How to monitor competitor website changes

Which pages to watch

• Homepage: sitewide sales, banners and launches show up here first.
• Sale or clearance page: what's discounted, and by how much.
• New arrivals: new products and collections.
• Shipping and returns page: the free-shipping minimum, return window and who pays for returns.
• A handful of product pages: the ones that compete with your best sellers, for their prices.

Which changes matter

• A price going up or down, including a new "was" price.
• A new sale, discount code or bundle, and its end date.
• A change to the free-shipping minimum, or a new free gift.
• New products and collections.
• Something that went away: a sale that ended, a product that was removed.

Changes to ignore

• Banners and carousels that rotate between the same messages.
• Products shuffled into a different order, or moved to the next page of a list.
• Review counts, "only 3 left" notes and other stock counters.
• Small wording edits, cookie banners and pop-ups.

Three ways to do it

• By hand: bookmark the pages and check them every week or so. Free, but easy to let slip, and you have to spot what changed yourself.
• A general page-change monitor: alerts you when anything on a page changes. Flexible, but on store pages most alerts are noise from the list above.
• A daily offer tracker: reads the store pages for you and reports only price, promotion and product changes, in plain words.

How EcomWatchdog does it

EcomWatchdog reads each competitor's homepage, sale, new-arrivals and shipping pages, plus the product pages you choose, once a day around midnight US Central. It compares each page with the night before, and a short update is written for each meaningful change: what it was before, what it is now, and the exact wording from their page. Every update is checked against the page before it is saved. Changes like rotating banners and reshuffled products are left out.

What it can't see

• It reads public pages only: not prices behind a login, in a cart or at checkout, or offers sent only by email or text message.
• Some stores block automated visits. Their pages can't be read, and the app says so instead of reporting "no change".
• Prices are what a visitor in the US sees, for the product option in the link you add.
• Checks run once a day, so a change made and undone between two checks can be missed.
• History starts when you add a store; it can't show what changed before that.

Example update

Questions

How often should I check a competitor's website?

Once a day is enough for most stores: promotions usually run for days or weeks. If you check by hand, once a week catches most of them.

Will the competitor know I'm watching?

The pages are public, the same ones any shopper sees. EcomWatchdog's page reader identifies itself as EcomWatchdog and reads each page once a day; it doesn't log in, add anything to a cart or buy anything.

Can I watch pages that aren't part of a store, like a blog?

EcomWatchdog watches store pages: the homepage, sale, new-arrivals, shipping and product pages. For other kinds of page, a general page-change monitor is the better fit.