When you add a competitor by domain, Vendably discovers their product catalogue for you. You do not have to list competitor products manually. Discovery runs automatically as part of adding a competitor from /competitive/competitors/.
How Vendably discovers a competitor's catalogue
You enter a competitor's domain. Vendably detects the store platform and provides live feedback in the form as it does so. It then discovers product URLs from the site, using the site's sitemap where one is available, and respecting the site's robots.txt throughout.
Once discovery completes, Vendably surfaces the competitor's products and begins matching them to your catalogue. See Competitor price monitoring for how product matching works.
Adding a competitor
- Go to /competitive/competitors/.
- Enter the competitor's domain.
- Review the platform Vendably detects. Vendably shows detection feedback live as you type.
- Confirm and save. Vendably begins discovery in the background.
- Once discovery runs, review the matched products and approve, exclude, or override matches as needed.
Importing from a CSV file
If you prefer to supply competitor products directly, you can import them from a CSV file instead of relying on crawl-based discovery. This is useful if a competitor's site is difficult to crawl or if you already have a product list to hand.
Honest limitations
Discovery relies on crawling the competitor's site. If a crawl repeatedly fails, Vendably stops attempting that domain after repeated failures rather than retrying indefinitely. If discovery is not producing results for a competitor, the CSV import route is the alternative.
API-based discovery for specific store platforms is a later phase. The current approach is crawl-based discovery as described above.
Where to go next
- Competitor price monitoring: how Vendably monitors prices and matches products once a competitor is added.
- Setting up price alerts: how to be notified when a competitor's price crosses a threshold.
- What is Intelligence: an overview of the full Intelligence capability.