How to monitor competitor prices on Shopify
To monitor competitor prices on Shopify, list the competitor storefronts that sell what you sell, read their public product pages on a fixed schedule, match each of their listings to your SKU, and record every read with its URL, timestamp and price. Only change a price from a dated, matched observation — never from memory.
Which competitor pages should a Shopify merchant read?
Public product pages are enough. Most storefronts, Shopify ones included, expose the price, the currency and whether the item is in stock in the page itself or in a structured feed the browser already downloads. You do not need an account on the competitor site, and you should never use one — a logged-in price is not the price your customer sees.
Start with three to five storefronts that a customer would actually compare against you, not every store in the category. Coverage grows later; matching quality is what decides whether the numbers are usable.
How often should competitor prices be checked?
As often as your competitors move, and no more. In the categories Melqart measures, a minority of listings change price in any thirty-day window, and most that do move once. A weekly read catches the trend; a daily read catches a promotion before it costs you a weekend; six-hourly matters only where rivals reprice within the day. Melqart’s plans are built on exactly those three cadences (weekly, daily, six-hourly) so a merchant pays for the frequency the category needs.
How do you match a competitor’s listing to your own SKU?
By evidence, not by title similarity alone. A safe match agrees on brand, on unit (a box of ten is not a single), on currency and on the variant that matters in your category. Anything weaker should be shown to a person before it is used for pricing. Melqart marks each match as safe for pricing or not, and only safe matches feed a recommendation.
What should you keep as evidence before changing a price?
Four things per observation: the source URL, the time it was read, the price and currency as read, and a fingerprint of the page content so the read can be verified later. Melqart stores all four on every observation and keeps a snapshot of what was read, so a recommendation can always be traced back to the page that caused it.
- Source URL of the competitor listing
- Timestamp of the read, in UTC
- Price, currency and stock state as read
- Content hash and an archived snapshot
Should competitor monitoring change your Shopify prices automatically?
Not until you have watched the recommendations for a while and they have earned it. A wrong automatic cut is the most expensive mistake in this category. Melqart proposes; a person approves; and in the current early-access release nothing is written to a store at all — approvals are recorded and evidence kept until write access launches, which is dated on the changelog.
Questions people ask next
Does Melqart need access to my competitor’s Shopify store?
No. It reads only public product pages, the same ones a customer sees. It never logs in anywhere on your behalf.
What does the free store audit read from my own Shopify store?
Only what is public: your storefront’s product feed. No card, no install, no credentials, no write access. It returns what it found and what it could not read.
Which platforms does Melqart connect to today?
Shopify, WooCommerce, Vendure, Salla and Zid are live. Amazon, noon and Trendyol are coming and are labelled as such inside the product.