Discovery finds sellers, re-checks follow them
Two different jobs keep a product's offers current. Discovery is a search of Google Shopping and Amazon, bought from DataForSEO, a paid data provider. It finds who sells the product and at what price, and it runs once a month on every paid plan because each search is billed. One monthly search per product and region serves every account that tracks it.
A re-check reads a seller Pricebeeper already knows straight from that seller's product page, from our own servers. No search is bought, so it can run between searches: weekly on Starter and Plus, daily on Growth and up. The price, stock and sale it reads go into the same seller history as the monthly search, so the price chart keeps one line per seller.
| Plan | New sellers (discovery) | Known sellers | 5 cheapest offers and pinned pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | No search | No search results to follow | Pinned pages weekly |
| Starter and Plus | Monthly | Weekly | Weekly |
| Growth, Pro and Business | Monthly | Daily | Every 6 hours |
| Custom | Daily or hourly, by contract | Daily | Every 6 hours |
Which offers get re-checked
Not every search result can or should be re-read. After each discovery, Pricebeeper picks the offers worth following:
- Sellers' offers only. Ads, sponsored placements and search listings that name no seller are left out.
- Offers in the region's currency, in new condition, and between half and double the median price, which drops accessories and mislabeled listings.
- One offer per seller, the cheapest, and never your own store.
- Only offers with a store page Pricebeeper may read. Amazon offers, and Google results without a link to the seller's page, update only at the monthly search.
From a keyword search that leaves up to 15 offers: the 5 lowest, 5 around the median and the 5 highest. From a product matched to a Google product ID, every seller that passes those rules is kept, with the 5 cheapest and the 5 dearest at either end. Exact product matching explains how products get matched.
A monthly list of up to 40 sellers
On every paid plan, the monthly search asks for the sellers of a matched product: Google's seller list up to 40 deep, and the sellers of the Amazon ASIN. Until the next search, each seller on the Google list whose page can be read is re-checked from that page, weekly on Starter and Plus and daily on Growth and up. Keyword searches for products not yet matched also run monthly.
The saved list belongs to the product and the region, not to one account. When another slot of the same product in the same region starts, on your account or anyone else's, it joins the saved list instead of buying a new one. It receives the list as of the day it was pulled and each seller's latest page read, recorded as history without alerts, and is re-checked on its own plan's schedule from then on.
The cheapest offers every 6 hours
On Growth and up, the 5 cheapest offers of each search and your pinned competitor pages are read every 6 hours instead of once a day. They are the prices that decide where you rank. On Starter and Plus, they are read weekly like the other known sellers.
Not every read becomes a history row. A read is recorded when it is the first of the day, when the price or stock changed, or when the page says sold out. Reads that change nothing only update the time the offer was last checked, which keeps charts and exports readable.
Check now, on every plan
Every product page has a Check now button, on every plan. It re-reads the product's known offers and pinned pages from the stores straight away. Pages anyone read in the last 15 minutes are skipped, and one click reads at most 200 pages.
A new seller still appears at the next monthly search, or straight away if you pin its page. Check now allows 30 clicks an hour on paid plans and 10 on Free, with a ceiling of 100 a day.
How competitor stores are treated
A re-check is a visit to someone else's shop, so it follows rules that keep the load small:
- robots.txt first. Every page, and every redirect, is checked against the store's robots.txt for our crawler, PricebeeperBot. If robots.txt can't be loaded, the store is treated as closed to us and asked again an hour later.
- One request per store at a time, at least 5 seconds apart, across all accounts. A page read once serves every region and account that follows it.
- Light reads. Shopify stores are read from their public product data and WooCommerce stores from their public Store API; other pages from the structured data in the page. Pages over 3 MB are skipped.
- Backing off. 3 failed reads in a row put a page on hold for 7 days, with the monthly search data in the meantime. A robots.txt refusal or a bot challenge marks the store as blocking checks. 10 failures on one store in a day pause every read of it for 24 hours.
- Never Amazon. Amazon pages are not fetched at all. Amazon prices come from the monthly search data.
Safeguards on what a re-check can change
- A location check. The first read of each offer is compared with the price the region's search showed, within 1%. If they agree, the page is re-checked for every region on the plan's schedule. If the store shows our servers a different price than shoppers in that region see, the offer updates only at the monthly regional search, labeled Monthly (regional price).
- The lowest market price only goes down. A few re-checked sellers aren't the whole market, so a re-check can lower a product's lowest market price but never raise it, and never with a sold-out offer. The next discovery sets it again.
- Sell-outs need two readings. Store pages flicker, so a sold-out reading from a store's page raises a stock alert only when the next reading agrees.
- Market statistics leave them out. Re-checks are seller histories. Market averages, the category index and regional arbitrage leave them out, so one store read 4 times a day doesn't outweigh the market.
