Export their catalogue Monday. Export it Friday. The difference is their discount calendar.
Continuous price-monitoring platforms charge by the month, cap the number of products, and ask for a sales call. For most people the actual job is simpler: know what a competitor charges, at variant level, and notice when it changes. Two full exports and a spreadsheet do that. This page is how.
A product-level price is a fiction on any store with sizes, colours or pack quantities. The 500ml is discounted and the 5L is not; the medium is out of stock and the large is full price. Our export puts one row per variant on its own sheet — SKU, option values, price, compare-at, availability — because that is where the movement happens. Compare two of those sheets and a promotion is visible down to the individual size.
Both exports carry the same stable keys: product_id and variant_id on Shopify, the product id and variation id on WooCommerce, the SKU on Magento. Put last week's Variants sheet beside this week's, match on that key, and three columns tell the story:
That is a VLOOKUP or a XLOOKUP, not a data pipeline.
On Shopify and WooCommerce the export includes the compare-at (or regular) price alongside the live one, and we only report it when it is genuinely higher. Ninety-seven percent of variants on one reference store carried a compare-at price — that store's entire discounting strategy was sitting in a public column. You do not need to visit a single product page to read it.
The same two-file comparison shows what they added and what they removed, because a product id present this week and absent last week is a launch. The Products sheet carries vendor and product type, so a brand they started stocking, or one they quietly dropped, shows up as a change in the vendor column. Published and updated dates on Shopify exports date the change for you.
If you need alerts within the hour across thousands of SKUs, a monitoring platform is the right tool and this is not. If you need to know what happened this week, or to brief a pricing meeting on Thursday with what the market moved since last Thursday, two exports at $14.99 each cost less than a day of most subscriptions and produce a file you own outright.
Any Shopify, WooCommerce or Magento 2 storefront runs the moment you paste the URL. SAP Commerce and Wix Stores also work if you paste one. Other platforms are handled by a person within 48 hours.
No. Each export is a one-off $14.99. Run it weekly, monthly, or once — nothing renews.
Both files share the same keys — product_id and variant_id — so a lookup between last week's Variants sheet and this week's gives you price, compare-at and stock changes per variant. It is a spreadsheet formula, not a project.
You get the availability flag the storefront itself shows — in stock or not, per variant. Exact quantities sit behind merchants' admin logins on every platform and are not public.
We read the same public listings a shopper's browser reads: no login, no paywall bypass, no personal data. What you do with the data is your responsibility.