Competitor price monitoring is software that checks rivals' prices, discounts and product listings across marketplaces, quick-commerce apps and travel sites, many times a day. It is also called competitor price tracking or price intelligence. Its buyers are brands, retailers, and travel companies such as hotels and airlines.
The software collects prices by web scraping: software reads public web pages and apps automatically and copies their data. For each product, it opens the listing on each site. It reads the price, the discount, whether the item is in stock, and where the item appears in search results. It does this again every few hours, or every few minutes for products whose prices change often.
The hardest step is matching. The same product appears under different names on different sites. One site lists "Classic Salted Chips 52 g", and another lists "Salted Potato Chips (52 gm)". The software must decide that both are the same item, by comparing the name, the pack size, the brand and the photo. Only then can the two prices be compared.
On quick-commerce apps, the apps that deliver groceries in about ten minutes, prices and stock differ from one pincode to the next. This is because each order is delivered from a dark store, a small warehouse that serves only the area a few kilometres around it. So the software must check each product in many pincodes, not just once on each app.
Take, for example, a brand of instant coffee that sells its 100 g jar on three quick-commerce apps. Its software checks the jar in 40 pincodes of Mumbai and Pune every two hours. On a Saturday morning, it finds that a rival brand has cut the price of its own 100 g jar from ₹320 to ₹269 on one app, in every pincode. It also finds that the brand's jar is out of stock in 6 pincodes of Pune on another app. The brand's sales team receives both alerts. It decides to fund a matching offer on the first app for the weekend, and it asks the second app to restock its Pune dark stores.
The data goes on to other software. Price and promotion optimisation uses rivals' prices when it picks a retailer's own prices. A brand's marketplace management team uses it to change listings and ads. Hotels use the same method for room rates: their revenue management system (RMS) reads what nearby hotels charge for each night.
Tracking rivals' prices is a key input to dynamic pricing, in which prices change as demand and rivals' prices move. Without it, a brand learns about a rival's price cut only when its own sales fall.