Price Monitor: track and protect your margins against competitors

On marketplaces and in B2B e-commerce, price wars are a constant feature. Pixee PIM’s Price Monitor tracks your prices and those of your competitors in real time, and alerts you when you’re out of line with the market — before your customers go elsewhere.

Why monitor competitors’ prices?

For a distributor, margin is the lifeblood of the business. Two opposing risks threaten it:

• Being too expensive— you lose orders to cheaper competitors without even realising it
• Being too cheap— you lose margin unnecessarily, especially when the competition is less aggressive than it seems

Without price monitoring, you’re flying blind. You set your prices once a year during supplier negotiations, and then forget about them. Meanwhile, Amazon, ManoMano or your direct competitors adjust their prices daily.

How the Price Monitor works

The Price Monitor performs automatic price checks on the sources you configure: Amazon Marketplace, competitor sites, Google Shopping, B2B platforms…

For every product in your catalogue, it compares:

• Your current selling price
• The price of the same product (identified by EAN/GTIN) at the configured competitors
• Price trends over time (upward or downward trend)

The result: a dashboard showing your price position (cheaper, average, more expensive), and alerts that can be configured according to your thresholds.

The hard part: recognising the same product

Comparing two prices is trivial. Making sure they refer to the same product is not — and that is where most price-watch setups lose their credibility with buyers. A dashboard throwing three false alerts a week stops being opened within a month.

The EAN/GTIN is the starting point: when both sides publish it, the match is certain. But it is often missing from competitor pages, or wrongly filled in. What remains are matches on title and brand, which produce plausible — and sometimes wrong — correspondences. The classic traps:

• Packs and pack sizes— a price for a pack of six compared with a unit price makes a perfectly competitive offer look out of market.
• Variants— size, colour, capacity, power rating. One model can cover a wide price range, and title matching does not tell them apart.
• Conditions— new, refurbished, used, clearance, end of line.
• Model years— last year’s model still in stock at a competitor is not your direct competitor.

The method rule that follows applies to any tool: an uncertain match must be flagged as such and validated by a human before it enters a statistic — let alone before it triggers a pricing decision. A setup that does not separate a certain match from a probable one manufactures figures nobody will look at for long. Upstream, the reliability of your own identifiers does a good share of the work.

A displayed price is not a comparable price

The second source of false alerts is more insidious: the price captured on a page is not the price the customer pays.

• Shipping costs and free-shipping thresholds— a gap of a few per cent on the list price disappears if you ship free above a threshold the competitor does not have.
• VAT and the customer’s tax regime— comparing a consumer price including tax with a B2B price excluding tax makes no sense, and yet it is a staple of early price checks.
• Quantity discounts and contract pricing— in B2B, the public price is often a façade: your customers, like your competitor’s, buy on their negotiated terms.
• Specific levies and contributions— eco-participation, copyright levies: included in the display here, added at checkout there.
• Short promotional operations— a reading taken during a 48-hour promotion does not describe a market position.

Hence the value of reasoning on a trend rather than on a single point. A competitor cheaper three readings in a row is information; a competitor cheaper on Tuesday morning is not information yet.

Alerts: react only to what matters

Monitoring thousands of product references is only worthwhile if you can act on the important signals. The Price Monitor allows you to configure alerts based on:

• Price difference— alerts you if a competitor is X% cheaper on a product
• Product category— monitor high-turnover or high-value SKUs more closely
• Priority competitor— monitor only certain competitors identified as the most threatening
• Frequency— daily, weekly, or real-time alerts

How often should prices be checked?

Checking every price every day is expensive — in calls to data sources, and in attention. The reasonable practice is to segment the catalogue rather than look for a single cadence:

• High-stakes SKUs — the ones driving revenue or margin, and the ones exposed on the most contested channels — justify several checks a day.
• The bulk of the catalogue is perfectly served by a daily check.
• The long tail, with stable prices and low rotation, by a weekly one: keeping an eye on it without burning the budget.

This segmentation is not fixed. A SKU going on promotion, targeted by a competitor’s campaign or pushed to the front of a marketplace listing changes tier for the duration of the episode, then returns to its normal cadence.

