Guide
How to track competitor prices
Pick three competitors that actually take your customers, list the products you share with them by EAN, record their prices every day with the date, and set a rule for what counts as a change worth acting on. That is the whole method. The rest of this page is how to do each step, where a spreadsheet stops being enough, and what to do with what you find.
The trial has every feature, on 100 products and 3 competitor shops. Then you connect your shop, in about two minutes. Servers in Germany.
The method in three steps
- 1
Choose competitors by where your customers go, not by who is biggest. Look at the shops that show up next to you on a comparison site or in Google Shopping for your best-selling products. Three is enough to start; more than five adds noise before it adds insight.
- 2
Build the product list on the EAN, the number on the barcode. Export your catalogue with SKU, EAN and your price. Then, per competitor, find the product page for each EAN. Titles are not a key: "Yoga mat 6 mm" and "Yogamat 6mm blauw" are the same product, and two products can share a title.
- 3
Record the price every day, with the date, in a new row rather than over the old one. A price you overwrite is a history you lost. Add a column for "in stock" while you are on the page.
The spreadsheet version
One sheet per competitor, one row per product per day: date, EAN, their price, in stock. A second sheet joins the latest row per EAN to your own price and shows the difference in euros and in percent. Sort by that column and you have your morning list. Add a conditional colour for anything more than five percent below you.
This works. It takes about a minute per product per competitor if you do it by hand, which is where the trouble starts: fifty products and three competitors is two and a half hours a day. Most people do it for two weeks, then weekly, then stop. The sheet is still there; it is just wrong.
Where the spreadsheet stops
At the day you skip. Price tracking is only worth something as a series, and a series with holes cannot tell you whether a competitor is structurally below you or ran a weekend promotion. It also stops at scale: more than a few dozen products, or a competitor who changes prices daily, is more than a person keeps up with next to running a shop.
The third limit is quieter. A spreadsheet tells you the price; it does not tell you what to do. Whether a five percent gap matters depends on your cost, your minimum margin and how much traffic that product carries. That rule lives in your head, which means it is applied inconsistently and never at seven in the morning.
Automating it yourself
A small script can fetch a product page and read the price out of it, and for one competitor and a stable website that is a fine afternoon project. It stops being one when the shop changes its page layout, blocks your requests, or shows a different price to a visitor from another country. Maintaining scrapers is a job, and the day the script silently reads the wrong number is the day you make a pricing decision on it.
Put your own catalogue on the board. Fourteen days, no card.
Start 14 days freeWhat a tool should do for you
Take the catalogue straight from your shop, so the list is never stale. Match on EAN and ask you about the rest instead of guessing. Fetch every competitor page daily and keep every reading. Let you set, per kind of event, how big a move has to be before it tells you. And show the result as a short list, not a table: which prices are wrong, which way, since when. If it also proposes a new price, it should show the rule and the numbers behind it, respect a floor you set, and wait for your approval before it touches the shop.
What to do with what you find
Start with the products that carry your margin, not your traffic. A competitor ten percent below you on a product you sell twice a year is a fact; the same gap on your best seller is a decision. Set a floor first: cost plus the margin you will not go under. Then decide, per group of products, what you want: be the cheapest, protect the margin, follow the lowest within a band, or hold list price. Those are rules, and rules can be written down and applied every morning.
And read the other direction. A competitor who has been above you for a week is room to move up. Most shops only ever look at who is cheaper.
How priceq does it
priceq is the tool version of this page. It connects to Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento 2, matches on EAN with a review queue, checks once or twice a day, keeps the history, alerts on thresholds you set, and from the Business plan proposes prices that show their rule and never go below your floor. A person approves every push. Plans start at €99 a month for 200 products. More on what competitor price monitoring involves.
Questions
How many competitors should I track?
Three to start. Choose the ones your customers actually compare you with, which you can see on comparison sites and in Google Shopping. Add more only when the first three are under control.
Where do I find a competitor’s EAN?
Often on the product page, in the specifications, or in the page source. If a shop does not show it, match once by hand on brand and model number and record the EAN yourself.
How often is often enough?
Daily. Weekly misses every promotion shorter than a week, and those are the ones that cost you sales.
Is it allowed to read competitor prices from their website?
Reading publicly shown prices is common practice; comparison sites do nothing else. Do it politely, at a low rate, and only take the price and availability.
Should I always match the lowest price?
No. Matching the lowest without a floor is how margins disappear. Set the floor first, then decide per product group what you want to be.