Price Monitor: protecting your margins against the competition

On marketplaces and in B2B e-commerce, price wars are a constant feature. ProductsManager’s Price Monitor tracks your prices and those of your competitors in real time, and alerts you when you’re out of line with the market — before your customers go elsewhere.

Why monitor competitors’ prices?

For a distributor, margin is the lifeblood of the business. Two opposing risks threaten it:

• Being too expensive— you lose orders to cheaper competitors without even realising it
• Being too cheap— you lose margin unnecessarily, especially when the competition is less aggressive than it seems

Without price monitoring, you’re flying blind. You set your prices once a year during supplier negotiations, and then forget about them. Meanwhile, Amazon, ManoMano or your direct competitors adjust their prices daily.

How the Price Monitor works

The Price Monitor performs automatic price checks on the sources you configure: Amazon Marketplace, competitor sites, Google Shopping, B2B platforms…

For every product in your catalogue, it compares:

• Your current selling price
• The price of the same product (identified by EAN/GTIN) at the configured competitors
• Price trends over time (upward or downward trend)

The result: a dashboard showing your price position (cheaper, average, more expensive), and alerts that can be configured according to your thresholds.

Alerts: react only to what matters

Monitoring thousands of product references is only worthwhile if you can act on the important signals. The Price Monitor allows you to configure alerts based on:

• Price difference— alerts you if a competitor is X% cheaper on a product
• Product category— monitor high-turnover or high-value SKUs more closely
• Priority competitor— monitor only certain competitors identified as the most threatening
• Frequency— daily, weekly, or real-time alerts

From monitoring to action: repricing

Price monitoring is only valuable if it leads to adjustments. Two approaches:

Assisted manual repricing

The Price Monitor alerts you to out-of-market listings. You review the alerts, analyse the context (stock, margin, seasonality) and decide whether or not to adjust. ProductsManager allows you to update the price directly from the dashboard and push it to your sales channels.

Automatic repricing (Scale and Enterprise plans)

You define repricing rules: “if a competitor is more than 5% cheaper, align my price with theirs with a minimum margin of X%”. The system automatically applies the adjustments within the limits you have set.

This automation is particularly useful for retailers with thousands of active listings on Amazon or other high-volume marketplaces.

Protect your margins, don’t sacrifice them

Price Monitor is not a price-dumping tool. Its aim is not to push you to systematically lower prices — it is to provide you with accurate information for informed decisions.

Sometimes, the right decision is not to match prices:

• A cheaper competitor may have limited stock or poor customer reviews — there’s no point in matching their price
• For a high-value-added product or one with associated services (extended warranty, installation, after-sales service), the price difference may be justified
• For certain exclusive or own-brand products, the competition is not the right benchmark

The Price Monitor gives you the data. The decision remains yours, informed by information you didn’t have before.

Where to start?

Setting up the Price Monitor involves three steps: identifying your 50–100 high-stakes SKUs, configuring the competitors to monitor for these SKUs, then analysing the initial data to calibrate your alert thresholds. Generally, the first insights arrive within 48 hours.