Competitor Price Monitor — Wiser Alternative

Monitor prices and availability on known competitor product pages. Export price, currency, source URL, timestamp, and same-currency gaps against your supplied price for a reviewable pricing snapshot. For pricing analysts, each dataset row is one accepted competitor product page with its observed price and comparison signal.

Workflow: put the results to work

Supply product pages you have already checked for comparability. Add your price and currency to calculate a same-currency gap, then review price and availability together. The Actor observes pages; matching equivalent SKUs and deciding whether to change a price remain separate steps.

Best fit

Use when a pricing analyst, retailer, or brand already has a short list of comparable public product URLs and needs a reproducible price snapshot for a spreadsheet, BI workflow, or internal review. Pair it with a source-specific catalog Actor for URL discovery, or choose a managed price-intelligence suite for automated matching, currency conversion, retained history, alert delivery, MAP enforcement, and repricing operations.

It returns public price, availability, product identifiers when present, source and canonical URLs, collection time, and an explicit comparison state. A row is billable only after both a public product title and a current price have been validated and written to the dataset.

Choose a dedicated marketplace Actor when you need a site-specific search, catalog, or reviews workflow. Choose Wiser when you need its managed matching, managed historical coverage, suite dashboards, reports, collaboration, MAP enforcement, or automated retail workflows.

Input

targets is the only required field. Each object must contain one public product-detail URL. The caller, not the Actor, decides which URLs refer to comparable products.

{
    "targets": [
        {
            "comparisonId": "wireless-headset-100",
            "retailer": "Example Retailer",
            "productUrl": "https://example.com/products/wireless-headset",
            "ownPrice": 100,
            "currency": "USD"
        }
    ],
    "alertThresholdPercent": 5,
    "maxConcurrency": 3,
    "proxyConfiguration": {
        "useApifyProxy": true,
        "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]
    }
}

alertThresholdPercent sets alert: true when a same-currency competitor is lower by at least that percentage of ownPrice. The Actor will not calculate a price difference when either currency is missing (currency_unknown) or when they differ (currency_mismatch).

Output

Each dataset item is one current public product-page observation.

Field	Meaning
competitorPrice, competitorCurrency	Current public price and currency when exposed by the page.
originalPrice, availability	Public promotion and stock signals when exposed.
sku, gtin, brand	Public product identifiers and brand when exposed.
ownPrice, priceDelta, priceDeltaPercent	Caller-provided own price and a calculation only for comparable currencies.
comparisonStatus, alert	Explicit result of the price-gap rule; never an automatic repricing instruction.
matchStatus	Always states that the comparable URL was caller-supplied and unverified.
extractionMethod, retrievalMethod	Structured-data or metadata parser used, plus whether static HTML or the rendered-page fallback produced the row.
sourceUrl, canonicalUrl, collectedAt	Evidence and freshness fields for review.

{
    "comparisonId": "wireless-headset-100",
    "retailer": "Example Retailer",
    "productTitle": "Wireless Headset",
    "competitorPrice": 89.99,
    "competitorCurrency": "USD",
    "availability": "in_stock",
    "ownPrice": 100,
    "ownCurrency": "USD",
    "priceDelta": 10.01,
    "priceDeltaPercent": 10.01,
    "comparisonStatus": "competitor_lower_than_own",
    "alert": true,
    "matchStatus": "user_supplied_comparable_url_unverified",
    "sourceUrl": "https://example.com/products/wireless-headset",
    "collectedAt": "2026-09-07T12:00:00.000Z",
    "provenance": "public_product_page"
}

Every run also writes OUTPUT and RUN_SUMMARY in the default key-value store. Terminal outcomes are COMPLETE, PARTIAL, VALID_EMPTY, INVALID_INPUT, UPSTREAM_FAILED, or CONFIG_ERROR. A successful platform run alone is not evidence of useful data: inspect the dataset and these terminal records.

A practical workflow

• Start with a reviewed list of public competitor product URLs for one SKU group.
• Attach your own price and ISO currency to each known comparison, then run the Actor.
• Filter the dataset for alert: true, open each source URL, and confirm the product match, variant, delivery conditions, and promotion before acting.
• Save the reviewed input as an Apify task, schedule it at the useful cadence, and send OUTPUT or filtered dataset results to your reporting or alerting workflow.

The Actor is read-only. It never changes prices, contacts retailers, opens accounts, purchases goods, or sends messages.