From monitoring to action: repricing

Price monitoring is only valuable if it leads to adjustments. Two approaches:

Assisted manual repricing

The Price Monitor alerts you to out-of-market listings. You review the alerts, analyse the context (stock, margin, seasonality) and decide whether or not to adjust. Pixee PIM allows you to update the price directly from the dashboard and push it to your sales channels.

Automatic repricing (Scale and Enterprise plans)

You define repricing rules: “if a competitor is more than 5% cheaper, align my price with theirs with a minimum margin of X%”. The system automatically applies the adjustments within the limits you have set.

This automation is particularly useful for retailers with thousands of active listings on Amazon or other high-volume marketplaces.

Before automating: five safeguards

Automating a price adjustment means delegating a commercial decision to a rule. The exercise is perfectly manageable, provided it stays reversible:

• A margin floor, never a price floor. An absolute minimum price expires as soon as the purchase cost moves; a minimum margin does not.
• An explicit scope— the rule applies to the SKUs you designated, not to the catalogue by default.
• Variation limits per cycle— a maximum decrease prevents one aberrant data point from cascading across a whole family.
• A log— every change must be dated, tied to the source that triggered it, and reversible.
• Deliberate exclusions— own brands, products under contract, new products in their launch phase, end-of-life SKUs.

And one precaution before generalising: run the rules in observation mode for a few weeks, publishing nothing, then compare what they would have done with what your buyers actually did. The gap is the best tuning brief you will ever get.

Monitoring is not dictating

One limit is worth stating before rollout, because it belongs to law rather than to tooling. A supplier may recommend a resale price; it may not impose one on its distributor. European competition law treats resale price maintenance as a hardcore restriction. The notion of a minimum advertised price — MAP — was born in a different legal setting; its use in Europe is framed with a lawyer, not with a spreadsheet.

None of this rules out price watching: observing public prices is legitimate, and indispensable when your competitors do it. What is open to discussion is the use you make of it. Using it to adjust your own policy, yes; using it to discipline a reseller, no.

Protect your margins, don’t sacrifice them

Price Monitor is not a price-dumping tool. Its aim is not to push you to systematically lower prices — it is to provide you with accurate information for informed decisions.

Sometimes, the right decision is not to match prices:

• A cheaper competitor may have limited stock or poor customer reviews — there’s no point in matching their price
• For a high-value-added product or one with associated services (extended warranty, installation, after-sales service), the price difference may be justified
• For certain exclusive or own-brand products, the competition is not the right benchmark

The Price Monitor gives you the data. The decision remains yours, informed by information you didn’t have before.

Where to start?

Setting up the Price Monitor involves three steps: identifying your 50–100 high-stakes SKUs, configuring the competitors to monitor for these SKUs, then analysing the initial data to calibrate your alert thresholds. Generally, the first insights arrive within 48 hours.

Frequently asked questions

Can you monitor a competitor that publishes no EAN?

Yes, by matching on title and brand, but the result does not have the same status: it is a probable match, not a certain one. It must be flagged as such and confirmed before it feeds an alert. Without that distinction you build pricing decisions on sand, and you will find out the day a buyer checks an alert by hand.

How many SKUs should you monitor to begin with?

Fewer than people assume. Fifty to a hundred high-stakes SKUs are enough to calibrate alert thresholds and, above all, to measure your false-alert rate. The difficulty of a rollout is never the volume monitored — it is the quality of the matches and the relevance of the thresholds. Both are settled on a small scope, then extended.

Does price monitoring replace market research?

No, and the confusion is expensive. It measures what is displayed, not what is sold. It says nothing about volumes shifted, about your competitors’ margins, or about negotiated B2B terms. A cheaper competitor is not necessarily a competitor who sells. Price watching feeds a pricing decision; it replaces neither knowledge of your market nor your buyers’ judgement.

Which plans include price monitoring?

The details are in the comparison table on the pricing page, which is authoritative: monitoring is read-only on the Starter plan, gains alerts and MAP tracking on Growth, and automatic alignment only appears from Scale onwards. Put differently: you start by looking, then move to alerts, and automation comes last — which is also the right deployment order.