Introduction
Competitor price monitoring is one of the most valuable uses of ecommerce intelligence. When you know what your competitors charge, you can make informed pricing decisions, spot market trends, and respond quickly to price changes that matter.
This walkthrough will take you from having no visibility into competitor pricing to actively tracking two or three competitors with automatic price alerts. By the end, you will have matched products showing side-by-side price comparisons and at least one price alert configured and ready to trigger.
Prerequisites
Before you start, you will need:
- An active Vendably merchant account with intelligence access enabled.
- A list of two or three known competitor websites (for example, direct.competitor.com, shop.rival.co.uk, or similar).
- Basic familiarity with your own product catalogue and the categories that matter most to your business.
If you do not yet have intelligence access, contact your Vendably account manager to enable it.
Step 1: Add your first competitor by domain
Before state: No visibility into competitor pricing or product inventory.
After state: First competitor domain registered in Vendably and queued for discovery.
Log in to your Vendably merchant account and navigate to the Intelligence section. Select 'Add Competitor' or 'New Competitor Source'.
Enter the full domain of your first competitor (for example, www.example-competitor.com). Vendably will validate that the domain is reachable and store it as an active source.
Do not add subdomains or URL paths at this stage. Vendably works best with the root domain so it can discover all product pages and inventory across the entire site.
Once you have entered the domain, save and proceed to the next step.
Step 2: Enable sitemap parsing and product discovery
Before state: Competitor domain registered but no products discovered yet.
After state: Vendably automatically discovers product URLs and extracts product data from the competitor's sitemap.
Vendably will now attempt to locate and parse the competitor's sitemap.xml file. This is the fastest way to discover all product pages at once.
In the competitor settings, confirm that 'Automatic Sitemap Discovery' is enabled. Vendably will search for the sitemap at the standard location (www.example-competitor.com/sitemap.xml) and also check for a sitemap index if one exists.
If the competitor does not have a publicly accessible sitemap, Vendably can fall back to web crawling, but this takes longer. For now, assume the sitemap is available and let the automatic discovery run.
Vendably will extract the product URLs from the sitemap and queue them for data extraction. This process usually completes within a few hours, depending on the size of the competitor's catalogue.
Step 3: Review and approve matched products
Before state: Product URLs discovered but not yet matched to your own inventory.
After state: Matched products displayed with confidence scores; you have approved or excluded candidates.
Once the initial crawl completes, navigate to the product matching view for this competitor. Vendably uses product name, category, brand, and other attributes to automatically match competitor products to your own.
You will see a table of matched pairs. Each match has a confidence score (shown as a percentage). A score of 85% or higher typically indicates a reliable match.
Review the matches, particularly in your core categories. For each matched pair, you can:
- Approve the match (it will be included in price comparisons and alerts).
- Exclude the match (it will be hidden from reports).
- Manually adjust the match if Vendably has paired the wrong items.
Focus on approving matches for the product categories that drive the most revenue or margin for your business. You do not need to approve every match; quality matters more than quantity.
Once you have reviewed and approved matches, save your changes.
Step 4: Repeat for additional competitors
Before state: One competitor actively tracked with matched products.
After state: Two or three competitors added, discovered, and matched.
Return to the 'Add Competitor' screen and enter the domain of your second competitor. Repeat steps 1 through 3 for each additional competitor.
Vendably will run discovery and matching in parallel, so you do not need to wait for the first competitor's crawl to finish before adding the second.
Aim to have at least two competitors tracked, but three is ideal for a representative market view. Adding more than five competitors at once can make the matching review process unwieldy, so start with your closest or most important rivals.
Step 5: Configure a price alert on a key category
Before state: Competitors tracked and products matched, but no alerts configured.
After state: At least one price alert configured and armed; alerts will trigger when competitor prices change beyond your threshold.
Identify one product category that is strategically important to your business. This might be your highest-volume category, your highest-margin category, or a category where you compete most directly.
Navigate to the Price Alerts section in Intelligence. Create a new alert and select 'Category' as the trigger type. Choose the category you identified above.
Set a price change threshold. For example, you might alert on any price drop of 5% or more, or any price increase of 10% or more. The threshold depends on your business model and how price-sensitive your market is.
Select which competitors this alert applies to. You can choose all competitors or a subset.
Confirm the alert is set to 'Active' or 'Armed'. Save the alert.
Vendably will now monitor the prices of all matched products in that category across your selected competitors. When a price change exceeds your threshold, you will receive an alert (by email or in-app notification, depending on your account settings).
Step 6: Wait for the first scheduled crawl to complete
Before state: Competitors added and alerts configured, but initial crawl may still be running.
After state: First crawl completed; price comparisons and alerts are live and based on current competitor data.
Vendably crawls competitor websites on a regular schedule, typically daily or every few days depending on your plan. The first crawl may take a few hours to complete, especially if the competitor has a large catalogue.
You can check the status of the crawl in the competitor detail view. Look for a 'Last Crawl' timestamp or a 'Crawl Status' indicator.
Once the crawl is complete, the price comparison table will show current competitor prices alongside your own. Price alerts will also begin to function.
You do not need to do anything to trigger the crawl; it runs automatically on schedule.
Checkpoint: What you should see
Once you have completed all six steps, your Vendably Intelligence dashboard should show:
- A price comparison table with at least two competitors listed.
- Matched products displayed in rows, with your price, each competitor's price, and the price difference clearly visible.
- A confidence score next to each matched product (typically shown as a percentage or a quality indicator).
- A competitor detail view showing a 'Last Crawl' timestamp indicating that the most recent crawl has completed.
- At least one active price alert configured on a key category.
- An alert status indicator showing that the alert is 'Armed' or 'Active' and monitoring for price changes.
If you see all of these elements, your competitor tracking setup is complete and working correctly.
Next steps
Now that competitor tracking is live, you can use the price comparison data to inform your pricing strategy. Many merchants review their price alerts weekly and adjust their own prices in response to significant competitor moves.
You can also expand tracking to additional competitors, add more price alerts on other categories, or adjust your alert thresholds based on how frequently you receive alerts and how actionable they are.
Over time, you will develop a sense of which competitors move prices most frequently and which price changes are worth responding to. Vendably's historical data will help you spot seasonal trends and market patterns.