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Competitor Pricing — sources & health

Where competitor price data comes from, how the Health tab tells you when a source has stopped working, and how market data feeds your discount bounds.

Last updated: September 23, 2026

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Competitor Pricing tracks what other sellers charge for the products you choose, and feeds that into your discount policy as market-gap bounds. It is deliberately a narrow tool — knowing exactly what it does and does not do is what makes the numbers trustworthy.

Estimated time: 5 minutes

What you'll accomplish

  • Understand exactly how prices are collected, and the limits of that method
  • Add sources and know the caps that apply
  • Read the Health tab and fix a paused source
  • Understand how market data affects your discounts

Requirements

  • Plan: Pro or Enterprise. Not available on Free or Growth.
  • Found at Settings → Integrations → Competitor Pricing.

How data is collected — and what that rules out

StockSweep fetches the competitor pages you nominate and parses the price out of the HTML. That is the whole mechanism.

Deliberately not included:

  • No JavaScript rendering. A price that only appears after a page's scripts run cannot be read.
  • No marketplace APIs. Amazon, eBay and similar are not queried through their APIs.
  • No third-party data provider. There is no data vendor behind this, which also means no extra subscription and no extra cost.

The upside is that there is nothing to sign up for and no data licence to worry about. The limit is that some competitor sites simply cannot be read this way — and the Health tab will tell you which.

We identify ourselves honestly as StockSweepBot/1.0 and respect robots.txt.

Adding sources

  • Up to 3 sources per product variant. This is a curation limit: three well-chosen competitors give a better market picture than thirty noisy ones.
  • Up to 1,000 sources per import when adding in bulk.
  • Manual refresh has a 10-minute cooldown per source.

Sources refresh automatically each night from 02:00, spread over 3 hours so one merchant's catalogue does not hammer a competitor's site.

Reading the Health tab

Health is where you find out that a source stopped working — which matters, because a silently broken source does not produce wrong data, it produces no data, and a market average computed from fewer sources than you think is the subtler problem.

Two things pause a source automatically:

  • Consecutive failures. After 5 failures in a row, the source is paused.
  • A WAF block. If a competitor's firewall (Cloudflare, Akamai and similar) blocks us, we stop trying against that hostname for 24 hours rather than burning attempts on a target that will not let us in.

A paused source is not deleted. Fix or replace the URL and re-enable it.

How market data reaches your discounts

Once a variant has enough competitor data, two derived numbers become available to your discount policy:

  • Market floor — do not undercut the market by more than X%. This raises the price and reduces the discount.
  • Market ceiling — do not remain more than X% above the market after discounting. This deepens the discount.

Floor and ceiling can never both bind, so at most one adjustment applies. And the margin floor always outranks both: the market ceiling can deepen a discount, but never past your margin. See Margin Protection Explained.

Two thresholds shape the signals you see:

  • A variant is flagged overpriced when it sits more than 15% above the market, and only when at least 50% of its sources returned data — so a flag never rests on a single reading.
  • Data older than 7 days is treated as stale and carries less weight. Full weight needs at least 2 sources.

Daily price snapshots are retained for 90 days.

Verify it is working

  • Open the Sources tab — each source shows its last successful fetch and last observed price.
  • Open the Health tab — active, paused and blocked sources are separated, with the reason.
  • Check one product against the competitor page manually. If the parsed price is wrong rather than missing, the page's markup is likely the cause; replace the source with a cleaner URL.

Troubleshooting

A source keeps pausing itself

Five consecutive failures. Most often the URL moved, or the page renders its price in JavaScript. Open the page and check whether the price is in the initial HTML.

A competitor's whole site stopped working at once

That is the WAF suppression: the site blocked us and we back off for 24 hours. Repeated blocks mean that competitor cannot be tracked this way.

The market average looks wrong

Check source coverage for that variant. An average computed from one live source out of three is thinner than it looks — which is what the 50% coverage rule on the overpriced flag exists to protect you from.

Prices update slower than I expect

Refresh runs nightly from 02:00, spread over three hours. Manual refresh is available with a 10-minute cooldown per source.

FAQ

Does this cost extra?

No. It is included in your plan, and there is no third-party data subscription behind it.

Can I track marketplace listings?

Not through marketplace APIs. A marketplace product page can sometimes be tracked as an ordinary page, but many block automated fetches.

How many competitors should I add per product?

Up to three, and three well-chosen ones beat three arbitrary ones. Coverage quality drives the confidence of every derived signal.