[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":239},["ShallowReactive",2],{"learn-lesson-competitor-price-monitoring-what-is-competitor-price-monitoring":3},{"course":4,"lesson":68,"index":195,"outline":196,"prev":237,"next":238},{"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":186,"next_step":191},"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",false,{"title":76,"description":77,"keywords":78},"What Is Competitor Price Monitoring? The Four Stages","Competitor price monitoring is four stages, and only two involve scraping. Here is what each stage does, where projects fail, and how to tell if you need one at all.","what is competitor price monitoring, price monitoring definition, competitor price tracking explained, price intelligence stages",[80,85,110,116,121,127,137,142,177],{"type":81,"paragraphs":82},"prose",[83,84],"Competitor price monitoring is usually described as \"automatically checking what your rivals charge\". That description is accurate and almost useless, because it hides where all the work is. Checking a price is the part a script does in two hundred milliseconds. Everything expensive happens either side of it.","A working pipeline has four stages. If you can name which stage is currently failing, you can fix it. If you cannot, you will keep rewriting the scraper and wondering why the numbers still look wrong.",{"type":86,"title":87,"intro":88,"headers":89,"rows":93},"table","The four stages","Read the right-hand column first. It is where the projects die.",[90,91,92],"Stage","What it does","How it fails",[94,98,102,106],[95,96,97],"1. Selection","Decides which competitors and which of your products are worth watching","Someone picks \"all of them\", the cost triples and nobody reads the output",[99,100,101],"2. Collection","Finds the competitor's product pages and reads price, stock and shipping off them","A redesign changes the page and the run returns fewer rows — quietly",[103,104,105],"3. Matching","Decides that their listing and your SKU are the same sellable thing","A 2 litre bottle is compared with a 1 litre bottle and the margin report is fiction",[107,108,109],"4. Action","Puts the number in front of the person or system that changes a price","The feed lands in a dashboard, the dashboard is opened twice, the project is cancelled",{"type":81,"title":111,"paragraphs":112},"Only stage two is scraping",[113,114,115],"This is the thing worth internalising before you spend any money. Stage two — collection — is a solved, commoditised problem. Dozens of vendors, including us, will do it. It is the stage every vendor demo spends its time on, because it is the stage that looks impressive on a screen.","Stages one, three and four are where your pipeline becomes useful or becomes shelfware, and none of them are technical. Stage one is a commercial judgement about where your margin is actually under threat. Stage three is a data problem that is never fully solved, only managed to an acceptable error rate. Stage four is an organisational problem about who is allowed to change a price and what evidence they need.","A vendor who only sells you stage two has sold you a quarter of a pipeline. That can be exactly right — plenty of teams genuinely only need the collection outsourced — but you should know which quarter you bought.",{"type":117,"variant":118,"title":119,"text":120},"callout","note","The question to ask before building anything","\"If I had perfect competitor prices tomorrow morning, what would change by Friday?\" If the honest answer is \"we would look at them\", you do not have a monitoring problem yet, you have a pricing-process problem. Fix the decision first; the data is cheap once something is waiting for it.",{"type":81,"title":122,"paragraphs":123},"What it is not",[124,125,126],"It is not real-time. Almost every retail pricing decision is made on a daily or weekly cycle, by a human, in a meeting or a spreadsheet. Systems that promise minute-level price feeds are solving a marketplace buy-box problem, which is a genuinely different architecture and usually a genuinely different budget. If your prices change weekly, a daily feed is already faster than your process can absorb.","It is not a competitor's internal data. You see the shelf price a shopper sees. You do not see their cost, their margin, their stock depth, or the discount they are giving a key account. Treating the shelf price as a proxy for their strategy is the single most common analytical error in this field.","It is not a substitute for knowing your own catalogue. Most matching failures are not caused by the competitor's data being messy. They are caused by your own product data — missing EANs, pack sizes buried in free text, three internal SKUs that are the same physical item. Lesson five is blunt about this.",{"type":128,"title":129,"intro":130,"items":131},"list","Signs you need one","Any two of these and the business case usually writes itself.",[132,133,134,135,136],"Someone on your team has a browser folder of competitor product pages they open manually","You have been undercut on a top-selling line and found out from a sales drop, not from a report","Your repricing rules reference competitor prices that are updated \"when we get round to it\"","You cannot currently answer \"how many of our top 200 SKUs are above market right now?