Vendably monitors your competitors' product prices and tracks how they change over time, so you can see where you stand against them without manually checking other sites. The competitive dashboard is at /competitive/, with a competitor list at /competitive/competitors/ and a price comparison view at /competitive/prices/.
How Vendably collects competitor prices
Vendably crawls competitor pages on a schedule you set for each competitor. It extracts price and product data using a layered approach: it tries platform APIs and structured data on the page first, then falls back through several other extraction methods. Every price Vendably reads is appended to a price history, so you can see how a competitor's price has changed over time rather than just its current value.
Vendably respects each site's robots.txt when crawling. Direct platform-API imports for some store platforms are a later phase; the current default is page extraction combined with the product matching described below.
Monitoring frequency
When you add a competitor, you choose how often Vendably crawls their site: every 6 hours, daily, or weekly. You can change the frequency at any time from /competitive/competitors/. You can also trigger a manual refresh if you need an immediate update outside the scheduled crawl.
How Vendably matches competitor products to yours
Vendably matches competitor products to products in your catalogue using a layered strategy:
- GTIN match: Vendably looks for a matching GTIN first. A GTIN match is the most reliable.
- Part number (MPN) match: if no GTIN is found, Vendably tries to match on the manufacturer part number.
- Brand and part number match: Vendably also matches on brand combined with part number.
- Title match: if none of the above produces a match, Vendably falls back to product title similarity.
Vendably shows you matched products for review. You can approve a match, exclude it if it is incorrect, or override it manually to link a competitor product to a different product in your catalogue.
Setting up a competitor
- Go to /competitive/competitors/.
- Add a competitor by domain. Vendably detects the store platform and begins discovering the competitor's product catalogue. See Automated competitor discovery for how discovery works.
- Choose a monitoring frequency (6-hourly, daily, or weekly).
- Review the matched products Vendably surfaces and approve, exclude, or override each match as appropriate.
Viewing price comparisons
The price comparison view at /competitive/prices/ shows how your prices sit relative to your monitored competitors across matched products. You can filter by competitor and by product. The price history for any matched product shows how a competitor's price has moved over time.
Where to go next
- Automated competitor discovery: how Vendably discovers a competitor's product catalogue when you add a domain.
- Setting up price alerts: how to be notified automatically when a competitor's price crosses a threshold you set.
- What is Intelligence: an overview of the full Intelligence capability.