What is Price Monitoring? A Complete Guide for Brands and Retailers

In mid-2025, when investigators discovered that 57% of Shein’s discounts were fraudulent and 11% were price increases, France’s antitrust agency fined the company €40 million ($47.17 million). False promotions, unhappy customers, and government fines contributed to the company’s failure to monitor its historical pricing.

This is not just a company problem. Customers are aware that many online retailers still have trouble displaying accurate prices. In fact, e-commerce cart abandonment rate peaked in 2023 at 70%, the highest level since 2013. This demonstrates how businesses continue to lose sales on a daily basis due to poor pricing visibility.

If you sell products online, every price change your competitors make could cost you a customer. Price monitoring means tracking competitor and marketplace prices in real-time, so you can respond quickly and protect your sales. If your prices are too high, shoppers leave. If they are too low, you lose margins. Keeping up with pricing across your category helps you protect revenue and stay visible on key sales channels. 

This blog post demonstrates how price monitoring helps brands, retailers, and manufacturers protect margins and improve pricing decisions. You will learn how to use pricing tools to stay competitive and why reacting fast to price changes now matters every day.

What is Price Monitoring?

Price monitoring is the ongoing process of tracking and analyzing product or service prices across the market to guide smart pricing decisions. Businesses use it to identify competitor moves, follow pricing trends, and determine the right price points for their products.

Most businesses track several types of prices, depending on their category and goals:

• Retail prices, which show what consumers pay at checkout
• MAP (minimum advertised prices), which brands use to stop price erosion by sellers
• Competitor pricing, which helps you respond quickly to rivals undercutting or discounting
• Dynamic pricing, where prices shift often based on demand, timing, or stock availability

In mid‑2022 a U.S.-based outdoor gear retailer called GO Outdoors adopted automated competitor price monitoring services. Their system flagged a major rival’s July 4 tent discount days before it launched. They matched pricing within hours, captured top Amazon search placement, and drove a 32% surge in temporary revenue during that holiday period.

Stories like this are common when businesses use dedicated tools to collect and act on pricing data. Like a consumer price comparison site, a retailer price monitoring tool collects pricing data from websites and marketplaces at regular intervals. These tools then analyze the raw data to highlight competitor prices, pricing shifts, and market-driven patterns based on real-time demand or supply changes.

If you run an online retail business, competitive price monitoring helps you make informed pricing decisions quickly, boost profit margins, and protect long-term brand value.

Why is Price Monitoring Important?

Price monitoring helps businesses make smarter pricing decisions by tracking competitors, trends, and shifts in real-time. It keeps your prices relevant and stops you from reacting blindly to sudden discounting or promotions in the market.

Here are some of the core benefits of price monitoring:

• Helps maintain a competitive edge: With price monitoring, you can determine when to adjust your own rates by continuously tracking those of your competitors. This keeps customers interested in your offers and prevents you from losing business to competitors who are offering better prices.

• Prevents price wars: Price monitoring provides you with information to help you respond strategically, rather than reacting rashly to every discount your rivals introduce. By doing this, you can maintain your competitiveness and protect your margins by avoiding needless price reductions.
• Benchmarks against direct and indirect competitors: You keep an eye on pricing from less well-known competitors who could have an impact on your market share in addition to comparing with your obvious rivals. This provides you with a comprehensive view of your prices’ position in the larger market.
• Protects brand reputation and MAP compliance: By monitoring prices, you can identify sellers who disregard MAP regulations, thereby protecting your brand’s reputation and ensuring compliance. As a result, you can prevent price erosion and maintain a high perceived value for your brand.

Informs pricing strategy: With competitor price monitoring services, you get accurate, real-time data collected for informed pricing decisions. By doing this, your team can improve profits and customer trust by adjusting prices based on facts instead of hypotheses.

How Does Price Monitoring Work?

If you want to react fast to pricing shifts without losing revenue, you need to understand exactly how price monitoring operates behind the scenes.

Overview of the process

Price monitoring begins with a structured system that collects, compares, and flags pricing data across different sources. Every step needs to work together so your team doesn’t miss important pricing movements. You can’t act on pricing gaps if your tools can’t spot them in time.

Data scraping or APIs

The majority of businesses use web scraping price monitoring tools or marketplace APIs that retrieve data at predetermined intervals to gather competitor pricing. From marketplaces, brand websites, or retailer listings, these tools collect product URLs, prices, and promotions.

Competitive benchmarking

Platforms use rules you specify to compare competitor pricing with your current offers after data is gathered. To identify pricing discrepancies and take prompt action, you can set parameters by category, product type, or even region.

Alerts and dashboards

Teams monitor pricing across product lines using dashboards and are alerted in real time to any significant changes. Pricing, sales, and marketing teams can use this configuration to make decisions based on factual information rather than intuition.

