Competitor price alerts that name the seller and the change

01Four alerts, four rules

Every price alert is about one product, in one region, from one seller, and each type has one rule:

• Price drop and price increase: a seller's cheapest offer moved by at least your threshold since that seller was last seen. The threshold is 5% unless you change it, so a 3% move raises nothing.
• Sale detected: a seller that was not on sale at its previous check now shows a discount. Either the source reports a former price or a percentage off, as Amazon and Google Shopping results can, or the price sits at least 15% below that seller's own average of the last 30 days (with at least 5 checks in that period).
• Target price reached: the cheapest offer that is not out of stock falls to or below a price you set for the product. It fires when the price crosses the target, not again on every check while it stays below.

Three related alerts have their own pages. Stock alerts tell you when a competitor sells out or restocks, on every plan. MAP monitoring raises violation alerts on Growth and up, and competitor ad monitoring raises one when a shop starts advertising a product you track.

02Each seller is compared with itself

One check of a product can return dozens of offers from different shops, and often several listings from the same shop. Comparing today's cheapest offer with the previous check's cheapest would report the gap between two shops as a price change. Pricebeeper keeps each comparison inside one seller: its cheapest offer now against its cheapest offer at its previous observation, in the same currency.

So if Shop A cuts an item from $50.00 to $45.00 while Shop B stays at $47.00, you get one alert: Shop A lowered its price by 10% to $45.00, was $50.00. Every alert names the seller, the region, the old and new price and the percentage.

A seller seen for the first time raises no change alert, because it has no earlier price to compare with. It can still set off a target price alert if it is cheap enough. Ads and sponsored placements never raise price alerts: they are recorded apart from sellers' offers, and so are search results that name no seller.

03Alert settings for each product and region

Alert settings belong to a product in a region, the same unit Pricebeeper bills as a slot. You can change them for every region of a product at once or for one region only.

1. 1

   Set a threshold

   The smallest change, in percent, that counts as a price drop or increase. It starts at 5%.

2. 2

   Add a target price

   Optional. When the cheapest offer in stock reaches it, you get one alert.

3. 3

   Choose the alert types

   Switch price drops, price increases, target prices, sales, sell-outs, restocks and the "most sellers sold out" alert on or off one by one.

4. 4

   Decide on email

   Turn "Email me" off for a product and its alerts show only in the app.

Alerts are graded by size so you can sort and filter them: a move of 20% or more is high impact, 10% to 20% is medium, anything smaller is low. Stock alerts are always medium. At most 10 alerts are raised per product and region in one check: target prices first, then the largest price and stock changes, then sales.

04Where alerts arrive

The alert email waits about 10 minutes after the first new alert and then carries everything raised in the meantime, so a check that finds many changes sends one email per person, not one per alert. Price alerts and competitor stock changes sit in separate sections. Each section lists up to 50 alerts and counts the rest, and alerts older than 7 days are never emailed, for example after an outage.

In the app, the Alerts page lists every alert with its type, seller, region and impact, with an unread filter, a count per type and a filter by product. Alerts can also be exported as CSV.

Slack and webhook destinations receive the same alerts. A webhook delivery is signed with HMAC-SHA256 in an X-Pricebeeper-Signature header (a timestamp plus a signature of the timestamp and the body) and carries a delivery ID that stays the same across retries, so your receiver can verify the sender and drop duplicates. Failed deliveries are retried up to 5 times with growing gaps. After 5 failed deliveries in a row the destination is switched off and the account owner gets an email. Free accounts get 1 destination and paid plans 10; API and integrations describes the payload.

The daily digest goes to the account owner at 08:00 UTC. It counts the last 24 hours of alerts by type, lists the 10 latest stock changes and the 10 latest other alerts, and shows the 5 products with the widest gap between the cheapest and the dearest in-stock seller. On a day when nothing was checked and no alert was raised, it isn't sent.

05Preferences, unsubscribes and teammates

Each person chooses what reaches them, separately for email and for the app: price alerts, stock alerts, MAP alerts, competitor ad alerts, repricing, the daily digest and system messages. Every alert email carries an unsubscribe link for its own category, and mail apps that support one-click unsubscribe show it. Leaving the stock section doesn't stop price alerts.

Alerts belong to the account, and the account owner receives them. Teammates with the "Alert emails" switch on get a copy of the same batch, filtered by their own preferences and with their own unsubscribe links. Only the owner and admins can add or change Slack and webhook destinations. Teams and security covers roles.

06How soon an alert follows a price change

An alert is only as fresh as the check behind it. On Free, your own page and pinned pages are read weekly. On Starter and Plus, known sellers are re-read from their own pages weekly, so a competitor's cut can take up to a week to reach you. Offers that update only at the monthly search, such as Amazon's, can take up to a month.

On Growth and up, every known seller of a product is re-read from its own page once a day, and the 5 cheapest offers and your pinned pages every 6 hours. Those re-checks raise the same alerts, so a cut by one of the 5 cheapest sellers is seen within 6 hours when its page can be read directly. Amazon pages never are. Daily and weekly re-checks explains which pages qualify.

The Check now button on a product re-reads its known offers and pinned pages on the spot, on every plan, and any change it finds raises alerts like a scheduled check. Searches for sellers run once a month on paid plans, so a new seller appears at the next monthly search, or straight away if you pin its page. Daily or hourly searches need the sales-led Custom plan.

07What price alerts don't do

• They don't see prices between checks. Where a seller is read weekly, a price that drops and recovers within the week can be missed; on offers that update only at the monthly search, within the month.
• A seller that appears for the first time with a low price doesn't raise a price drop, because it has no earlier price. A target price catches any in-stock offer below a figure you choose.
• Amazon prices come from the monthly search data, so Amazon sellers raise alerts only when a monthly search runs.
• A promotion with no reported discount that sits less than 15% below the seller's 30-day average reads as a price drop, not a sale.
• There is no text-message channel. A signed webhook can feed one of your own.

Tools that check known URLs several times a day can alert sooner on those pages: Prisync's pricing page lists 3 checks a day, PriceMole's 4. The Prisync comparison sets out that trade-off against Pricebeeper's search-based discovery.

Questions people ask