CatalogPulse — Competitor Assortment Intelligence for Shopify

Monitor competitor product assortments, pricing, and variant availability using publicly accessible Shopify catalog data.

CatalogPulse helps e-commerce teams, brands, agencies, and market researchers analyze Shopify competitors and detect changes between catalog snapshots.

Move beyond a basic product list. Understand what competitors offer, how their catalogs are priced, and which product variants have become available or unavailable.

What CatalogPulse Does

1. Analyze competitor assortments

• Retrieve product information from public Shopify catalog endpoints.
• Examine product titles, vendors, categories, tags, prices, and variants.
• Analyze product-category and vendor distributions.
• Explore pricing ranges, averages, medians, and price bands.

2. Detect catalog changes

When a compatible previous snapshot exists, CatalogPulse can identify:

• Products added between complete catalog snapshots.
• Products missing from a subsequent complete snapshot.
• Changes to product titles, vendors, and categories.
• Changes to minimum and maximum listed prices.
• Product variant additions and removals.
• Variant-level price changes.
• Variant availability changes, including unavailable-to-available and available-to-unavailable transitions.

Price comparisons are enabled only when currency verification succeeds and both snapshots use the same verified currency.

3. Compare repeated runs

CatalogPulse saves snapshots for future comparisons.

Run it again with the same store and compatible settings to compare current catalog data with previously collected data.

When a catalog is only partially retrieved, CatalogPulse reports changes to products present in both snapshots and suppresses unconfirmed product additions and removals.

4. Export detailed product data

Each successfully analyzed store produces one summary record in the default Apify Dataset.

Detailed product records are saved separately in the run's default Key-value store, in JSON files containing up to 250 products each.

Available data includes:

• Product IDs, names, URLs, vendors, and categories.
• Product tags and available timestamps.
• Minimum and maximum listed prices.
• Variant IDs, SKUs, options, and prices.
• Variant availability indicators.
• Snapshot coverage and currency information.

This structure supports downstream data analysis, dashboards, and AI-agent workflows.

Quick Start

1. Open CatalogPulse in Apify Console.
2. Enter one or more publicly accessible Shopify store URLs.
3. Choose the maximum number of products to retrieve per store.
4. Enable catalog comparison, variant details, and insights as needed.
5. Start the Actor.
6. Open the Output tab to explore summaries and product details.

Example Input

{
  "storeUrls": [
    "https://www.allbirds.com"
  ],
  "maxProductsPerStore": 250,
  "compareWithPrevious": true,
  "includeVariants": true,
  "includeInsights": true
}

Run the Actor again with the same settings to use the stored comparison history.

Understanding the Results

Competitive Catalog Reports

The default Dataset contains one CATALOG_SUMMARY record for each successfully analyzed store.

Important fields include:

Field	Meaning
storeUrl	Analyzed Shopify storefront
productCount	Number of retrieved products
currency	Verified currency, or null when unavailable
medianListedPrice	Median minimum listed product price
changeCount	Number of detected product-level change records
changes	Detailed change events
previousSnapshotFound	Whether a compatible history snapshot was found
priceComparisonEnabled	Whether verified currency permits price comparison
snapshotComplete	Whether catalog retrieval is complete
snapshotTruncated	Whether retrieval stopped at the configured limit
comparisonReliable	Whether both catalog snapshots were complete
productsRecordKeys	Keys for detailed product JSON files
insights	Assortment, category, tag, and pricing analysis
warnings	Coverage and comparison limitations

Product Details (JSON)

Use Output → Product details (JSON) to access detailed product files.

Product data is divided into chunks of up to 250 products.

For example, a run retrieving 251 products creates:

• One JSON file containing 250 products.
• A second JSON file containing 1 product.

Each file includes the store URL, retrieval timestamp, currency, chunk number, and product records.

Example Change Event

The following simplified example illustrates a detected variant availability change:

{
  "type": "PRODUCT_UPDATED",
  "title": "Women's Tree Breezer - Spice (Spice Sole)",
  "fields": [
    {
      "field": "variantAvailability",
      "variantId": "41376575291472",
      "before": true,
      "after": false
    }
  ]
}

This indicates that the Shopify storefront reported the variant as available in one snapshot and unavailable in the next.

It does not establish why the status changed or whether a sale occurred.

Important Limitations

• CatalogPulse is designed for Shopify stores with publicly accessible product endpoints. Some stores may restrict or block access.
• Analysis covers retrieved products. Truncated results do not represent the full catalog.
• Product additions and removals are reported only when both compared snapshots are complete.
• Availability reflects the storefront's reported status, not warehouse stock quantities, sales volume, or revenue.
• Prices are storefront-listed values. They may depend on market, location, or other storefront conditions.
• Currency verification uses sampled product checks and is not a guarantee of every possible pricing context.
• Product types and tags depend on the source store's metadata. Some categories may be missing, and tags may contain operational identifiers.
• A product appearing in a later snapshot is not necessarily a newly launched product.
• Comparison history requires compatible settings and accessible stored snapshots.
• Run-specific output files are subject to Apify storage retention policies.
• CatalogPulse does not send automatic email or messaging alerts. Recurring execution can be configured separately using Apify scheduling.

Use this Actor responsibly and respect applicable website terms, access restrictions, and laws.

Usage and Billing

CatalogPulse uses Apify's Pay-per-event pricing model.

• Competitor Catalog Report: $0.10 per successfully processed Shopify store.
• Actor Start: $0.00005 per run.
• Platform usage: Included, with no additional platform usage charges to users.

Each successfully analyzed store generates one CATALOG_SUMMARY record in the default Dataset.

Detailed product JSON files are stored separately in the run's Key-value store and do not create additional default Dataset item events.

For multiple stores, set a maximum run charge that accommodates the expected number of reports.

Pricing may change. Check the current Apify Store pricing before running large analyses.

Built for Competitive Intelligence Workflows

CatalogPulse is suitable for:

• E-commerce competitor research.
• Assortment and category benchmarking.
• Listed-price monitoring.
• Variant availability monitoring.
• Catalog-change reporting.
• Structured data feeds for analytics and AI workflows.

CatalogPulse — turn public Shopify catalog snapshots into actionable competitive intelligence.