A spreadsheet works for the first couple of weeks. Then it becomes a full-time job. You open a competitor’s page, look at the price, type numbers into the table. You move to the next product. Repeat. Four hours later the data is already out of date.
If you want to know how to track competitor prices efficiently, the answer is simple: automation. But first, let’s look at why a spreadsheet does not work.
Why a spreadsheet does not work
A spreadsheet has four fundamental problems for competitor price monitoring:
The data goes stale immediately. You write down a price at 10:00. At 11:00 the competitor changes it. Your table is wrong, but you do not know it.
There are no alerts. A spreadsheet does not email you when something changes. You have to check yourself. And you do not do it often enough.
It does not work at scale. 10 products are manageable. 100 products from 5 competitors is 500 cells, all needing manual updates.
There is no price history. Did the competitor cut the price for a campaign, or is it a permanent change? You cannot tell from a spreadsheet.
The automated alternative
Automated price monitoring software solves all four problems at once:
- Prices update automatically several times a day
- Get an automatic alert when the system detects a significant price change.
- It scales. 1,000 products are as easy as 10
- Price history accumulates automatically, so you see trends
How the automation works
With Comprice, competitor price monitoring has three steps:
1. Upload a product feed
CSV, Excel or JSON. You need the product name and its URL in your shop. EAN codes speed up matching but are not required.
2. AI matches competitors’ products
A multi-layer AI (EAN, CLIP image recognition, OCR, semantic analysis) finds the same products across hundreds of online shops. You do not have to map them by hand. The system does it.
3. Alerts and analytics
From then on you get an alert in your inbox when a competitor changes a price, your position changes or a competitor runs out of stock. Price history accumulates automatically.
Results
The more products and stores you have, the longer manual checking takes. The data can be out of date before the comparison is finished.
With a spreadsheet you do not make pricing decisions based on data. You make them based on memory and intuition. Automated price monitoring changes that.
If you want to see how it works for your shop, try it free.
Frequently asked questions
Upload a product feed, the system matches your products to competitors’ catalogues using AI and starts tracking prices automatically. Alerts arrive by email.
Yes. Comprice tracks both price and stock at the same time.