Competitor URLs

Nobody else sells on your own store, so you paste the web address of a competitor’s product page onto a listing and the Repricer reads that price for you.

On a marketplace, the channel tells the Repricer what every other seller is charging. On your own store nobody else is selling next to you, so no such list exists. A strategy that prices against a competitor has nothing to read.

A competitor URL closes that gap for you. You paste the web address of a competitor’s product page onto one of your listings. From then on the Repricer opens that page every few hours, reads the selling price off it, and keeps the latest one. Your strategy prices against the cheapest of the pages you added, the same way it would price against the cheapest offer on a marketplace.

You do this on the listing itself. Click Listings in the sidebar, click the product title on a row to open the listing, and click Competitors in the row of tabs at the top of that dialog. On a listing from your own store, that tab is your list of competitor URLs, one row each, with the last price read off every one.

Before you start

What your role lets you do

Adding, pausing, renaming or removing a competitor URL needs your Admin, Manager or Editor role in the Repricer. An Analyst gets the same table with no buttons on it. Your role is set per product in team, roles and permissions.

Which listings can have competitor URLs

Only your listings on your own store, which means Shopify, BigCommerce, eBay and Square. Your Amazon and Walmart listings get the competing offers from the channel itself, so there is nothing to add and no place to add it.

There is a second condition, and it catches people. The Competitors tab, in the row of tabs at the top of the listing dialog, appears on an own-store listing only while the strategy you assigned to it prices against a competitor. Assign a strategy set to Cost-based pricing and your tab goes away. That strategy builds a price from your cost and never looks at anybody else. See competitors for what the tab shows on each kind of listing.

How to add a competitor URL

1. 1

   Open the listing

   Click Listings in the sidebar, then click the product title on the row you want. Your listing opens in a dialog over the table.

2. 2

   Open your competitor list

   Click Competitors in the row of tabs across the top of that dialog, after Insights.

3. 3

   Start a new one

   Click Add URLs in the toolbar above the table. On a listing with nothing on it yet, you get the same button in the middle of the empty table instead.

4. 4

   Paste the web address

   A dialog opens with two boxes side by side. Put the full address of the competitor’s product page in the wide box on the left. In the narrow box on the right, give that competitor a short name if you want one.

5. 5

   Save it

   Click Add at the bottom right. The dialog closes and your row appears in the table.

That is the whole task. Your new row starts at the status Pending. The Repricer reads the page within the next few minutes, and your price and both date columns fill in on their own. Your strategy starts counting that price as soon as the first reading works.

Everything below explains the table, the six statuses and the timing one at a time. You do not need any of it to add a competitor.

Every option in detail

Adding several competitors at once

The dialog that opens from Add URLs, in the toolbar above your competitor table, takes more than one row. Click + Add another under the last row for another pair of boxes. You can also paste a list of addresses, one per line, into any address box, and each line becomes its own row. The line above the boxes tells you how many more you can add, and rows stop appearing once you get there.

The × at the right end of a row takes that row back out before you save. Press Enter in a filled last row and you get another row. Press Enter anywhere else and your rows are saved.

Add at the bottom right saves every row at once, and it counts what you filled in, so two rows give you a button reading Add 2. Nothing is saved until you click it, so Cancel at the bottom left loses whatever you typed. A row with a problem in it stops your whole save. You get a message under that address saying what is wrong, and those messages have their own section further down.

Reading the competitor URL table

The table on the Competitors tab has one row per competitor page. Your rows are sorted by price, cheapest first, so the top row is the lowest price you know about.

Directly above the rows you get the same toolbar every table in the Repricer has, with Search, Columns, Filter and Density on it. See filters for what each one does. Click a column header to sort by that column instead of by price.

A price on a page in another currency gets converted for you. You get the price the way that page shows it, then what it comes to in your listing’s currency, on the same line.

What each status means

The Status column of that table is one badge with a tooltip on it. You can get six values, and the Repricer works them out from your last few readings rather than from anything you set.

