E-commerce monitoring is the collection and analysis of data from online stores, marketplaces, and sales platforms. The monitoring can include all the information that a customer sees when they enter an online store. Monitoring can apply to both a company’s own sales network (e.g., in the case of manufacturers) as well as their competition. The most commonly acquired data includes:

• Product prices and availability
• Information about promotions
• Statistics and data on customer reviews and ratings
• Advertisements and promotions on banners
• Content of product descriptions, photos, and technical data

Data collected from online stores and sales platforms, gathered quickly and without the need for tedious and time-consuming analysis, is used for various purposes:

1. When monitoring our own sales network, we have a full view of both the price level of our products at different sellers and in relation to the competition, and we also verify the availability of our products. This allows us to efficiently manage distribution, affiliate programs, and producer promotions.
2. Observing the competition allows for quick reactions to actions of other sellers offering the same or similar products, adjusting prices, responding to promotional or advertising campaigns. It also allows managing cooperation with suppliers and advertisers regarding their actions (or their competition) at other sellers.
3. Ad monitoring enables identifying where, what, and in what places it is worth or necessary to advertise. It also allows checking the reliability of campaigns carried out by stores and recognizing trends and directions in which competitive brands are heading.
4. Monitoring customer comments and ratings allows detecting defects in new products and eliminating them. The analysis of ratings also enables signaling quality of service shortcomings in stores. Verification of comment content also allows for gathering characteristics and product properties that customers most often write about and using this information in marketing communication.
5. Monitoring the positioning of offers on category lists and search results provides knowledge about which products of certain brands appear on the first pages of lists and which products are recommended both in search and in suggested accessories and add-ons. We know where and what actions to take to improve the visibility of our products to customers and thus increase the chances of sales or promote certain products that are important to us.
6. Monitoring content descriptions allows for verification of the correctness and completeness of product descriptions, usually verifying the accuracy and consistency of descriptions among different sellers, using current photos, compliance with product parameters, etc. but also, for example, the completeness of descriptions on platforms like Amazon, where a lack of information can result in an increase in the number of returns from customers.

E-commerce monitoring involves many sources that are important for sales and marketing management – depending on the client’s needs. You can monitor all websites that present product sales offers along with their prices and descriptions. In practice, it is possible to monitor any online stores, commercial websites, price comparison websites, and auction sites. There are no restrictions on the country, currency, or language in which the offers are presented.

The frequency of monitoring depends on the industry and the variability of prices in the market for a given assortment. Most often, clients acquire data once or a few times a day, there are also industries where reading once a week is enough, but there are also those where data is collected every hour. For very quickly changing prices, we can provide data even every 10 minutes!

The method of data acquisition depends on the needs, type of data, the specificity of a particular industry, and its products. Data can be collected in three different ways:

Automatic – using intelligent algorithms – this is the cheapest solution, but errors in the data may occur.

Manual – the collected data is analyzed and verified manually by our team of specialists.

Mixed model – the most common and recommended solution in practice, where automatically collected data is verified by our specialists. There is always verification and selection of parameters according to which algorithms retrieve and combine data from a particular source. Thanks to this, we can guarantee the highest quality of delivered information (data collected on all offers for individual products, as well as verification of the correctness of assigned offers).

The way data is collected is visible for each monitored website in the same way as visits from different clients. Therefore, there is no possibility of identifying that you are monitoring them. And do you know who is monitoring your website?

By definition, monitoring your competition should increase your revenue and strengthen your brand’s position in the market, so it should be viewed as an investment rather than a cost for the company. The fees for monitoring are always established as a monthly subscription, with no additional configuration or implementation costs.

The cost of price monitoring is determined by several parameters:

• The number and types of monitored sources (stores, marketplaces, auction sites, comparison websites) have the greatest impact on the cost.
• The number of products being monitored has a smaller impact on the cost. Larger price changes typically occur with a scale of 100, 500, 1,000, 5,000, or 50,000 products rather than for smaller differences.
• The frequency of monitoring is also important.

Additional requirements can also affect the price, such as:

• Special requirements for reporting methods (on-demand reports, collecting and analyzing detailed product data, an automatic price change recommendation module, etc.)
• Choosing additional modules beyond prices and availability: monitoring promotions, banners, offer positioning, comments, content, etc.

