Pinned competitor pages: track the rivals you already know

01When a pin is the right tool

Paid plans find competitors by searching Google Shopping and Amazon for each product once a month. Pins cover what that search misses or hasn't reached yet, and the rivals you want watched more closely:

• A competitor that doesn't list on Google Shopping, or lists only part of its range there.
• A regional chain whose website you check by hand today.
• A new competitor you have just spotted: a pin tracks it from its first read, where the search would find it at the next monthly run.
• The 2 or 3 shops whose prices you follow closely, where a read every 6 hours on Growth matters more than a monthly search.
• The Free plan, which has no search: pins are how free accounts track competitors.

02Pinning a page takes four steps

1. 1

   Open the product

   The product's page has a Competitors you track card. It shows how many pages are pinned and your plan's limit per product.

2. 2

   Paste the URL

   Paste the competitor's product page. Tracking parameters and anything after # are removed. Add a name if you like; otherwise the shop's domain is used.

3. 3

   Test it

   Test reads the page once, right then, and shows the price, currency and stock it found, or a plain reason it couldn't, such as a robots.txt refusal or no price on the page.

4. 4

   Track it

   Track saves the pin and queues its first read straight away.

A pin is read only while its product is monitored in at least one region. Its prices are recorded for each of the product's regions under the name you gave it; through the API, a pin can be limited to some of those regions.

03What Pricebeeper reads from the page

Each page is read the lightest reliable way the store's platform allows, and the method is remembered for that store for 24 hours:

• Shopify stores: the store's public product data, with the variant's price, its compare-at price (recorded as a sale) and stock. A URL with ?variant= is read for that variant; otherwise for the first variant in stock.
• WooCommerce stores: the store's public Store API, variations included. If a security plugin blocks the API, Pricebeeper reads the page instead.
• Any other page: the structured data in the page (JSON-LD, microdata and OpenGraph price tags), with price, currency, stock, condition and a list price (recorded as a sale) where the page states them.

When a page can't be read, the pin says why in plain words: the store blocks automated checks, its robots.txt doesn't allow them, the page wasn't found, there was no price on it, it was too large, or the store took too long to answer. Pricebeeper never shows the store's own error text.

04How often pins are read

On Free, Starter and Plus, pins are read once a week. On Growth and up, a read becomes a history row 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 it was last checked. Check now re-reads all of a product's pins on demand, skipping pages read in the last 15 minutes. Daily and weekly re-checks of the sellers found by search use the same reader.

05Adding many pages from a CSV file

The API's bulk endpoint takes a CSV file of pins: a competitor_url (or url) column, a product_id, sku or gtin column to find your product, and an optional label. A file can hold up to 2,000 rows and 2 MB. A product is found by its Pricebeeper ID, by the store or feed ID it was imported with, or by its barcode.

The answer counts the pins created, the duplicates, the rows over your plan's limit and the invalid rows, and lists each problem by line number. Each upload counts toward the 20 imports an hour allowed per account. For shops moving from a tool that tracks URLs, this is most of the switch. API and integrations covers keys and the documentation.

06Pausing, resuming and plan changes

• Pause a pin to stop reading it without losing its history, and resume it when you want it back.
• Resuming is refused while the product already has as many active pins as your plan allows.
• After a downgrade, the newest pins over the new limit pause on their own and are marked as over your plan's limit. When the limit grows again they resume, oldest first; pins you paused yourself stay paused.
• A page that fails 3 times in a row is held for 7 days and then tried again. A store that blocks checks is labeled that way, with the date of the next try.

Each pin shows one of five states: OK, Waiting for first check, Check failed, Store blocks checks or Paused, with the last price, stock and time it was read.

07How pinned prices are used

A pin's reads land in the product's offers table with a Store's online price badge and your name for the competitor. They form a seller line on the price chart and raise price alerts and stock alerts like any other seller. A sold-out reading needs a second one in a row before it alerts, because store pages flicker. A sale price on a pinned page is recorded but doesn't raise a sale alert.

Two rules keep pins in proportion. A pin is one store's online price rather than a regional search result, so it can lower a product's lowest market price but never raise it, and it stays out of market averages. And a pin isn't an exact match: for MAP monitoring, a pinned store's price below MAP opens a violation only when that store is on your seller list.

08Tracking competitors on the Free plan

Free costs nothing and includes 50 slots in 1 region, checked weekly. It doesn't search Google Shopping or Amazon, so its competitors come from pins: up to 3 per product, or 150 competitor pages across a full Free catalog, read weekly along with your own product page.

When you want the sellers found for you, Starter adds the Google Shopping and Amazon search for $39 a month and raises the limit to 5 pins per product. The pricing page compares the plans.

09Limits of pinned pages

• Amazon pages can't be pinned; Amazon prices come from the monthly search on paid plans. Google Shopping and search result pages can't be pinned either: pin the store's own page.
• Pages that load their price with JavaScript and carry no structured data can't be read, and neither can pages behind a login.
• A store whose robots.txt disallows automated checks is respected, not worked around.
• A pin records the price the store shows our servers, which may differ from what shoppers in a given state see.
• One pin follows one variant. Pin the variant's own URL when size or color changes the price.
• Pins are per product. Watching a competitor's whole range takes one pin per product, or the search on paid plans.

Questions people ask