How to monitor competitor promotions
Updated November 2, 2026
Decide which few pages carry a competitor's promotions (usually the homepage, the sale page, new arrivals and the shipping page), have them checked once a day, and read one short summary of what changed. That takes about a minute, instead of visiting every competitor's site and trying to remember what it said before.
What's worth knowing about
- Sales and discounts, including how much and on what.
- Coupon codes and who can use them.
- Free gifts, free-shipping thresholds and changes to returns.
- New products, collections and bundles.
- Offers that stop being advertised.
What to leave out
Most changes on a store's pages don't matter to you: products shuffling position, review counts, stock levels, menus and small wording edits. A good summary leaves these out, so the few changes that matter stand out. EcomWatchdog ignores them.
A simple routine
- Read the daily email: it lists each competitor's changes, most important first.
- For each one, decide: match it, answer it differently (a gift instead of a discount, say), or ignore it.
- Look at a competitor's history before a big season, to see when they started last time's sales.
Why once a day is enough for most stores
Most promotions run for days or weeks. A morning summary of yesterday's changes is enough to react in time, without alerts during the day. The trade-off: an offer that appears and disappears between two nightly checks can be missed.
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.
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.
Planning a promotion of your own? Check what the discount really costs first. Free calculator: Discount Break-Even Calculator.
Questions
- Will I get an email every day?
- Only on days something changed, at the time you choose. You can also choose what you're emailed about (for example, sales but not new products); everything still shows in your dashboard.
- How many competitors can I follow?
- 5 on the free trial and on Starter, 20 on Pro.
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