The short answer
Automatic price tracking means a tool visits your competitors’ product pages on a schedule, records each price, compares it with the last check and tells you when something changes. There are four ways to do it:
- A Google Sheets formula: free, good for up to about 20 simple product pages
- A scheduled workflow in n8n or Make.com: low cost, flexible, sends alerts where your team works
- A price monitoring app: typically $59–$399 a month, priced by how many products you track
- A full-catalog tracker: watches competitors’ entire stores, including new products, variants and stock
For most online stores, a daily check with alerts for price drops, stock-outs and new products is enough.
Why manual price checks fail
Pricing has an outsized effect on profit. A well-known McKinsey analysis found that a 1% price increase, with volume unchanged, lifted operating profit by about 8%. The same maths works against you when you price too low or react a week late.
Checking competitors by hand breaks down in four ways:
- It’s too infrequent. Competitors run flash sales and adjust prices weekly or daily. A monthly check misses most of it.
- It covers too little. Someone checks the 15 products they remember. The changes that matter are often in the other 500.
- It misses openings. A competitor running out of a best-seller is your chance to hold your price or push ads. You only see it if you’re watching.
- It doesn’t scale. Each new competitor or product line adds hours of copying and pasting.
What to track besides the price
- Regular price and sale price, so you can tell a permanent change from a weekend promotion
- Stock status, to spot competitors running out
- New and removed products, which reveal launches and discontinued lines
- Shipping costs and free-shipping thresholds, which change the real price buyers compare
- Variant prices, because a competitor may cut one size or colour, not the whole product
- Bundles and promotions, such as “buy 2, get 10% off”
Method 1: a free Google Sheets formula
For a handful of competitor pages, Google Sheets can read a price straight from the page with IMPORTXML:
=IMPORTXML(A2, "//meta[@property='og:price:amount']/@content")
Put the competitor’s product URL in A2. Many stores, including most Shopify themes, publish the price in this og:price:amount tag; if a store doesn’t, right-click the price, choose Inspect and adapt the path to the element that holds it.
Good for: up to about 20 products. Limits: Sheets refreshes on its own schedule rather than one you control, it can’t see prices loaded by JavaScript, it breaks when a site changes its layout, and it doesn’t alert you or keep a history.
Method 2: a scheduled workflow with alerts
The next step up is a small workflow in n8n or Make.com that turns the spreadsheet into a real tracker:
- Schedule trigger: runs every morning, or several times a day.
- Read your list: gets competitor URLs and your matching products from a Google Sheet.
- Fetch each page: an HTTP request pulls the page and extracts the price and stock.
- Compare: checks today’s values against yesterday’s row in the sheet.
- Record: appends today’s prices, so you build a price history.
- Alert: sends a Slack, email or WhatsApp message only when something changed.
A typical alert looks like this: “Competitor A: 1L steel bottle down from $34 to $27 (−21%). 750ml out of stock. Your price: $32.” Your team can make that decision in a minute.
We’ve built this kind of Sheets-based workflow for clients. One example is an AI inventory assistant on n8n and Google Sheets, which lets a team check and update stock by chat while the sheet stays the single source of truth. The same pattern works for competitor prices.
Good for: tens to a few hundred products, with alerts where your team already works. Limits: someone has to maintain the extraction rules when competitor sites change.
Method 3: a price monitoring app
Price monitoring apps let you add your products, paste in competitor URLs, and get dashboards and alerts. They typically cost $59–$399 a month, priced by the number of products you track.
Good for: a stable catalog compared against a few known competitors. Limits: you match each competitor URL yourself, and the app only tracks products you already sell, so you won’t see competitors’ new launches.
Method 4: a full-catalog tracker
A full-catalog tracker crawls a competitor’s whole store instead of a list of URLs. It finds every product through the sitemap, collections and pagination, records every variant, and flags new and removed products.
Products are matched to your catalog by barcode (GTIN, UPC or EAN) or model number where the competitor shows them, and by name, brand and key attributes where they don’t, with a person checking uncertain matches.
Good for: competitive categories, large catalogs, and anyone who wants competitors’ launches and stock as well as prices. This is what our own tool, Designswheel Scrape, is built for.
Which method should you use?
| Sheets formula | Scheduled workflow | Monitoring app | Full-catalog tracker | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | Low monthly running cost | $59–$399 a month | Setup plus running cost |
| Products | Up to about 20 | Tens to hundreds | Your catalog | Competitors’ whole catalogs |
| Alerts | No | Yes, anywhere | Yes | Yes |
| Price history | Manual | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| New competitor products | No | No | No | Yes |
| Best for | Testing the idea | Small and mid-sized stores | Fixed product lists | Competitive categories |
Turning price data into decisions
- Don’t race to the bottom. Check whether a cut is a short sale or a permanent change before you react.
- Use their stock-outs. When a competitor runs out, you may be able to hold your price or advertise that product.
- Compare the total price. A higher price with free shipping can beat a lower price plus delivery.
- Look for patterns. Repeated discounts in one category often mean overstock or a new supplier.
- Send a weekly summary. One page of the biggest moves keeps everyone informed without opening a spreadsheet.
Is it legal to scrape competitor prices?
Collecting publicly visible prices is common practice, but there are rules. In the US, the long-running hiQ v. LinkedIn case is the main reference. In April 2022 a federal appeals court said the main US anti-hacking law, the CFAA, does not apply to scraping publicly accessible pages. But a later ruling found that a website’s terms banning scraping can be enforced as a contract, and the case ended in December 2022 with a $500,000 judgment against the scraper.
The ground rules we follow:
- Collect only public product data: prices, stock and descriptions anyone can see without logging in
- Never log in, get around paywalls or collect personal data
- Respect robots.txt and keep request rates low, so you never slow a competitor’s site
- Check each site’s terms, and use official feeds where a site offers them. Amazon, for example, restricts scraping, so use its official seller tools instead
This is general information, not legal advice. If you’re unsure about a particular site or country, ask a lawyer.