How to monitor competitor prices on Salla and Zid
Monitoring competitor prices on Salla or Zid works the same way as anywhere else — read public storefront pages on a schedule, match listings to your SKUs, keep dated evidence — with three local specifics: prices must stay in SAR and never be converted, Arabic and English titles of the same product must resolve to one match, and cadence should tighten around Ramadan and White Friday.
Can competitor storefronts on Salla and Zid be read without an account?
Yes. A Salla or Zid storefront is a public website; the product page shows the price in SAR, the stock state and the variant. Melqart reads those pages the way a customer’s browser does. It does not use the merchant APIs of Salla or Zid to read a competitor — those are for connecting your own store, with your own credentials.
Why must SAR prices never be converted when comparing?
Because a converted price is a guess with a date on it. A competitor listing in SAR compared against your listing in SAR is a fact; the same listing converted through a daily exchange rate is a fact plus an assumption, and the assumption moves. Melqart compares like currency with like, stores the currency on every observation, and marks a cross-currency match as unsafe for pricing. The public market report follows the same rule: Saudi figures are SAR figures, reported separately from every other market.
How do you match Arabic and English listings of the same product?
Match on what does not translate: brand, model or reference number, size, count and barcode where the page exposes one. Titles are the weakest signal in a bilingual market because the same product is listed as “iPhone 15 Pro 256GB” on one storefront and “آيفون 15 برو 256 جيجا” on another. Melqart’s matcher normalises brand and unit before it looks at wording, and anything it is not sure of goes to a review queue rather than into a price recommendation.
What changes during Ramadan and White Friday?
Frequency and stock. Promotions stack in the two weeks before Ramadan and the week of White Friday, and out-of-stock rates rise as fast movers sell through. A weekly read misses most of it. Tighten cadence to daily for the season (the Merchant plan reads daily; Flagship every six hours), and watch stock state as closely as price — a competitor that has sold out has stopped competing on that listing, and a cut against them is money left on the table.
Does Melqart write prices back to Salla or Zid?
Salla and Zid are live store connections in Melqart today, read through their official merchant APIs with credentials you generate. Price writes are approval-gated by design and, in the current early-access release, not yet switched on for any platform: a recommendation you approve is recorded with its evidence, and the write itself ships when write access launches. The date will be on the changelog; nothing changes in your store without your approval.
Questions people ask next
Is the product available in Arabic?
The marketing site and the public pages are bilingual with right-to-left layout. Inside the product, Arabic layout is on and the translation is still rolling out — some screens remain in English, and the product says so.
Can I watch competitors on noon or Amazon.sa from Salla?
Marketplace sources are on the roadmap and labelled “coming” in the product; they are not live today. Storefront competitors on Salla, Zid, Shopify, WooCommerce and Vendure are.
Where is the data stored?
On infrastructure in the UK and EEA, with tenant isolation enforced at the database layer. The security page and the data processing agreement describe the controls and the sub-processor classes.