API example

Use the Apify API with your own token; never place a token in a task example or shared dataset.

curl -X POST 'https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/khadinakbar~wiser-alternative/runs?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "targets": [{
      "comparisonId": "wireless-headset-100",
      "productUrl": "https://example.com/products/wireless-headset",
      "ownPrice": 100,
      "currency": "USD"
    }],
    "alertThresholdPercent": 5
  }'

Retrieve the default dataset and the OUTPUT record from the execution response before you make a pricing decision.

AI-agent / MCP prompt card

For each provided public competitor product URL, return the latest validated price, currency, availability, source URL, collection time, and comparison status. Treat every match as unverified until the caller confirms the product identity, and keep commercial decisions behind human review.

An AI agent should inspect the dataset plus OUTPUT before continuing. PARTIAL, VALID_EMPTY, INVALID_INPUT, and UPSTREAM_FAILED are deliberate outcome signals; retry a corrected public URL or route a source-specific retailer to its dedicated workflow.

Limits and recovery

Public product pages can vary by location, login state, selected variant, tax, shipping, inventory, and promotion. The Actor tries lightweight static HTML first, then uses a session-consistent rendered-page fallback when static retrieval yields an incomplete observation. It accepts a row when both title and price validate. For PARTIAL output, confirm the accepted source rows and retry the unresolved URLs with a lower concurrency setting. Keep login-gated, consent-gated, and private-account pages in an authorized workflow designed for that access mode.

Builder's note

I built the acceptance rule around a practical lesson from testing retail pages: a request that returns HTML is still incomplete until both the product title and current price validate. That is why persistence and the observation charge happen together, while every accepted row keeps its source URL, collection time, extraction method, and retrieval method for review.

Every live dataset row carries its own sourceUrl and collectedAt value; the row is the evidence for the current public observation. Verify the source page and the private release records before using results commercially.

How it compares with Wiser Solutions

This independent Actor is not affiliated, associated, sponsored, or endorsed by Wiser Solutions. Wiser’s public materials describe a broader price-intelligence offering with managed matching, monitoring, reports, alerts, and retail operations. The comparison below is limited to a short, caller-supplied public product-page snapshot.

Decision dimension	This Actor	Wiser Solutions Price Intelligence
Scope	Reads a bounded list of public URLs and returns price observations.	Broader pricing-intelligence workflows and managed operations.
Billing and same-job cost	Pay per validated observation plus platform usage; inspect the live Pricing tab for current rates.	Public materials direct buyers to a demo; this Actor makes no lower same-job cost claim without a comparable quote.
Effective efficiency	A compact JSON dataset can be produced for each supplied page, but the caller still confirms product equivalence.	Managed matching and broader analysis can be the better fit when match quality and coverage matter more than a short URL-led snapshot.
Input friction	Requires known comparable URLs and optional own-price context.	Wiser describes automated matching and custom workflows; it may reduce manual target preparation for an approved enterprise program.
Output contract	Exposes source URLs, collection times, nulls, and named terminal outcomes for downstream review.	Wiser describes flexible UI, reports, and integrated insight workflows.
Automation	Read-only extraction; users may compose reviewed inputs with Apify tasks, schedules, APIs, and webhooks.	Wiser describes real-time monitoring, alerts, and broader retail operations.
Freshness and provenance	Each row carries its collection time and source URL; no historical continuity is implied by one run.	Wiser describes configurable recurring monitoring and managed historical analysis.

Data-use boundary

For responsible use, collect only publicly accessible product information that you are authorized to access and collect. Respect retailer terms of service, robots guidance where applicable, local law, and your organization’s pricing and competition policies. Verify product identity, currency, tax, shipping, promotions, variants, availability, and MAP requirements before taking any commercial action.

Pricing and run costs

This Actor uses Pay per event plus Apify platform usage. The Pricing tab lists the current event rates and billing terms.

Event	Billing unit	When it applies
apify-actor-start	Actor Start	Charged when the Actor starts running. Number of events charged depends on Actor memory (one event per GB, minimum one event).
price-observation	Validated price observation	One public product page with a validated title and current price persisted to the dataset. Invalid pages and request failures are not charged as observations.

Run cost combines the charged events and Apify platform usage. Review the run charge limit and requested result count before starting.

Connect an AI agent

Use the Apify MCP configurator to choose an available client connection. Inspect this Actor’s current input schema and required credentials before running it.