10 Best Price Monitoring Tools for E-commerce Businesses

The COVID-19 pandemic stimulated the growth of online shopping. Over three-quarters of US consumers have shopped for items on the web in 2023. At the same time, due to high inflation, customers have become more price-sensitive. This means that your potential customer is likely to spend more time comparing prices for a particular product from different online retailers before finally ordering where it is cheaper. And this is why monitoring competitors’ prices is an essential aspect of analysis in today’s e-commerce environment.

Over the last five years, the market for solutions that monitor competitor prices has experienced significant growth, with a rise in the number of data providers and ongoing improvements in the tools themselves.

If you’re looking for one of these solutions right now, this article will serve as your guide. We explore the best price monitoring platforms in e-commerce: what functions they perform, how they differ, and what features they offer.

Contents:

What Is Price Monitoring?

Why Do You Need To Track Competitor Prices?

How to monitor competitor prices?

What Are Price Monitoring Tools?

10 Best Price Monitoring Tools

How to Choose the Right Price Monitoring Software

What Is Price Monitoring?

Price monitoring is the systematic process of tracking and analyzing the prices of goods and services. It provides answers to several important questions:

• Price positioning: How does your product’s or online store’s pricing compare to that of your competitors? Are your products more expensive or cheaper?
• Competitive advantage: Do you have a pricing advantage compared to your competitors? Are your prices higher, lower, or in line with the market?
• Market trends: Are competitors raising or lowering their prices? If so, why?
• Price wars: Are competitors engaging in price wars? Do they follow MAP or practice dumping?
• Price comparison: Do your prices align with market standards? Are they lower or higher?

In the past, price monitoring involved manual processes, with category managers visiting competitors’ websites to compare prices. It’s easy to imagine how time-consuming this was. Today, you can automatically monitor competitors’ prices using analytics tools to explore the market without spending time on data collection.

Let’s discover what useful features the top price monitoring software provides.

Why Do You Need To Track Competitor Prices?

Statistical evidence suggests that approximately 55% of consumers across various global markets closely monitor product prices in eCommerce.

In markets where price sensitivity is high, and consumers actively compare prices among retailers, maintaining competitive eCommerce pricing becomes paramount for your business success. This necessitates constant vigilance in monitoring your competitors’ pricing strategies.

Having real-time access to competitor pricing data across different product categories, brands, and individual items in your catalog enables you to make informed adjustments to your pricing. Whether aligning prices with competitors or undercutting them, this strategy allows you to effectively cater to price-sensitive consumers. Through regular market analysis and offering competitive prices, you can effectively capture the attention of this segment of customers.

How to monitor competitor prices?

To effectively monitor the prices of competitors, consider the following tips:

1. Utilize e-commerce pricing tools: Opt for tools equipped with data parsing capabilities to automatically gather pricing information at regular intervals, minimizing the need for manual intervention. These tools can also capture details like competitor promotions and product availability, providing comprehensive insights.
2. Gather data from diverse platforms: To gain a comprehensive understanding of market prices, collect data not only from competitors’ websites and marketplaces but also from comparison shopping websites. For instance, price comparison websites allow you to monitor competitors of all sizes simultaneously, offering a cost-effective and broad market overview.
3. Implement daily monitoring: Deploy competitor price tracking tools that offer dashboard functionality for seamless day-to-day monitoring. For instance, platforms like Pricer24 enable users to customize dashboards with widgets displaying real-time insights on price comparisons, price fluctuations, and MAP violation histories. This facilitates quick comparative analyses, tracks pricing dynamics, and identifies trends and instances of price violations by competitors.
4. Analyze market pricing trends: Regularly scrutinize competitor pricing to uncover patterns and recurring strategies, such as seasonal discounts or promotions, and assess their impact on consumer behavior. Delve into historical data and pricing trends during key retail events like Black Friday or Back to School seasons for deeper insights.
5. Monitor product stock availability: In addition to pricing, keep an eye on competitors’ product availability, as shortages often lead to price hikes by sellers with stock. Scarcity in the market typically drives prices up, making it crucial to track competitors’ assortment to identify shortages or surpluses and adjust pricing strategies accordingly.

What Are Price Monitoring Tools?

A price monitoring tool is a web service, browser extension, or other software that can automatically track competitors’ prices in real time. The primary goal of a price comparison tool is to save employees’ time and the company’s money.

