You already know you should watch rival prices. The hard part is doing the same check every week, on the same fields, so last Monday compares with this Monday.
This post is a competitor price monitoring checklist you can run in about 20–30 minutes. You will log list price, sale price, and promo badge text, plus free-shipping floors, stock status, and the URL you read. For the wider Monday routine across offers, search and ads, see how to track competitors.
Who this is for
Founders and one- or two-person ecommerce ops teams who sell online and share a few bestsellers with named rivals. If you already have a pricing team and MAP software, you probably need something heavier than a Monday sheet.
Before you start: lock the list
Pick three to six rival stores, and five to ten product pages per store that a shopper would weigh against yours. Match on size, form, fabric, or serving size so the pair is fair. Skip unmatched SKUs.
Write the exact product URL for each pair. Check that URL every week. Do not search the catalog fresh each Monday or you will compare different variants by accident.
The weekly checklist (in this order)
Do these steps on a fixed weekday. Morning works well because banners often refresh overnight.
1. Homepage and sale bar first (3–5 minutes per rival)
Open the rival homepage and the top bar. Log:
- Sitewide promo text (exact words on the badge or banner)
- Depth if shown (for example “20% off” or “$10 off”)
- Code if shown
- End date if shown
- Free-shipping line on the bar (threshold or “free shipping on everything”)
Many price cuts never touch the product page. They live here. If you skip this step, a quiet PDP drop and a sitewide sale look the same later.
2. Shared product pages (the core of the check)
For each paired URL, log:
| Field | What to write |
|---|---|
| Date | The day you checked |
| Rival | Store name |
| Your SKU / rival SKU | Short labels you reuse every week |
| Page URL | The exact PDP you opened |
| List price | The main / compare-at price on the page |
| Sale / strike price | The price a shopper pays today, if different |
| Promo badge on PDP | Exact badge text, or blank |
| In stock? | Yes / no / limited if the page says so |
| Bundle vs unit | Note if the price is for a multipack, kit, or subscription vs a single unit |
| Notes | One short line if something else matters |
Read the price a shopper sees on the public page. Skip JSON feeds and member-only prices. If a size or color changes the price, stick to the variant you paired last week.
3. Shipping threshold on the shipping or cart path (quick)
If the homepage bar did not show a free-shipping floor, open the shipping page or start a cart with one item. Log the free-shipping minimum to your main ship-to country.
A rival that left list prices alone but dropped free shipping from $75 to $50 changed the deal. Shoppers feel that as a price move even when the PDP number did not change.
4. Stock beside price
Mark sold-out or “notify me” next to the price row. A cut on a sold-out item means little until that rival can ship again. Do not set your own price off a page that cannot ship.
5. One line for the week
After the last URL, write one sentence: what moved, and whether you will do anything. Most weeks the right move is nothing. Keep the line anyway so next month you can see habits across quiet weeks.
How to record it (sheet columns only)
Use one row per rival product per week. Suggested columns:
week_date | rival | your_sku | rival_sku | page_url | list_price | sale_price | promo_badge | free_ship_threshold | in_stock | bundle_or_unit | week_note
Keep currency consistent. Do not invent sample dollars in the template; fill real numbers from the pages you open.
Optional helper columns once the sheet is familiar:
delta_vs_last_week(sale price this week minus last week)sitewide_banner(copied from step 1, so a PDP cut has context)
What a move usually means
Cut plus a sitewide banner
The rival is running a sale. Match only if that product is a true like-for-like and you care about that traffic this week. Plan the end date. Put your own price back when their sale ends.
Quiet PDP drop, no banner
This is often a lasting list change, a clearance, or a test on one SKU. Check whether nearby sizes or colors moved too. One quiet drop on your hero SKU is worth a decision. One drop on a slow variant can wait.
Sale price down, list price unchanged
They put a discount on top of the old list price. Compare yourself to the sale price while it runs, and to the list price when it ends.
Sold out, with or without a price cut
Do not chase the price. Check that your in-stock equivalent is easy to find and that shipping and returns copy are clear.
Free-shipping floor dropped, prices flat
Treat it as a price move for cart-sensitive shoppers. Decide whether your threshold still makes sense.
Price up
Note it. You may have room to hold or raise on that pair. You may also be looking at a temporary glitch or a variant mismatch. Confirm the URL and variant before you act.
For how to turn standing price gaps into rules (below / at / above the market), see competitor-based pricing. This checklist only gets the weekly facts clean.
Cadence and time budget
Run steps 1–5 above every week on your chosen weekday. Plan about 20 minutes for three rivals and five shared products each, or closer to 30 minutes if you watch six rivals or ten products each.
Once a month, add about 10 minutes to skim shipping and returns pages end to end, and to note any subscription discount on the PDPs you already watch.
If a week is chaos, do the homepage banners and your top three shared SKUs only. A thin week beats a skipped week.
See your competitors this week
Type your address. We find the sites that turn up next to yours in Google, in your country and language, and read them every week.
14 days free, then from $49 a month. Cancel any time.
When a spreadsheet stops being enough
A sheet works while the list is short and you still open every URL. It starts to fail when:
- You miss banners because you only open PDPs
- Two people edit different copies of the file
- You cannot remember which page a number came from a month later
- The list grows past what you can finish before standup
That is the honest handoff point to software. Competitor price monitoring at Over the Fence is built for a small rival set, read weekly, with the page each change came from. The wider ecommerce monitoring view adds pages, Google rankings, and AI Overview cites beside those prices. Plans start at $49 a month (Starter), with Growth at $119 and Scale at $249; 14 days free. Feature lines match the homepage: 3 / 6 / 12 competitors per site; prices of 10 / 25 / 50 rival products per site, weekly; up to 500 pages per website, checked weekly.
You can keep this checklist even if you never buy a tool. The fields stay the same; only who types them changes.
Soft next step
Run the checklist once this week on your real rival URLs. If the sheet already feels heavy, try Over the Fence for 14 days and keep the same fields in the Monday email instead.