The pricing section contains sample service listings with proposed prices to illustrate the budget level. However, each solution is priced individually, taking into account:

• Profitability of the solution for the client (see – is monitoring worth it for me?). During discussions about needs, consultants may propose various monitoring options to ensure that the solution performs its functions while remaining within a reasonable budget.
• The scale of the project (as the range of services expands, the unit price decreases).
• The industry and associated costs required to obtain high-quality data. Combining certain products requires more work and tasks, particularly if names, codes, or parameters are not clearly defined in stores, such as plants with differently defined sizes, comparisons of clothing from different manufacturers, etc.

Automated e-commerce monitoring services are always designed according to the needs of the client. Currently, tracking the activities of competitors has become an essential element of online sales and beyond. Some sellers do this manually by browsing selected websites and products. However, such actions are either superficial or time-consuming, and the conclusions and decisions are often delayed. Automatic data collection is fast and accurate, and its cost is usually lower than the cost of human labor, while the precision and timeliness of the results allow for generating additional revenue through proper decision-making.

The easiest way to calculate the profitability of the solution is to divide its cost by the monthly sales revenue. This way, we will determine what percentage of the sales of 1 product we allocate to monitoring. If this amount is already profitable for us, we can assume that the increased revenue thanks to monitoring will further reduce this cost per product.

Monitoring services can be changed over time and flexibly adjusted to current needs and possibilities. Therefore, it can be planned in such a way that the solution brings the greatest profit without excessively burdening the current budget. Consultants with experience in various industries and types of clients will help to adjust the optimal monitoring model!

Price comparison websites often contain outdated data, especially regarding product availability. Stores often present products that they do not actually have to attract traffic to the website. On the other hand, not all of a store’s assortment is presented in offers outside the store.

The most commonly used model by customers involves monitoring a certain number of stores defined as the most significant competition (or sales network in the case of manufacturers). This provides the most reliable reference, and additionally monitors price comparison websites or marketplaces, which allows, among other things, to obtain information on the entire price range for a product, and to identify new sellers who offer this assortment.

Of course it is. All the data we provide is publicly available. We collect this data and present it to you in ready-made reports to speed up the work of your product managers. For those interested, we have a legal opinion analyzing the legal status of price monitoring.

Of course, price history is one of the most important pieces of information that allows predicting trends and creating pricing strategies. For the systematic development of online sales business, it is crucial not only to update prices but also to plan ahead of competitors’ movements. By tracking the history, one can optimally manage the inventory and prices during the periods of the biggest promotions, but also identify periods of weaker sales for specific product groups to complement the sales with other items.

In the user panel, the price history for the last 12 months is always available, but of course, the data can be exported if using historical data is reasonable.

Each seller modifies their offer over time, so it is natural that the list of products may change. It is possible to replace some products, add new ones, or make changes related to seasonal sales in some industries.

New sellers also appear on the market, so changes in monitoring sources during use are also possible.

Many clients using the tool find new ideas for optimal use of the tool, so it is also possible to adjust reports and the scope of collected product information to changing needs.

The key to effective use of the monitoring system is receiving information relevant to decision-making. If I manage prices for a certain group of products, categories, or stores, I want to have data on changes that are crucial for my efficient operation, instead of sifting through a vast amount of data, wasting time searching for indicators that interest me.

This is where notifications come in, both as cyclically generated reports from the area that interests me, but also as alerts about changes that require my reaction. The monitoring system allows for setting conditions whose occurrence will generate a notification. The most frequently desired information is:

• Detection that someone has lowered prices below a set percentage threshold
• A new seller has appeared who offers my products
• Stocks of certain products have run out in specific stores
• A new promotion has appeared for a particular group of products
• The product description has changed on one of my marketplace accounts, etc.

Such notifications can be sent as SMS and/or email with a summary of the data that interests us.

The mechanism of adjusting prices based on changing competition prices, known as dynamic pricing, is becoming more and more popular. It involves defining rules according to which prices are to be changed. For example, you may want to follow prices set by a specific competitor, not go below a certain margin, or have your prices be a certain % lower than the average price in observed sources. Sets of such rules are combined into algorithms that manage price changes for specific groups of products. They can differ for new products, mature products, fast and slow-rotating products.

