How often should you check competitor prices?
Choose a price-checking schedule according to the changes you need to notice and how soon your team can act on them. A short-lived promotion may need closer observation than a stable offer you review once a day.
There is no single frequency that fits every product. Start with a small group of comparable offers, state what a detected change would help you decide and review whether the observations are useful.
Match the schedule to a decision
Ask who will read the result and what they can change. If your team reviews offers every morning, more frequent checks may add history without changing that morning's decision. If a promotion can begin and end during the day, daily observations may miss it.
These examples are planning choices, rather than rules for an industry.
| Situation | Schedule to consider | What to review |
|---|---|---|
| A stable offer with a daily human review | Daily | Whether meaningful changes persist until the review |
| Promotions that may change within a working day | Every 6 hours | Whether the additional observations affect an actual decision |
| A focused event where someone can respond during the day | Hourly | Whether the source supports the schedule and the added checks are useful |
Price2Spy's guide to monitoring frequency also treats product behaviour and the team's ability to respond as part of this decision. Its recommendations do not establish the right schedule for your own offers.
Count URLs before estimating checks
Count each monitored product page. Five products with two competitor URLs each mean ten watched URLs. The product count alone understates the work.
For a fixed 30-day planning window, estimate scheduled checks as:
watched URLs × checks per URL per day × 30 days
| Schedule | Checks per URL per day | One URL over 30 days | Ten URLs over 30 days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daily | 1 | 30 | 300 |
| Every 6 hours | 4 | 120 | 1,200 |
| Hourly | 24 | 720 | 7,200 |
These are arithmetic estimates for uninterrupted schedules. They are not a promise of completed observations or a final usage bill. Calendar-month length, initial checks, manual runs, retries, pauses, source failures and execution limits can affect the actual record. Review the allowance and usage shown in your workspace.
Avoid treating "ten products" and "ten checks" as interchangeable when comparing plans. Look at the number of URLs, the schedule and the provider's definition of a check.
Set the schedule in lookalytic
The e-commerce monitoring workflow offers "Every hour", "Every 6 hours" and "Every day". You can change a watch's frequency later.
Compare the estimate with the current plans and check allowances. Individual paid allowances can have different monthly anniversary dates, so use the dates shown for your purchases rather than assuming every plan resets on the first of the month.
Monitoring begins with new observations. It cannot recover prices from before the watch was created.
Revisit the schedule with evidence
Review a short trial of the chosen schedule. Record which changes reached the reviewer in time to affect a decision. If you test a higher frequency on a small shortlist, compare the additional useful changes with the extra checks it uses.
Suppose an offer falls in price at 10:10 and returns to its earlier price at 10:40. Checks at 10:00 and 11:00 would miss that movement. A recorded history contains the observations captured at those times.
Revisit the schedule when a promotion starts or ends, or when responsibility for reviewing the offer changes.