Competitor price monitoring tools can generally be divided into two categories: scrapers and SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions. Scrapers simply collect data from websites you specify, while SaaS solutions, in addition to data scraping functionality, include features for analyzing the data they gather. For example, Pricer24 is one of the best price monitoring software products and SaaS services for visual product analytics in e-commerce, offering various solutions including competitor price and promotion analysis and monitoring of MSRP/MAP deviations. A price scraper is just one component of this software.

Furthermore, price monitoring tools can be specialized (collecting data only on prices) or multifunctional. Multifunctional price monitoring tools can also gather data on product availability in the market and track promotions, the number of reviews, average ratings, etc.

10 Best Price Monitoring Tools

There are many price monitoring tools. Here are the 10 best programs for price monitoring in e-commerce, with high ratings on G2 Crowd and Capterra.

Pricer24

Price: Starting at $250 per month

Free trial: Available upon request

The Pricer24 SaaS solution is one of the best price monitoring tools. This analytics service is customizable to meet the requirements of midsize and large e-commerce companies, including vendors, distributors, and online stores. Among Pricer24’s clients are leading market players such as ASUS, Kingston, and Philips.

Key features:

• Data collection: Pricer24 gathers data on prices, availability, assortment, average product ratings, the number of product reviews, MSRP/MAP deviations, and changes in these metrics. It can collect data from both online stores and marketplaces as well as price comparison websites. Data is updated multiple times a day and boasts over 99.5% accuracy.
• Data visualization: The platform provides various reports for different tasks, including Price Comparison, Price Fluctuation, Price History, Market Analysis, Assortment Analysis, and MSRP/MAP Violation History. Reports can be personalized using custom tags and data segmentation or added to dashboards for daily monitoring.
• Customizable alerts: You can set up notifications for MSRP/MAP violations or price changes on competitors’ websites.
• Scraping from any site: Pricer24 can bypass website scraping protections.
• Customization: The platform can be customized to meet each client’s specific needs.
• Dynamic pricing: Pricer24 offers dynamic pricing through an API or integration with the client’s website.

Important technical note: This software collects information not based on specific product lists but based on categories or brands. This means that if new SKUs appear on a competitor’s website, the parser automatically processes them and the system recognizes the arrival of new products and matches them to existing analogues.

Minderest

Price: Based on each client’s needs

Free trial: Available upon request

Minderest specializes in providing solutions for price monitoring and price analysis of goods and services. The service allows for tracking prices, promotions, assortment, and product availability on competitors’ websites. It also offers analytical tools that help companies assess market trends, product demand, and pricing dynamics.

Key features:

• Data monitoring. The platform monitors data not only from online stores and marketplaces like Amazon but also from shopping apps and price comparison websites like Google Shopping.
• Price tracking options. Minderest provides a mobile app and a browser extension for price tracking.
• Data collection. Minderest can also collect price data from offline stores.
• Campaign optimization tools. The company offers a tool for optimizing cost-per-click campaigns and functionality to receive notifications about market price changes by email.

Dealavo

Price: Based on each client’s needs

Free trial: Available upon request

Dealavo is a service for monitoring prices and product availability. It also has its own dynamic pricing platform that can gather data from both online and offline sources. Additionally, Dealavo offers options for analyzing competitors’ prices.

Originally from Poland, Dealavo focuses on Polish customers.

Key features:

• Double data quality check. 75% of mapping is performed using AI, followed by manual data quality checks by specialists.
• Flexible support services. Each customer is provided with their own support manager who assists with any requests, optimizations, and implementation of new technologies, and even conducts training.
• Consulting services. The company provides consulting services for pricing and trade policy.

Price2Spy

Price: Starting at $19.95 per month

Free trial: Available

Price2Spy is cloud-based software for real-time price tracking and competitor analysis. It integrates with leading e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce. This tool not only monitors and analyzes competitor prices but also offers a variety of analytical reports and daily price change notifications.

Key features:

• Multi-source price tracking. The software can gather data from websites, marketplaces (such as Amazon), and social media platforms.
• Data monitoring. Price2Spy’s Promotion module will help you capture and analyze promotion prices.
• Web crawler. The Price2Spy team has mastered a crawling process that helps companies gather valuable data in bulk. 
• MAP monitoring. Price2Spy can be used to track minimal advertised price (MAP) violations on various websites, no matter if they are your competitors or your retailers.

Prisync

Price: Starting at $99 per month

Free trial: Available for two weeks

The primary function of Prisync is to monitor competitor prices and stock levels. Prisync also provides additional features including data import, real-time stock tracking, and deep price analytics.