The main benefit of using an automatic price change mechanism is the ability to maintain the highest possible margin while remaining competitive. The speed of changes and always maintaining the highest set price level allows for generating greater profits. In the case of manual changes, especially with a large number of products, achieving a similar effect is impossible.

The module itself retrieves data from price monitoring, calculates its own prices based on rules consistent with the pricing strategy, and updates your offers through integration with the store or sales platform account. Well-prepared rules can generate significant profits for the store!

Yes! The software allows for monitoring multiple different elements. Therefore, it is possible to divide the visibility of specific products, categories, and stores for the appropriate individuals, as well as access to the necessary functionalities for different departments of the company (sales, pricing, marketing, management).

In addition to adjusting the visible elements in the panel for different users, individual reports are often prepared and automatically sent to the email addresses of specific users. This way, they do not have to log into the system every time to receive key data for their area of work. This ensures systematization while saving time.

There is no perfect solution, as each system faces obstacles and limitations, especially since e-commerce monitoring systems inherently rely on data from various stores and platforms. Some of the errors that may occur include:

• Changes on the websites of monitored stores – here, an internal alert mechanism is used to monitor the accuracy and amount of data regularly retrieved, and any deviations are signaled, allowing for immediate identification of changes and adjustment of monitoring.
• Quality of offer descriptions by sellers – some stores or sellers do not include codes, change product names, or describe parameters in any way, especially in the case of so-called multi-item listings where information such as “6 pieces” or “6 x” or “six-pack” appear. Therefore, systems that rely solely on automatic search are less accurate. In the case of Brandly360, for each of the monitored sources, we verify the quality of offers presented in each source and teach the system to recognize and combine products based on effective parameters for a given source.
• “Difficult” categories and products – similar to the above, search criteria for some products are more blurred than for others, especially when monitoring similar products. The same features may have products that are not competing with each other at all. Here, direct cooperation with the client helps, as they often know best with which products they compete. Additionally, we can use the possibility of filtering not only by parameters related to the product itself but also by assuming specific price ranges, brands, etc.
• Difficulties in using the tool by users – employees often have many obligations. For salespeople, brand, product, or category managers, price analysis is just one element of their work. Using general analysis available in various tools can be time-consuming and require skills in their generation. Therefore, we establish with each client which people will use the tool, what data, and in what form they need it to make decisions quickly. This approach allows for the preparation of views and reports showing the most important comparisons, charts, comparisons, which protects clients from investing in a tool that is not being used or requires too many resources. In addition, employees often rotate, so we provide free training on using the system for each client if there is a need for it.
• Delays and data loss – timely delivery of data and their completeness is a key requirement for the system to perform its role. Data on promotions or price reductions provided after their completion may prove to be useless. Therefore, maintaining an appropriate, redundant infrastructure for monitoring and storing data is crucial. We treat this aspect with particular care, and it also constitutes a significant portion of our investments, to ensure that we do not disappoint the trust of customers, which is our priority.

Since the scope of monitoring is very wide, different important actions of competitors can be defined and observed. Reports informing about the following are most commonly used:

• price reductions of certain products, groups or categories of the competition,
• promotions of the competition that may affect our sales,
• information on who started the price reductions first (triggered the so-called price war),
• what products, industries and categories the competitors are investing in,
• which brands are being promoted in the observed stores,
• where manufacturers are investing and in which products,
• what are the price and promotional trends in different periods,
• what are the strengths and weaknesses of the competition (monitoring of opinions and ratings),
• identifying differences in the product portfolio (what the competition doesn’t have and you can maintain higher prices, and what is missing from your offer).

And many other pieces of information, often indicated by customers.

E-commerce monitoring allows you to observe specific online stores, marketplaces, comparison sites, and auction platforms. In the case of online stores, we always monitor those indicated by the client. These are usually the most important defined competitors or sales networks.

When monitoring sales platforms, on the other hand, the system searches for all offers of the observed products, showing all the sellers. Thanks to this, we have an overview of the entire market and can define new sellers whom we consider to be significant competition and observe them in detail. The list of monitored stores can be expanded and changed at any time, depending on the appearance or disappearance of competitors.