Manual vs. automated tools

Manual tracking often uses spreadsheets and individual checks. This makes it hard to catch quick price changes. Automated platforms gather and assess competitor prices on a large scale. They help teams respond more quickly without spending hours on repetitive tasks.

Here’s a quick comparison to help you understand how both methods stack up side by side:

Frequency of monitoring

Some businesses update competitor pricing every hour to catch flash sales or limited-time discounts, while others review prices daily or weekly to follow slower-moving markets and seasonal trends. Setting the right monitoring frequency helps balance the cost of data collection with the value of timely pricing insights. 

Additionally, regular updates keep your pricing aligned with market trends and help prevent surprise undercutting.

Who Uses Price Monitoring Tools?

Price monitoring tools help track competitors, correct channel conflicts, and fix revenue leaks before they grow. Each team uses it differently based on what they sell and who they sell to:

Ecommerce teams

Online sales teams rely on price monitoring to watch competitor listings across marketplaces and retailer sites. If a competing brand drops its price during a flash sale, the eCommerce team can quickly match it and retain search visibility on platforms like Amazon or Walmart.

For example, eCommerce teams at Walmart closely watched price changes at Amazon Fresh and Kroger in Denver during 2024 and adjusted pricing within hours. This helped Walmart retain top search rankings and remain within a 6-7% price premium compared to its competitors, significantly improving conversion rates.

Brand managers

Brand leaders use pricing data to track if retailers are respecting MAP guidelines or discounting too aggressively. For example, if a clothing brand finds that one distributor is undercutting prices on a seasonal launch, they can act before the entire market reacts.

Pricing analysts

Analysts monitor price changes over time to help businesses adjust their margins. For example, someone at a grocery store might check milk or bread prices daily at local competitors to ensure they stay competitive while still making a profit.

Competitive intelligence teams

These teams focus on broader strategy and use pricing tools to monitor how rival companies price bundles, upsells, and limited-time offers. A fitness equipment brand might spot a competitor dropping rowing machine prices in Q4 and decide whether to follow or focus on ads.

For example, one U.S. chain monitored competitors at scale and optimized dynamic pricing in more than 200 locations, tracking millions of SKUs and adjusting strategy based on competitor behavior

Retailers and distributors

Retailers and wholesalers rely on pricing tools to compare what suppliers offer and how much items are reselling for in the market before placing large orders. If a distributor notices that one supplier’s prices are consistently higher than others, they can switch suppliers to protect their profits. For example, in 2025, a U.S. industrial distributor used GrowByData’s price tools to expand their product range three times and shift from just reacting with discounts to focusing on value-based pricing. This change helped them improve their margins on thousands of products.

Key Features to Look for in a Price Monitoring Tool

Ensure the price monitoring software you select actually enables you to track competitors and respond quickly. You’ll need features that help you move quickly, especially if your catalog is extensive or your prices change frequently.

• Competitor price monitoring: Your software must automatically track competitor prices in real time. Ensure it displays the data clearly in a dashboard your team can actually use. If a competitor changes their price, your team should be notified promptly and adjust accordingly without delay.
• Stock movement visibility: Look for a tool that alerts you when a competitor’s product goes out of stock. If a top item disappears from their site, your team should be able to raise your price and improve margins without waiting.

• Historic pricing data: Pick a tool that stores past pricing activity. When you can see how prices changed over time, it’s easier to spot trends, plan promos, time your restocks, and choose the right moment to launch a product.
• Category standardization and enrichment: Your tool should group similar products, even when sellers use different names. For example, “wireless headphones” and “Bluetooth earbuds” should be grouped. This helps your team compare prices correctly and slice data by product type, brand, or tags.
• In-depth competitor tracking: Good software also tracks competitor product visibility, reviews, and product descriptions. These additional details reveal how competitors position their products and what helps them sell more effectively.

Accurate product matching capability: Without solid product matching, your comparisons fall apart. Choose software that matches your items to competitor products accurately, whether they’re brand-name or private label.

Challenges in Price Monitoring

Tracking prices in retail isn’t as simple as watching a single competitor or looking at one product. Between marketplace pricing shifts and regional variations, most brands struggle to keep up manually. 

Below are four specific challenges that teams face when trying to track prices, and how Intelligence Node helps solve them.

Dynamic pricing by marketplaces

Marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart change prices multiple times a day, sometimes every few minutes. Most retailers simply can’t keep up with this pace using internal tracking or spreadsheet-led methods. These rapid shifts cause brands to lose their competitive edge before they even realize it.

Intelligence Node gives you a real-time price monitoring engine that updates every 10 seconds, helping you react before you fall behind. The platform tracks Amazon and Walmart-level changes, recommends pricing moves instantly, and helps you protect margins while staying competitive.

