How to track competitor prices on Shopify: a step-by-step guide

Shopify gives you a good view of your own prices, orders and margins, but nothing in the admin tells you what other shops charge for the same products. If you want to know whether your $49 kettle is the cheapest, the most expensive or somewhere in the middle, you have to collect that information yourself. This guide covers the three practical ways to do it, how to set the work up so the numbers stay trustworthy, and how to turn what you collect into price changes in your Shopify catalogue.

What Shopify does and does not give you

Inside the Shopify admin you have each product's price, its compare-at price (the struck-through "was" price), and, if you fill it in, cost per item. That last field matters more than most store owners realise: without cost per item you cannot see margin, and without margin you cannot judge whether matching a competitor is sensible.

What Shopify does not hold is any external market data. There is no report showing competitor prices, no alert when a rival drops a price, and no index telling you where you sit. Competitor tracking is therefore always an add-on: a manual routine, a spreadsheet, an app from the Shopify App Store, or a separate monitoring tool that reads your catalogue.

Step 1: decide which products to track

Do not start with the whole catalogue. Start with the products where price is most likely to decide the sale:

• Branded products that other shops also sell. If a customer can search the exact model number and find five sellers, your price is under direct comparison.
• Your best sellers by revenue. A small price error on a product that sells 40 units a week costs more than a large one on a product that sells two a month.
• Products listed on comparison sites or Google Shopping. Anything that appears next to competitors in a price-sorted list is effectively being compared for you.

Own-brand and unique products usually do not need competitor tracking at the product level. For those, it is more useful to watch a few close substitutes so you know the price band customers are seeing.

Step 2: choose your competitors per product

A common mistake is choosing competitors at shop level ("we compete with Shop A and Shop B") and then tracking every product against them. In practice, competition varies by category. A homeware store may face one set of rivals for kitchen appliances and a completely different set for textiles.

For each product, pick the two to five shops a real customer is most likely to compare you with. Good candidates are shops that rank near you in search for the product name, shops that appear next to you on comparison sites, and shops with similar delivery promises. A marketplace seller with three-week shipping from abroad is a weaker reference than a domestic shop that delivers tomorrow.

Step 3: collect the competitor product URLs

The most reliable way to track a competitor's price is from the exact product page on their site. Searching their shop by name each time invites mistakes: a different colour, the 1.5 litre model instead of the 1.7 litre, a bundle with a second item.

When you collect URLs, check three things on each page:

1. It is the same product, size and variant as yours.
2. The price shown is the price a customer pays, not a price that requires a membership, a voucher code or buying two.
3. The page shows stock status. A low price on an out-of-stock product is not real competition today.

Keep the URLs in a structured list with your Shopify product handle or SKU in one column and the competitor URL in the next. Whatever method you choose next, this mapping is the asset that makes it work.

Shortcut: when the competitor also runs on Shopify

Many Shopify stores publish a public product feed. Add /products.json to the end of a competitor's store address (for example competitor.com/products.json) and your browser may show their products, variants, prices and availability in one list. Adding .json to a single product page address often works the same way. It is a quick way to check a price or spot new products, but treat it as a starting point: some stores turn it off, and it does not show checkout discounts or shipping costs.

Step 4: pick a tracking method

Option A: manual checks

For a handful of products and competitors, opening the pages once a week and writing the prices down is a reasonable start. It costs nothing and teaches you how your market behaves. The weakness is consistency: manual checks get skipped in busy weeks, which are often exactly the weeks when competitors move.

Option B: a spreadsheet with formulas

Spreadsheets can pull some prices automatically, but most modern shop pages load prices with JavaScript, which simple import formulas cannot read. You end up with a mix of automated and manual cells, and the broken ones are not always obvious. We compare this approach in more detail in spreadsheet vs software for competitor price tracking.

Option C: an app or monitoring tool

A dedicated tool reads competitor product pages on a schedule, stores the history and shows the result next to your own prices. When evaluating one for a Shopify store, check:

• Whether it imports your Shopify catalogue directly or needs a CSV.
• How often it checks prices, and whether that is enough for your category.
• Whether it records stock status as well as price.
• How it handles readings that look wrong, such as a competitor price at a fraction of everyone else's because the URL now points to an accessory.
• Whether it can push approved price changes back to Shopify, or only report.

Step 5: read the numbers in the right way

Once data is flowing, avoid the temptation to look only at the cheapest competitor. A more stable reference is the median of your competitors' in-stock prices, often expressed as a price index. Say you sell a kettle at $49 and four competitors list it at $45, $47, $50 and $53. The median is $48.50, so your index is roughly 101: you are almost exactly in the middle of the market, even though one shop is $4 cheaper.

Three other figures are worth looking at for each product:

• Gap to cheapest. Useful for products where you know customers sort by price.
• Your margin at the current price. This tells you how much room you have to move.
• Changes since last check. A competitor who has dropped 15% overnight is a different signal from one that has always been cheaper.

Step 6: change prices in Shopify safely

Tracking only pays off when it leads to better prices. Before you change anything, write down three rules:

1. A minimum margin. The lowest margin you will accept on any product, regardless of what competitors do. See minimum margin and price floors.
2. A target position. Do you aim to be the cheapest, in the middle of the market, or deliberately above it because of faster delivery or better service?
3. A maximum step. How far you will move a price in one change. Large jumps confuse returning customers and can trip price-reduction rules if you later advertise a discount.

For a small catalogue, you can apply changes by hand in the product editor or with Shopify's bulk editor. For larger ones, export the product CSV, update the price column and re-import, or use a tool that writes prices back through the Shopify API. Whichever route you take, keep a log of what you changed and why, so you can see later whether the change helped.

Luska is one example of the tool route: it syncs your Shopify catalogue, checks competitor URLs daily, and on Professional plans and above can push approved prices back to Shopify. The Shopify price monitoring page explains the setup.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a free way to track competitor prices on Shopify?

Yes: manual checks and a spreadsheet. It works for a small number of products and competitors. It becomes unreliable as the list grows, because checks get skipped and broken formulas go unnoticed.

How many competitors should I track per product?

Two to five is usually enough. More than that tends to add shops your customers never consider, which pulls the median away from the real market.

Should I track prices on Amazon and marketplaces too?

Only if your customers genuinely compare you with them. If your shoppers value next-day domestic delivery, a marketplace listing that ships in three weeks is not an equivalent offer.

Can I automatically match the cheapest competitor in Shopify?

Technically yes, with apps or scripts, but automatic matching of the cheapest price without a margin floor is how stores end up selling below cost. If you automate, put a floor and a maximum step in place first.

How do I get alerted when a competitor drops a price?

Use a tool that checks on a schedule and sends an alert when a price crosses a threshold you set. Pick a threshold that ignores tiny changes, for example 5% or more, otherwise you will get so many alerts that you stop reading them. Our guide to responding to competitor price drops covers what to do when one arrives.

Should I track when competitors go out of stock?

Yes. A competitor running out of a product you both sell is often a better moment to hold or raise your price than to cut it, because shoppers have one fewer option.