Competitor price tracking, done properly.
Competitor price tracking (also called price monitoring) is the practice of automatically and repeatedly checking what competitors charge for the products you also sell, so pricing decisions are based on current data instead of a manual spot-check from last week. PriceSentry does this by matching products on GTIN, barcode, or product URL, and checking each competitor's own product page directly, not buying access to a shared third-party price API.
Register your interestMatching: GTIN first, URL always works
Every product is matched to a competitor's listing by GTIN or barcode, an exact match, not a title-similarity guess that can silently match the wrong variant or bundle. No GTIN? Point us at the product URL directly and confirm the match once.
Checked in-house, not through a resold API
Competitor pages are checked by our own infrastructure, not a shared third-party price API. That keeps checks reliable and gets cheaper to run at scale, instead of getting more expensive per lookup.
One check per URL, not per customer
The same competitor page is only ever checked once, no matter how many of your own products reference it or how many other accounts track the exact same URL. That's what keeps tracking fast and keeps costs from scaling linearly with catalog size.
Freshness: every attempt logged, failures surfaced
Every check, success or failure, is recorded with the price found. A competitor page that fails three times in a row triggers an alert instead of silently going stale, so a broken or blocked tracker doesn't quietly poison your pricing data.
Position: not just a price, a comparison
Every tracked product shows your rank against the competitors you're tracking, the price gap in pounds and percent, and your own listing shown alongside them in the same price-sorted view, not a number in isolation.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between price tracking and price monitoring?
In practice, nothing. Both terms describe the same thing: automatically and repeatedly checking competitor prices instead of doing it by hand. PriceSentry uses them interchangeably.
How often are prices checked?
Tracked continuously, results typically land within seconds of a check being requested, and a bulk console lets you trigger a fresh check for a whole account or specific products on demand rather than waiting for the next scheduled pass.
What happens if a competitor blocks checks?
It's logged as a failure, not hidden. A competitor that blocks automated access is exactly the kind of thing that should be visible, since it tells you something about that competitor's pricing strategy too.
Can I track competitors who aren't on the same platform as me?
Yes. Tracking works against any competitor product page regardless of what platform they run on.