page can carry fifteen sellers, and the price that matters is whoever currently holds the buy box, not the marketplace's own.","Pricing the project on the SKU count rather than the SKU-times-competitor count, and discovering the real figure after the budget is signed off.",{"type":186,"title":196,"intro":197,"items":198},"Write these down before you move on","Lesson three assumes you have them.",[199,200,201,202],"The named competitor list, split into daily and less-than-daily","The in-scope SKU list, with the rule you used to build it written next to it","Your estimated monthly page count, and therefore your estimated monthly cost","The review date — scope rots, and a list nobody has revisited in a year is tracking last year's market",[204,205,206,207],"Score competitors on overlap with your range and on whether a shopper genuinely switches. Most daily lists should be three to eight names.","Rank your own products by margin at risk, not revenue. Sole-stockist lines have almost none.","Own-brand and exclusive SKUs can never be matched — excluding them is the cheapest single improvement to your match rate.","Page count equals competitors times the SKUs they actually carry. Do that arithmetic before you sign anything.",{"text":209,"label":210,"url":211},"You have a list of competitors and a list of products. Next you need the thing that connects them: the actual URLs of their product pages.","Lesson 3: finding competitor product URLs","/learn/competitor-price-monitoring/find-competitor-product-urls",[213,219,220,227,232,238,243,248],{"slug":214,"navTitle":215,"title":216,"summary":217,"time":218,"needsAccount":74},"what-is-competitor-price-monitoring","What it actually is","What competitor price monitoring actually is","The 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",{"slug":69,"navTitle":70,"title":71,"summary":72,"time":73,"needsAccount":74},{"slug":221,"navTitle":222,"title":223,"summary":224,"time":225,"needsAccount":226},"find-competitor-product-urls","Finding product URLs","Finding every competitor product URL without copying them by hand","Four 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",true,{"slug":228,"navTitle":229,"title":230,"summary":231,"time":225,"needsAccount":226},"extract-price-stock-and-shipping","Extracting the fields","Getting price, stock and shipping off the page","Which fields to extract, why the sale price is two fields and not one, and the four ways a price appears on a page.",{"slug":233,"navTitle":234,"title":235,"summary":236,"time":237,"needsAccount":74},"match-listings-to-your-catalogue","Matching to your catalogue","Matching competitor listings to your own catalogue","The stage that decides whether your feed is intelligence or fiction, and the denominator trick that makes bad match rates look good.","13 min",{"slug":239,"navTitle":240,"title":241,"summary":242,"time":73,"needsAccount":74},"schedule-runs-and-catch-silent-failure","Scheduling and data quality","Scheduling runs and catching silent data loss","How often to actually check, and the four alerts that catch a degrading feed before someone reprices from it.",{"slug":244,"navTitle":245,"title":246,"summary":247,"time":218,"needsAccount":226},"export-to-sheets-bi-and-erp","Getting the data out","Getting the data into Sheets, BI or your ERP","Four delivery routes ranked by how likely they are to actually get used, and the column contract that stops downstream jobs breaking.",{"slug":249,"navTitle":250,"title":251,"summary":252,"time":225,"needsAccount":74},"turn-price-data-into-repricing-rules","From data to decisions","Turning price data into repricing decisions","Why \"match the cheapest\" destroys margin, what a rule needs besides a competitor price, and how to start without automating anything.",{"slug":214,"navTitle":215,"title":216,"summary":217,"time":218,"needsAccount":74},{"slug":221,"navTitle":222,"title":223,"summary":224,"time":225,"needsAccount":226},1791047866745]