A row keeps its last price on screen whatever the status says, so you can get an old number under a Failing badge. Last Checked is how you tell how old that number is.

How often each page is checked

Every competitor page is on its own clock, and your first reading happens within minutes of adding it. After that the gap depends on how much work that page takes to read. A page that answers quickly gets read every 4 hours, and a heavy one gets read every 12. Most are in between, at 6 or 8 hours.

The Next Check column shows you both halves of that. On the left is a countdown to your next reading, and beside it is the gap it settled into, written as Runs every 6h. Hover the gap for a sentence saying why that page got that number. A page you have never had a reading for shows nothing here, because the gap is decided by the first one.

When a reading is late, the countdown is replaced by Overdue in orange. A few minutes of that is normal, because readings are collected in rounds. Hours of it, with a Stale status beside it, is worth a look.

Pausing a competitor without losing it

Every row of your competitor table has its own actions at its right end. On a narrow window you get them behind a button of three dots in the same place.

Pause stops the readings on that one row and takes its price out of what your strategy compares against. Your row stays where it is, the last price it read stays on screen, and the status becomes Paused. Resume in the same place starts your readings again. It also sets the failure count back to zero, so a page you have fixed gets a fresh run of tries.

Pause a competitor when their page is no use to you for now. A competitor out of stock, with their price cut to something you would never match, is the usual reason. Remove one when you are done with it for good.

Renaming a competitor

Edit label, in the actions at the right end of the row, opens a small dialog with a Label box, up to 100 characters. This is only a name for your own reading of the table, so nothing about the price or the schedule changes when you save it. Clear the box and save, and you get an empty cell.

Removing a competitor

Delete, in the actions at the right end of the row, asks you to confirm first, and the button on that dialog reads Remove. Removing takes the row off your listing, and your strategy stops counting that price from that moment.

Nothing else on your listing is touched, and you can add the same address again at any time. A page you add back starts over at Pending with no price on it. Removing and adding is also how you get a page read sooner than its schedule would.

Limits

Your Add URLs button disappears once a listing has 10, and you get a message reading Competitor limit reached above the table instead. Remove one to make room.

What competitor URLs cannot do

How your price uses these prices

Your strategy never reads a single row. It reads one number, the lowest price among the competitor URLs on that listing, and prices against that.

Three kinds of row are left out of that number. A Paused row is left out. So is a row that never returned a price, and so is a row in a currency the Repricer has no conversion rate for. Everything else counts, whatever its status says, because a Failing row still has the last price it managed to read.

A change you make here reprices your listing right away. Pause a competitor, resume one, or remove one, and the lowest price is worked out again on the spot. If that number moved, repricing runs on your listing without waiting for the next reading. Adding a competitor is the one exception, because your new row has no price on it until its first reading works.

The same number fills the Lowest column on your listings table for own-store listings. It also fills the Market Position card on the Insights tab of the listing dialog. See insights for the rest of that card.

When something goes wrong

A page the Repricer cannot read

Pages break. A competitor rebuilds their site, an address stops answering, or a page starts turning away anything that is not a person with a browser. Here is what you see as that plays out.

When a URL is paused that way, you get a warning above the table: Some competitors were automatically disabled after repeated failures. You can reactivate them to retry. That warning stays until you resume the URL or remove it. The owners and admins of your organization also get an email about it. You can turn that email off under Sync errors in Settings, then Notifications.

Why a URL is rejected

You get these under the box you typed in, inside the dialog you opened from Add URLs. Your save does not go through until every row is clean.

A few addresses are turned down after you click Add instead of while you type. The message is The URL is not allowed for security reasons. and it covers addresses pointing at private networks, and addresses carrying a name and a password in them.

Messages after you save

Every one of these actions shows on screen before it is saved. So a row can appear, move or vanish, and then come back if your save did not go through. When you get one of the failure messages above, the table you are looking at is the truth and your change did not happen.

Where to go next