Competitor price monitoring for Shopify stores

What you can see on a Shopify store

Everything a shopper sees is public: the product name, the price, the old price shown as crossed out (Shopify calls it the compare-at price), the variants and whether each one is in stock. Most Shopify stores also publish the same information as a structured product feed, which makes it much easier to read than scraping each page.

What you can't see, and shouldn't try to: sales numbers, customer data, anything behind a login, or exact stock counts the store doesn't show.

What's worth tracking

• Price changes, up and down, with the old and new price side by side.
• Discounts, when a compare-at price appears or disappears.
• Out of stock and back in stock. A competitor that runs out is often a better signal than a price drop.
• New products. A new variant or colour often shows up before any announcement.

Four ways to do it

1. By hand

Free and fine for five products. It doesn't scale, and the weeks you're busy are the weeks you skip it.

2. A subscription tool

There are price tracking apps with dashboards. They're useful if you want to manage repricing inside one tool. Check what they charge per product, because the bill grows with your catalogue.

3. A small custom monitor

A script reads the stores you name every day and sends you a spreadsheet plus a short list of what changed. No dashboard to log in to, just a file and an email.

4. Run the same monitor yourself on Apify

I published the crawler as an Apify Actor: Shopify and WooCommerce Price and Stock Monitor. Point it at whole stores or single product pages, schedule a daily diff run, and get price drops, sold-out and back-in-stock events in a dataset. Pay per use: $0.01 per store per run and $0.002 per change. The first diff run is a free baseline.

Want Excel in your inbox without touching Apify? That is option 3, and the packages below.

Doing it politely

• Check the store's robots.txt and skip stores that block crawlers.
• Wait a few seconds between requests. One run a day is plenty.
• Never log in, never fill in forms, never touch customer data.
• If a store's terms forbid automated reading, leave it out.

What I build

My price and stock monitor does option 3 for you. You send the competitor stores or product URLs. You get a daily Excel and CSV with every product and variant, plus a change report with price drops, price rises, sold out and back in stock. Option 4 is the same engine on Apify if you want to run it yourself.

To keep it running after that: $29 a month for daily runs on up to 3 stores, plus $9 a month per extra store. The demo on the price monitor page uses three public Shopify stores I picked because their product feeds are public. They aren't clients.