\" in under an hour","A supplier is enforcing minimum advertised prices and you have no evidence of who is breaking them",{"type":81,"title":138,"paragraphs":139},"A note on cost shape",[140,141],"Collection is priced per page, almost everywhere, by almost everyone. That has one consequence worth planning around from the start: your bill is set by the number of competitor product pages times the number of times you look at them, and nothing else. Not by how many fields you extract. Not by how clever the matching is.","So the lever that controls your spend is lesson two, not lesson four. Twelve hundred pages checked daily is a very different monthly number from twelve thousand, and the second list is almost never twice as useful as the first. Teams that start with \"track everything\" and work down spend months paying for rows nobody reads.",{"type":86,"title":143,"intro":144,"headers":145,"rows":149},"Worked example: the page count behind a 1,200-SKU catalogue","Everything downstream — the bill, the run time, the argument with finance — falls out of one multiplication, and it is worth doing on paper before you speak to anyone selling you a tool. Take a retailer with 1,200 SKUs worth watching and five competitors on the shortlist. Read the last three rows together: the same five competitors and the same 1,200 products cost 108,000 pages a month or 38,600, depending on one scheduling decision.",[146,147,148],"Step","Figure","Pages",[150,154,157,161,165,169,173],[151,152,153],"SKUs you decide to watch","1,200","—",[155,156,153],"Competitors on the list","5",[158,159,160],"Share of your range each one actually carries","about 60%","720 per competitor",[162,163,164],"One full pass over all five","5 × 720","3,600",[166,167,168],"Daily, across a month","3,600 × 30","108,000",[170,171,172],"Weekly, across a month","3,600 × 4.3","about 15,500",[174,175,176],"Daily on the top 300, weekly on the remaining 900","(5 × 180 × 30) + (5 × 540 × 4.3)","about 38,600",{"type":128,"title":178,"intro":179,"items":180},"What usually goes wrong","Five failures account for most of the price feeds that get built and then quietly stop being opened.",[181,182,183,184,185],"Budgeting for the catalogue instead of the overlap. Teams multiply 1,200 SKUs by five competitors, get 6,000 pages a run, and price the project off a figure two-thirds higher than reality. You only ever fetch pages that exist.","Buying daily when the decision is weekly. If prices are reviewed in a Monday meeting, a daily run produces six snapshots nobody opens and multiplies the bill by seven.","Starting at stage two. Collection is the stage with a demo attached, so it gets built first, and the matching problem in stage three is discovered after the contract is signed.","Leaving stage four unowned. A feed with no named person who changes a price because of it is a reporting line item, not a pricing capability.","Treating the pilot's page count as the steady-state count. Pilots run on 50 SKUs and one competitor. The multiplication above is what arrives in month two.",[187,188,189,190],"A price pipeline is four stages: selection, collection, matching, action. Only collection is scraping.","Vendors demo stage two because it looks good. Your project will fail or succeed on one, three and four.","If nothing downstream is waiting for the data, you have a process problem, not a data problem.","Your bill is pages times frequency, so the scope decision in lesson two is also the budget decision.",{"text":192,"label":193,"url":194},"Next: the decision that sets both your cost and your usefulness — which competitors and which of your own products go on the list.","Lesson 2: choosing what to track","/learn/competitor-price-monitoring/choose-competitors-and-skus",0,[197,198,204,211,216,222,227,232],{"slug":69,"navTitle":70,"title":71,"summary":72,"time":73,"needsAccount":74},{"slug":199,"navTitle":200,"title":201,"summary":202,"time":203,"needsAccount":74},"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",{"slug":205,"navTitle":206,"title":207,"summary":208,"time":209,"needsAccount":210},"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":212,"navTitle":213,"title":214,"summary":215,"time":209,"needsAccount":210},"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":217,"navTitle":218,"title":219,"summary":220,"time":221,"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":223,"navTitle":224,"title":225,"summary":226,"time":203,"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":228,"navTitle":229,"title":230,"summary":231,"time":73,"needsAccount":210},"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":233,"navTitle":234,"title":235,"summary":236,"time":209,"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.",null,{"slug":199,"navTitle":200,"title":201,"summary":202,"time":203,"needsAccount":74},1791047866736]