Competitor Price & Stock Intelligence

See competitor price and stock changes, understand their commercial impact, and decide what to investigate next.

Monitor public ecommerce product and category URLs over repeated runs. The first run creates a baseline; later runs compare changes, score impact and urgency, and surface commercial opportunities. When several monitored pages change together, the Actor can group them into a coordinated competitor move.

Best for: ecommerce operators, pricing analysts, category managers and competitive-intelligence teams.

Which Northpeak monitor should you choose? This Actor checks the exact product/category URLs you provide and tracks price and stock signals over time. The separate Ecommerce Change Intelligence Actor focuses on broader page-change monitoring. Choose based on your monitoring workflow; neither Actor guarantees extraction on websites that block automated access.

Why it matters: A generic page monitor says something changed. Competitor Price & Stock Intelligence highlights which commercial move happened, estimates its impact, and provides a short decision brief so your team can prioritize its response.

What you get

• Price increases and drops, stockouts and restocks where the source page exposes usable signals
• Commercial impact score and urgency
• Competitor history and unusual-move signals
• Opportunity detection and concise decision briefs
• Aggregation of coordinated changes across multiple monitored pages

How to start

1. Add the public product or category page URLs you want to track.
2. Set a consistent monitorId for the project.
3. Run once to capture the baseline.
4. Run again later with the same URLs and monitorId to detect changes.
5. For ongoing monitoring, schedule recurring Actor runs in Apify. A one-time run does not continuously watch a page.

Data quality: If a product cannot be identified reliably, the Actor reports extraction_incomplete rather than claiming an unchanged price or stock state. Incomplete checks suppress unverified prices, availability claims, and commercial alerts. A page-wide sale banner is not proof of a discount on the monitored product; when product-level discount evidence is unavailable, discount is null (unknown), not true.

Important limitations: You supply the URLs; this Actor does not automatically discover competitor pages. First-run baselines are not historical changes. Results depend on publicly accessible page data, and commercial interpretation is an estimate rather than a confirmed competitor intention.

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Verified behavior

A two-run isolated validation in Apify successfully created a baseline and then detected a simulated 15% price cut, producing a price_cut commercial event and a decision brief. This validates the change-classification path, not the reliability of live extraction on every retailer. Live monitoring still depends on each site's publicly available data and access restrictions.

Technical details

Commerce Radar monitors competitor ecommerce pages and turns raw page changes into commercial decision signals.

Instead of only reporting that a price or stock value changed, the Actor classifies the move, scores impact and urgency, compares the move with the competitor's recorded behavior, and surfaces possible opportunities.

Core outputs

• commercialEvent — classified move such as price_cut, price_increase, stockout, or restock
• impactScore — 0–100 commercial significance score
• urgency — low, medium, or high
• strategyFingerprint — historical comparison and unusual-move detection
• opportunity — actionable signal such as competitor stock gap or pricing headroom
• decisionBrief — concise explanation of what happened and why it may matter

How it works

1. Run the Actor with competitor product/category URLs. The first run stores a baseline.
2. Run it again later with the same monitorId and URLs.
3. Changed pages are compared with the saved baseline.
4. Commerce Radar infers the commercial move and updates the competitor history.

Example input

{
  "urls": [
    "https://example.com/product/example-product"
  ],
  "monitorId": "competitor-a",
  "compareMode": "commerce",
  "outputMode": "all",
  "changeThreshold": 1,
  "maxPages": 10
}

Example intelligence result

{
  "status": "changed",
  "commercialEvent": {
    "eventType": "price_cut",
    "impactScore": 70,
    "urgency": "medium",
    "priceDeltaPercent": -20
  },
  "strategyFingerprint": {
    "unusualMove": true,
    "confidence": 70
  },
  "decisionBrief": "price cut detected (impact 70/100, urgency medium). This is unusual versus this competitor's recorded behavior."
}

Architecture

The Actor is HTTP-first and does not require a browser for ordinary HTML pages. Snapshots and strategy history are stored separately from the Ecommerce Change Intelligence Actor, so both products can operate independently.

Current scope

The MVP focuses on public ecommerce pages with extractable structured commerce data (JSON-LD) or visible price/availability signals. Shopify and other storefronts exposing standard product metadata are natural first targets.