What you see on the product page
Each offer in the offers table carries a badge for how it is kept current: Checked daily, Checked every few hours, Monthly (regional price) or Monthly (store blocks checks). Pinned pages show Store's online price. A line above the table says how many offers are checked daily or more often, and why the rest aren't.
Price alerts compare each seller's price with that same seller's previous price, whether the new reading came from a search or from the store's page. One difference: a sale seen only on a store's page is recorded but doesn't raise a sale alert; sale alerts come from the search data.
Limits to plan around
- New sellers appear only when a search runs, once a month on standard plans. A shop that starts selling your product the day after a search can take a month to show up, unless you pin its page or use Custom.
- Amazon offers aren't re-checked; they update at the monthly search on every paid plan.
- Stores that block automated checks, or show different prices by location, update only at the monthly search.
- Pages that show their price only after JavaScript runs, with no structured data, can't be read, so those offers also wait for the monthly search.
Several self-serve tools list more frequent checks of every tracked product: Prisync 3 times a day on its URL plans, Pricefy twice, PriceMole 4 times and Boardfy every 30 minutes to 3 hours, according to their pricing pages. Tools that search several times a day find a new seller much sooner than a monthly search. Pricebeeper's case is that known sellers are re-read weekly or daily at a low price, with up to 40 sellers per matched product. If prices in your category move by the hour, read the Boardfy and PriceMole comparisons, or look at the Custom plan on the pricing page.
Questions people ask
How often does Pricebeeper check competitor prices?
A monthly search, then weekly or daily re-checks. Paid plans search for sellers once a month. Between searches, known sellers are re-read from their own pages weekly on Starter and Plus, and daily on Growth, Pro, Business and Custom, with the 5 cheapest offers and pinned pages every 6 hours. Custom can add daily or hourly searches. On every plan, Check now re-reads a product's known pages on demand.
Is a daily re-check the same as daily discovery?
No. Discovery searches Google Shopping and Amazon and can find a seller that is new. A re-check reads the pages of sellers already found. On Growth, Pro and Business, discovery is monthly and re-checks are daily, so a known seller's price change shows up the next day, while a new seller appears at the next monthly search. On Starter and Plus, re-checks are weekly.
Why is an offer labeled Monthly (regional price)?
Because the store's page shows our servers a different price than the one Google Shopping showed shoppers in your region. Reading that page directly would record the wrong regional price, so the offer updates only at the monthly regional search instead. The next search checks again and puts it back on re-checks if the prices agree.
Does Pricebeeper re-check Amazon prices daily?
No. Pricebeeper never fetches Amazon pages, so Amazon prices come only from the monthly search data on every paid plan. A product matched to its ASIN gets the sellers of that exact ASIN at each monthly search. Sellers found on Google Shopping are the ones re-checked between searches, from their own sites, where their pages can be read.
Do re-checks respect robots.txt?
Yes. Every page and every redirect is checked against the store's robots.txt for PricebeeperBot, and a store whose robots.txt can't be loaded is treated as closed. Each store gets one request at a time, at least 5 seconds apart, and repeated failures pause reads of a page or a whole store.
Does Check now cost extra?
No. Check now is included on every plan, Free too. It allows 30 checks an hour on paid plans and 10 on Free, up to 100 a day, and skips pages read in the last 15 minutes. It re-reads the pages Pricebeeper already knows; new sellers still come from the monthly search or from a page you pin.
Related features
- 01Competitor price monitoringFind the sellers of your products on Google Shopping and Amazon, and track their prices by region.
- 02Pinned competitor pagesPaste a competitor's product URL and Pricebeeper reads its price, stock and sale price from the store's own page.
- 03Barcode and exact product matchingMatch each product to its Google Shopping product and Amazon ASIN by barcode, then track the sellers of that item.
- 04Competitor stock alertsKnow when a competitor runs out of a product you sell, and when it has the product back in stock.
- 05Price and sale alertsAn alert when a competitor cuts or raises a price, starts a sale, or reaches the target price you set.
- 06Data sources and data qualityEvery price is labeled with its source and kind, and a data-quality view flags stale data and sources that disagree.
How Pricebeeper compares
- 01Pricebeeper vs PrisyncPrisync tracks the URLs you give it 3 times a day. Pricebeeper finds the sellers for you, by country or state.
- 02Pricebeeper vs PriceMolePriceMole re-crawls every competitor 4 times a day from $99 for 100 SKUs. Pricebeeper checks less often and costs less.
- 03Pricebeeper vs BoardfyBoardfy re-checks every 30 minutes to 3 hours, per channel. Pricebeeper covers Google Shopping and Amazon in one slot.
- 04Pricebeeper vs PricefyPricefy updates prices twice a day and is cheaper past 3,000 products. Pricebeeper tracks by state and starts at $39.
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