Price Monitoring Setup Checklist
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A step-by-step checklist for setting up competitor price monitoring at an online store, from goals and competitor selection to guardrails and a review schedule.

[ ] Write down why you are monitoring: protecting margin, catching promotions, checking MAP compliance, or building a price history. Pick the one or two that matter most.
[ ] List the three to eight sellers your customers actually compare you against, using search and shopping results, support conversations, and return reasons as sources.
[ ] Remove sellers that do not really compete: no reviews, very long shipping times, or a category they treat as an afterthought.
[ ] Tier your catalog: tier one for revenue drivers and reference products, tier two for the middle, tier three for the long tail.
[ ] Set a check cadence per tier. Most small and mid-sized stores land between daily and weekly for the core catalog; see /blog/how-often-check-prices/ for the trade-offs.
[ ] Match each tracked product to the exact competitor listing: same size, color, pack quantity, and condition. Use manufacturer part numbers or UPCs wherever they exist.
[ ] Add a review step for every new product match and a way to flag suspicious ones, such as a price that is suddenly a fraction of everyone else's.
[ ] Choose a collection method that fits your size: manual checks, a spreadsheet routine, in-house automation, or a dedicated monitoring service.
[ ] Confirm your collection respects each competitor's terms of service, keeps request volumes low, never bypasses logins or access controls, and never collects personal data.
[ ] Ban pretext tactics: no staff posing as customers to extract pricing, and no contacting competitors under false pretenses.
[ ] For every price recorded, capture the timestamp, whether it was a sale price, the shipping terms shown, and the stock status.
[ ] Note where a competitor's displayed price might differ from what a shopper pays: logged-in pricing, regional pricing, tax display, and cart-only promotions.
[ ] If you resell under a MAP policy, save a copy of the policy and know how to document a violation; see /blog/map-policies-explained/.
[ ] Set a cost-based floor price for every tracked product using /tools/repricing-floor-price/, not a round number.
[ ] Set a ceiling price so an upward move during a competitor stockout never becomes an embarrassing outlier.
[ ] Define a maximum price change per day so a single bad data point cannot cause a large swing.
[ ] Build an exclusion list: MAP-restricted items, clearance, and products in the middle of a promotion.
[ ] Write a data-quality rule: if the competitor price that would trigger a change looks like an error, hold and alert instead of acting.
[ ] Start at the alerts-only stage. Let a person make every change until you have seen a few weeks of rule suggestions.
[ ] Decide in advance which products can move to automated changes within narrow bounds, and who reviews them daily.
[ ] Keep a single switch or procedure that turns all automated repricing off in one action.
[ ] Schedule a monthly review of gross margin per tier, conversion on monitored products, and the share of the catalog within a reasonable band of the competitor set.
[ ] Assign an owner for the process and a backup, so monitoring continues when one person is on vacation.