Tracking prices across regions or currencies

Pricing isn’t consistent across countries, ZIP codes, or even different cities within the same country. Many brands fail to monitor pricing at a local level and miss competitive shifts that affect nearby markets. When teams rely on limited data, they misread customer behavior and make incorrect pricing decisions.

Intelligence Node helps retailers compare and monitor prices locally, globally, and by ZIP code across any currency. The tool’s ML engine lets you benchmark exact matches against competitors in any region without language or format issues.

Data accuracy and freshness

Old or mismatched data leads to bad pricing decisions and lost revenue across multiple SKUs. Most price tracking tools fail to match similar products correctly or update frequently enough to support pricing moves. One mistake in your source data can cost thousands over time.

Intelligence Node’s patented similarity engine guarantees 99% accurate matches with real-time pricing updates across 1.2 billion SKUs. It gives retailers clean, fresh data they can trust while comparing products across any category at scale.

Monitoring bundles and variants

Retailers often sell bundles, sets, or product variants like size or color options that are priced differently. Most tools can’t identify or match these variations, so teams either ignore them or track them manually. This leads to incomplete pricing insights and missed savings or margin opportunities.

Intelligence Node’s platform automatically detects, separates, and matches bundles and variants with their market equivalents. It tracks and compares bundle prices the same way it tracks single products, helping teams price every option correctly.

How to Choose the Right Tool

Choosing a price monitoring platform depends on your company’s internal setup, user workflows, and long-term goals. You’ll need to evaluate more than features and cost; your tool has to fit how your team works every day.

• Customization needs: Look for tools that let you define pricing rules, categories, and competitor groups without extra dev time. You should be able to set your own comparison logic and match products based on your catalog structure.
• Integration with existing tech stack: Choose a tool that connects easily to your PIM, ERP, or eCommerce platform. Your team shouldn’t need to call a developer every time something changes. The right platform should integrate seamlessly and push data to wherever your team works.
• Support and scalability: Choose a vendor that responds promptly when issues arise. Also, make sure the tool handles traffic spikes or a growing catalog without freezing up. If you plan to expand into new markets or product lines, the tool should scale automatically with that growth.
• Demo/trial best practices: Before purchasing, ask the vendor to demo the platform using your actual product catalog and real competitors.  That’s the only way to check if the data is accurate. Here are some other ways you can verify the vendor’s authenticity:
  • Watch how often the platform updates prices and availability. If it misses key changes, that’s a red flag.
  • Let your team test it too. They should be able to find and use insights without needing to call support or dig through help documents.
  • Check how clearly it shows the results and how fast your team can act on what they see.

Use Cases and Success Stories

Below are some of the specific ways different businesses use Intelligence Node’s platform in real time:

1. A brand tracking MAP violations and enforcing compliance

To protect its premium positioning, the coffee division of a major global CPG brand needed to monitor retail pricing daily across hundreds of seller sites. They used Intelligence Node to scan for MAP violations in 145 ZIP codes and catch unauthorized discounting by retail partners.

This daily price check helped the brand act before small violations escalated across other locations or sellers. With Intelligence Node, they preserved their pricing policy while protecting brand trust and consistency.

2. A retailer optimizing pricing strategy to increase conversion

A global hypermarket chain wanted to stay competitive with Amazon across millions of SKUs in real time. With Intelligence Node’s 10-second refresh rate and 99% matching accuracy, the retailer adjusted prices at scale based on live competitor moves. 

They used plug-and-play APIs to push pricing data straight into their backend systems without long wait times. This direct integration helped them improve productivity, reduce manual work, and convert shoppers who were comparing prices before making a purchase.

3. A manufacturer spotting gray market sellers

A leading consumer electronics brand needed help identifying gray market sellers that were distorting price perception. They used Intelligence Node’s matching engine to compare products with similar specs across sites and flag unauthorized sellers or wrongly priced listings. 

The tool provided them with daily updates on pricing differences across hundreds of SKUs, enabling them to take immediate action. This allowed them to stabilize pricing across global markets and prevent margin leakage caused by underpriced third-party listings.

Why Price Monitoring Needs to Be Part of Your Growth Strategy

Retailers who ignore price monitoring leave money on the table and miss clear signs of competitive shifts. Every price drop, stock-out, or promotion from a rival creates a window to win or lose customers. When you track these signals early, you can act quickly, protect profit margins, and gain market share.

Smart brands and retailers use price monitoring tools not just to react, but to lead with better offers. The right solution, such as Intelligence Node, provides pricing clarity, competitive benchmarks, and actionable daily data.Looking for a price monitoring solution tailored to your business? Book a demo with Intelligence Node today!