Guide
How to monitor competitor prices on Shopify
7 min read
If you sell on Shopify, knowing when your competitors change prices is worth real money - but checking their stores by hand doesn't scale. Here are the three ways people actually do it, from a manual spreadsheet to fully automated alerts, with the trade-offs of each.
Option 1: The manual spreadsheet
The most common starting point: a spreadsheet with a row per competitor product, and a daily routine of opening each store, checking prices, and typing them in.
- Pros: free, no tools, full control.
- Cons: slow (often 30-90 minutes a day), easy to skip, and you only catch a change when you happen to look. Flash sales and overnight drops are missed entirely.
Option 2: The products.json + spreadsheet method
You can speed the manual method up by pulling prices from each store's public /products.json feed instead of eyeballing pages, and dropping them into a sheet (some people use IMPORTDATA or a small script).
- Pros: faster and more accurate than manual browsing; gets the real variant-level prices.
- Cons: you still have to run it, store each snapshot, and compare today's numbers to yesterday's to spot changes. Pagination, sale/compare-at pricing, and new/removed products all add fiddly edge cases.
Option 3: Automated monitoring with alerts
The scalable answer is to let a tool fetch, store and diff the data for you, and only tell you when something meaningful changes. That's exactly what Shop Sentry does.
- Pros: zero daily effort, nothing missed, variant-level accuracy, price history for context, and an exception-based inbox (no news when nothing changed).
- Cons: it's a paid tool beyond the free tier - though far cheaper than the time the manual method costs.
- 1Paste a competitor's Shopify domain - the full catalog is discovered automatically.
- 2Choose what to hear about: price changes, restocks, new products, removals.
- 3Get alerts by email or Telegram within seconds of a change, with the before/after value.
Tips that make price monitoring actually work
- Start with the 20-30 SKUs that matter - your best sellers and the products where you go head-to-head - not the entire catalog.
- Decide your own price floor and margin first. Monitoring tells you what competitors do; your floor tells you how much of it you can afford to match.
- Watch patterns, not single moves. A competitor who discounts every Friday is a pattern; one random drop might be a glitch. Give it a couple of weeks before reacting automatically.
- Track their /collections/all too, so you also catch new launches and removals - pricing is only half the competitive picture.
- Compare the price AND the compare-at (sale) price. A product gaining a compare-at price is a sale starting, which is often more actionable than the raw number.
Which should you use?
If you're watching one competitor's handful of products, a spreadsheet is fine. The moment you're tracking several stores - or you've ever thought 'I should have caught that price drop sooner' - automated monitoring pays for itself quickly.
Shop Sentry's free plan covers one competitor store, so you can replace the daily spreadsheet check for free and upgrade only when you add more.
Frequently asked questions
What's the easiest way to monitor competitor prices on Shopify?
For a few products on one competitor, a spreadsheet works. Beyond that, an automated monitor like Shop Sentry (free on one store) checks prices for you and alerts you when they change - far less work than a manual sheet.
Can I track competitor prices for free?
Yes - manually in a spreadsheet, via the public products.json endpoint, or with Shop Sentry's free plan (one competitor store). Paid plans add more stores, hourly checks and Telegram alerts.
How often should I check competitor prices?
It depends on your market. Fast-moving or flash-sale-heavy niches benefit from hourly checks; slower categories are fine daily. Manual checking rarely keeps up, which is why most sellers automate it.
Can I get alerted only when a price actually changes?
Yes - that's the point of exception-based monitoring. Shop Sentry only pings you when a price, stock level or product actually changes, so you aren't drowning in no-change updates.