Key features:

• Regular tracking. Prisync tracks competitor prices and product availability four times a day and reports this data in the Prisync web app.
• Notifications. The software sends email notifications when it detects price changes among competitors.
• Exporting to Excel. All data available in the account can be exported to an Excel file, which can be automatically sent by email.
• Reporting. Prisync provides reports at both the brand and category levels.

Prisync cannot track websites with strong protection against parsing. Additionally, it may be challenging to monitor websites with various product parameters (such as items with different sizes or colors).

Repricer

Price: Starting at $79 per month

Free trial: Available for two weeks

Repricer is primarily focused on repricing, which involves adjusting prices in accordance with market conditions on platforms like Amazon and eBay. Additionally, it provides analytics and offers flexible monitoring settings.

Key features:

• Data monitoring. The platform facilitates 24/7 monitoring of competitor price changes, ensuring real-time insights into market dynamics and competitive pricing strategies. It also enables proactive adjustments to stay competitive in a dynamic market landscape.
• Official Amazon Web Services partner. Repricer is made for Amazon and works with your existing software, so it’s ready to work straight away. The system works on all 21 international Amazon marketplaces.
• Amazon Buy Box predictor. Functioning across all 21 international Amazon marketplaces without additional fees for multi-geography repricing, the net-margin repricing feature allows you to set profit margins for every sale. Additionally, the Amazon Buy Box predictor identifies high and low probability products for winning the Buy Box, facilitating proactive strategies for optimal sales performance.
• Architecture. The platform uses Amazon’s cloud architecture, allowing for rapid price adjustments.

Skuuudle

Price: Customized for each client

Free trial: Available

Skuuudle is a competitive intelligence solution for SMEs and enterprises that provides users with industry and competitor data and analysis in order to help manage pricing, products, and promotions.

Key features:

• Pricing intelligence. With Skuuudle, you can track competitor pricing and promotions reliably and at scale.
• Product matching. The platform provides an opportunity to link your products to competitors’ products (even own-label).
• E-commerce scraping. Skuuudle provides large-scale global web scraping.
• MAP monitoring. The service also specializes in MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) monitoring, ensuring adherence to brand pricing policies across various platforms. 

Omnia

Price: Customized for each client

Free trial: Available

Omnia provides a scalable pricing platform enabling you to manage millions of product assortments across multiple markets and channels on a global level while localizing pricing strategies.

The Omnia platform is focused on dynamic pricing. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to dynamically adjust prices in real time based on changes in demand, competition, and other factors. In addition to tracking competitor prices and market trends, Omnia provides multiple daily updates for each tracked product.

Key features:

• Data collection. Omnia collects data through in-house scraping from marketplaces, comparison shopping engines (CSEs), and any online store. 
• Price monitoring. The software tracks and collects pricing data on competitors’ or resellers’ prices. Data and insights are gathered by scraping CSEs, marketplaces, and online stores.
• Repricing. Omnia’s repricing tool automatically increases or decreases your assortment’s prices to keep you achieving your commercial goals.
• Customized support. Each customer has a dedicated customer success team that provides guidance and answers all queries.
• Setup. Initial setup requires certain technical knowledge.

Competera

Price: Customized for each client

Free trial: Available upon request, personalized to the client’s needs

Competera is a solution that allows users to reprice products at any level, from specific categories and stores to countries and regions.

Key features:

• Unified ecosystem and customization. Competera is a single ecosystem for real-time pricing, presented through a user-friendly interface that can be customized according to specific business requirements.
• 98% data accuracy. Each data point undergoes a thorough manual and automated quality check. After various checks for data types, completeness, and comparison with previous data sets, the collected information is visualized in a dashboard for analysis.
• Intelligent repricing system. The platform employs deep learning algorithms to assist retailers in determining the most advantageous prices for their products, leveraging demand trends and various market factors. Additionally, it incorporates rule-based repricing functionalities that users can predefine, along with providing a comprehensive cause-and-effect analysis of price adjustments.

ZenRows

Price: Starting at $49 per month, depending on the client’s needs

Free trial: Limited functionality

ZenRows is a web scraping service that gathers data from websites, even those protected from bots by various proxies and CAPTCHAs. AI helps bypass anti-bot mechanisms on websites and enables you to make as many requests as you need. If you want to collect data from a website that blocks bot service activity, ZenRows can mimic human-like activity and help you scrape data quickly.

