How to Automate Competitor Price Monitoring on Shopify
by
Ryan ODonnell
Last updated:
December 27, 2024
To stay competitive, you should closely monitor your competitors’ pricing strategies. Tracking price fluctuations helps you adjust your own pricing, protect profit margins, and remain appealing to your customers.
While setting up competitor price monitoring might seem complicated, automation helps simplify it. This guide will walk you through creating a workflow that tracks competitor prices and sends alerts when changes occur—helping you make smarter pricing decisions.
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MESA Template ID
slack-alert-competitor-price-drop
Topics:
Step-by-step guide: Get Slack alerts when competitor prices drop below yours
Time needed: 5 minutes
With MESA, you can automate price monitoring and receive Slack notifications when a competitor’s price dips below yours, allowing you to act fast and adjust your strategy.
Schedule the price check
Set up a schedule to automatically monitor competitor prices—such as hourly—to ensure your market pricing data stays current.
Scrape the competitor’s webpage
Use MESA’s built-in Scraper tool to gather pricing details from your competitors’ product pages. Scraper grabs the web page and converts it into structured data to analyze later.
Determine if the product is on sale
Leverage AI to analyze the scraped data and identify if the competitor’s product is on sale. AI will provide a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response.
Filter sale confirmation
The Filter next checks the AI response to confirm the product is on sale. This step makes sure only relevant data is processed further.
Extract competitor’s sale price
When a sale is confirmed, AI will extract the first price listed before any sale markers, such as ‘Sale •,’ from the competitor’s site. This isolates the actual sale price for accurate comparisons.
Retrieve your product’s current price
Next, pull your product’s ID to retrieve its current price, enabling a direct comparison with the competitor’s sale price.
Compare prices
Filter to check if the competitor’s sale price is lower than your product’s current price, highlighting where potential price adjustments may be needed.
Send Slack notification
If a lower competitor price is detected, notify a designated Slack channel with the sale price and a link to their product page.
Test, then turn “On”
Give your workflow a test run to confirm it’s ready, then turn it “On” to have it run on your pre-determined schedule.
Best practices for price monitoring
Focus on continuous improvement and thoughtful strategies to make your price monitoring efforts effective. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
Prioritize direct competitors: Start by targeting the competitors that pose the greatest threat to your market share, allowing you to concentrate your efforts where they have the most impact.
Refine your alerts: Set clear criteria for a significant price change. This keeps notifications actionable and prevents your team from being overwhelmed by unnecessary updates.
Review and adjust regularly: Schedule routine check-ins to assess how well your workflow is performing. Use these assessments to identify trends, fine-tune your criteria, and improve over time.
By taking a focused and adaptable approach, price monitoring can become a reliable tool for staying competitive without adding unnecessary noise to your operations.
Related:
Schedule A Site-Wide Sale With Strikethrough Discounts
Staying competitive requires closely monitoring pricing changes. With an automation platform like MESA, setting up and managing competitor price monitoring becomes simple, saving you valuable time and effort. By regularly tracking and analyzing competitor prices, you can fine-tune your pricing strategy, protect your margins, and respond quickly to market shifts.
The good news is that the whole process can be automated, so you’re not just staying on top of changes—you’re creating the space to focus on bigger goals, like growing your business and delivering value to your customers.
Frequently asked questions
How often should I monitor competitor prices?
It depends on your industry. Start with daily alerts and adjust hourly or weekly based on how frequently prices change in your market.
How can I automate price adjustments based on competitor data?
With MESA, you can easily extend this step to automatically adjust your prices based on competitor data. Tailor it to fit your needs, adjust the schedule, or set specific conditions for changes.
What you should do now
Whenever you’re ready…here are 4 ways we can help you grow your business:
Add MESA to your Shopify store. The best way to get started is by adding the MESA app from the Shopify App store. Every plan includes the first 7-days free so you can be assured your workflow is running properly.
Browse pre-made templates. Our customizable workflow templates are a great way to get started more quickly.
Talk to our automation experts. If you need help personalizing any workflow template, guidance how to make any automation or, simply want us to make your workflow, we can help.
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