Ask a retailer with 40,000 products how they set prices and they’ll tell you about their price intelligence feed. It holds millions of rival prices matched to their own SKUs and refreshed several times a day. Ask a store with 300 products and they’ll show you a spreadsheet nobody has opened since July.
Both are trying to answer the same question. What does the market charge, and where do we stand against it? The difference is how much of the answer each one needs.
Price intelligence is knowing what your competitors charge for the products you sell, and keeping that record over time. It includes the offers they run, what they have in stock and what they charge for shipping. Software collects it by reading rivals’ product pages on a schedule. It tells you where you stand and how the market moves, and it leaves the pricing decision to you.
What goes into it
A price on its own is the least useful part. A rival’s $40 jacket tells you little until you know it was $55 last week, that the cut came with a sitewide code and that it sold out two days later.
| What | Why it matters | Where it’s read |
|---|---|---|
| List price and sale price | The number a shopper compares | The product page, usually its structured data |
| Promotions | Many cuts never touch the product page. A code in a banner or a free gift over $50 is a price cut too | The homepage banners and the top bar |
| Stock | A rival selling out of something you sell sends shoppers your way. A restock ends it | The product page |
| Shipping and free-shipping minimums | A $2 cheaper product with $7 shipping isn’t cheaper | The shipping page and the cart rules shown on the site |
| New and dropped products | A rival’s range is a pricing decision too | Their collection pages, read weekly |
| History | One reading is a snapshot. A month of readings shows a habit | Kept by the tool |
The history is where the intelligence comes from. With a few months of it you can answer the questions that matter. Does this rival run a sale every month or only at Black Friday? How deep do they go? Do they cut the products you also sell, or only their own?
Four kinds of tool, and who each is for
Most tools sold as price intelligence do one of four jobs. They overlap, so check which job a tool is built around before you compare prices.
| Kind | What it does | Built for | Examples, with what their own pages said |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price monitoring | Reads rivals’ prices on products you choose and reports the moves | Stores and brands of any size | Pricefy: free for 50 SKUs, paid from $49 a month for 100 SKUs, prices updated twice a day. Prisync: from $99 a month for 100 products, updated 3 times a day |
| Repricing and dynamic pricing | Changes your own prices by rules when rivals move | Stores with large catalogs and price-led shoppers | Prisync’s dynamic pricing engine starts on its $199 plan, Pricefy’s repricing on its $99 plan |
| Market intelligence | Estimates rivals’ sales and covers whole markets you don’t add site by site | Brands planning ranges and launches | Particl: from $250 a month for 5 competitors, with SKU-level sales estimates and data updated daily |
| Price optimization | Sets prices from demand and price elasticity models, with rival prices as one input | Mid-size and enterprise retailers | Competera: quote only, competitor data billed per SKU delivered, scans several times a day |
All prices above were read on each vendor’s own pages on October 3, 2026, and the entry prices were checked again on October 5. They change, so check before you buy.
A small store rarely needs the bottom two rows. Sales estimates are a model of what a rival might sell, and a demand model needs months of your own sales data to say anything. What a small store needs is the first row, done well, and the decision kept in its own hands.
How much a small store needs
Big retailers track every SKU because a 1% move across 40,000 products is real money. A store with a few hundred products has different problems. It has three to six competitors that matter and a few dozen products shoppers really compare. And it has nobody whose job is to read a price feed.
So the useful version is smaller:
- A short daily list. The 10 to 50 rival products a shopper choosing among yours would weigh instead. These are the ones where a rival’s weekend sale costs you orders, so they’re worth reading every day.
- The rest of each rival’s site, weekly. New products, dropped products and slow price drift show up fine at a weekly pace.
- Every rival’s offers, daily. Codes and free gifts live in banners, not on product pages. A tool that only reads product pages misses half the cuts.
- Alerts for the moves that matter. A cut of 10% or more on a listed product, or a sell-out, the day it happens. Everything else can wait for a weekly summary.
- The source of every number. A price you can’t click back to is a price you can’t trust when you’re about to change your own.
Turning the record into decisions
Three patterns come up again and again.
A rival cuts a product you both sell. Wait a few days before you follow. Most cuts are sales with an end date. If it’s still there after a week and you’re losing orders on that product, decide where you want to stand. Competitor-based pricing has the three positions and a worked price index.
A rival sells out. Don’t cut your price. Make sure your product is easy to find. Shoppers who wanted theirs are already looking.
A rival runs the same sale every month. That’s their real price. Their list price is just the number they discount from. Compare yourself with what shoppers actually pay there most of the time.
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.
3 days free, then from $49 a month. Cancel any time.
What to ask before you buy
- Does it read promotions, or only product prices? A rival’s 20% code in a banner won’t show up in a tool that reads product pages only.
- How does it match products? Some ask you to paste each rival URL. Others suggest matches you check. Matching is most of the work, so see how it’s done in the trial.
- Does it change my prices? If you want that, buy a repricing tool. If you don’t, make sure the tool can’t.
- What happens when a rival blocks it? A good tool says so and keeps the last reading. A bad one quietly shows stale prices as current.
- Is the history kept? Price intelligence is the history. A tool that keeps 30 days can’t show you last Black Friday.
Where Over the Fence fits
Over the Fence does the monitoring and leaves pricing to you. It reads the rival products on your daily list every day (10 on Starter, 25 on Growth, 50 on Scale, for each site). It reads each rival’s homepage banners and offers every day too, and the rest of each rival’s website every week. Every reading is kept with the page it came from. A move of 10% or more on a listed product, or a sell-out, reaches you the day we see it. The weekly email brings at most three findings, each with what to do first.
It doesn’t reprice your products and it doesn’t estimate anyone’s sales. It does put prices next to what else your rivals did that week: their new pages, their Google rankings and how often Google’s AI Overviews cite them. Plans start at $49 a month with 3 days free.