Key features:

• Auto-scraping. ZenRows automatically converts unstructured content into structured data (JSON output) without requiring complex coding.
• Bypasses anti-bot protection at various levels. The software successfully bypasses bot protections and blocking systems by providing proxy support for efficient data retrieval.
• Flexible integration and language support. The platform offers API and Proxy modes that are adaptable to various tasks and technologies, complemented by a Node SDK and integration examples in different languages (cURL, Python, Node, Go, PHP, Ruby, Java).
• Scalability and infrastructure handling. ZenRows manages essential infrastructure for large-scale web scraping, handling proxy connections, headless browsers, rendering, and servers, enabling scraping at unlimited scale and bandwidth.

How to Choose the Right Price Monitoring Software

Before choosing the best price monitoring software, you need to analyze your needs. Here’s a roadmap to help you select the right software:

1. Start searching for the best price monitoring platform by defining your goals: competitive tracking, market trend analysis, pricing strategy optimization, automated price changes, marketing strategy optimization, etc.
2. Identify the sources of price data you need to monitor: competitors’ online stores, marketplaces, price comparison websites, etc.
3. Determine the data update frequency.
4. Analyze whether the tool can enhance your managers’ efficiency (minimizing time spent on analysis, improving sales based on analysis, etc.).
5. Assess the tool’s user-friendliness and customer support service. It’s crucial that your managers have a seamless training experience. Ensure that the tool presents data in a clear format. Graphs, charts, and reports should be easy to interpret.
6. Analyze whether the software is suitable for analysis and whether you need to integrate with your data processing system. Pay attention to the integration options offered by the vendor, their simplicity and accessibility, and how they affect the solution’s cost.
7. Calculate your budget. There are price monitoring programs for any budget that are paid on a monthly, semi-annual, or annual basis. Choose one that balances functionality and price to suit your needs.
8. Look for a tool with responsive customer support to address any issues or questions.
9. Try out demos of several programs and determine which is most convenient for you. Seek out user and expert reviews.
10. Some companies offer live demonstrations or training sessions. Participate in them to better understand a tool’’s features. During the demo, ask the manager how the tool collects data, what logic it follows, and how it matches competitors’ products with your catalog. For example, if the tool matches products automatically, there is a risk of errors. If products are matched manually, it means the price monitoring service has a team dedicated to matching. Inquire about the criteria used for matching, as this greatly affects data accuracy.

Our main advice is to contact the sales and support department of the price monitoring tool you’re considering and ensure that it meets the needs of your business and team.

FAQ

How does price monitoring help with the business?

Price monitoring provides valuable insights into the competitive landscape, allowing eCommerce businesses to stay informed about changes in competitor pricing strategies. By automating this process, companies can efficiently gather and analyze pricing data in real-time, enabling them to make data-driven decisions to remain competitive and maximize profitability.

What are the benefits of competitor price tracking?

Competitor price tracking offers numerous benefits, including:

• Enhanced competitiveness: By monitoring competitor prices, businesses can adjust their pricing strategies accordingly to stay competitive in the eCommerce market.
• Improved profitability: Analyzing competitor pricing data helps businesses optimize their pricing strategies to maximize profit margins.
• Real-time insights: Automation allows businesses to receive timely updates on competitor prices, enabling them to respond swiftly to market changes.

Can one track the prices of products across various countries/regions?

Yes, automation allows businesses to track prices across different countries and regions effortlessly. By leveraging sophisticated eCommerce pricing intelligence tools, companies can gather pricing data from diverse geographical locations, providing them with a comprehensive understanding of global market dynamics. This capability enables businesses to tailor their pricing strategies to specific regions and effectively compete in international markets.

Why Should You Automate Your Competitor’s Price Tracking?

Automating competitor price tracking offers several compelling advantages for businesses:

• Efficiency: Automation streamlines the process of gathering and analyzing competitor pricing data, saving valuable time and resources. It eliminates the need for manual data collection and ensures timely updates on pricing trends.
• Accuracy: Automated tools provide precise and reliable pricing data, minimizing errors associated with manual data entry or human interpretation. 
• Scalability: Automation allows businesses to scale their price tracking efforts effortlessly, accommodating a growing number of competitors and products without compromising efficiency. 
• Competitive Advantage: By staying ahead of competitors with up-to-date pricing insights, eCommerce businesses can adapt their pricing strategies quickly to capitalize on market opportunities or respond to competitive threats.