Competitor price monitoring that runs itself every week
Competitor price monitoring without opening a single tab. Every Monday morning Sai checks your rivals’ product pages in a real browser, logs price, sale price and stock in your Google Sheet, and tells you what moved since last week. Set the schedule once; Sai runs it on its own computer while you work on something else.
The routine
# Routine: Weekly competitor price monitoring
Schedule: Weekly on Monday at 8:00 AM
Runs on: Scout's computer
Ask me before acting: no
Stop a run after: 30 minutes
## Each run
1. Open every URL in the Sources tab of the Tracker sheet in a fresh browser session. Accept only necessary cookies.
2. On each page, read the price, any sale price and the stock status, using the same size, color or region every week.
3. Add one row per product to a new tab named with today's date: product, store, URL, price, sale price, in stock.
4. Compare with last week's tab. Mark new lows, price rises and items that went out of stock.
5. Highlight any price drop over 10%.
## Rules
- Never sign in, add to cart or check out.
- If a page fails to load, needs a login, shows a captcha or changed its layout, skip it and list it.
- Wait a few seconds between pages on the same site.
## Send me
A short summary: products checked, biggest changes, and pages that need my attention.What is competitor price monitoring?
Competitor price monitoring, also called competitor price tracking, is the practice of checking the prices, discounts and stock levels that competitors show for the same or comparable products, at a regular interval, and recording them so changes can be compared over time. Retailers and brands use it to set their own prices, react to promotions and spot competitors’ stock-outs. The data almost always comes from competitors’ public product pages.
The hard part isn’t reading a price once. It’s doing it the same way every week, for every product, without gaps, so the history is trustworthy. That repetition is exactly what a routine is for.
How this routine monitors competitor prices
Each run follows the same five steps, on Sai’s own computer, in a real browser:
- Open each page. Sai opens every product URL from your Tracker sheet in a fresh session and accepts only necessary cookies.
- Read it like a shopper. It reads the price, any sale price and the stock status as the page shows them, choosing the same size, color or region every time.
- Log a dated row. Each product gets one row in a new tab named with the date, with the store and the URL, so you build a price history instead of overwriting it.
- Compare with last week. New lows, price rises and items that went out of stock are marked, and drops over your threshold are highlighted.
- Report. You get a short summary, plus a list of pages that failed, needed a login or changed layout.
What you get every Monday
Because every row keeps its date and source URL, the sheet doubles as an audit trail when someone asks why a price changed.
- A new tab in your Google Sheet or Excel file with one row per product per week
- Week-over-week changes marked, with big drops highlighted
- A short summary at the top of the task, for example: “Logged prices for 48 products across 4 stores. 6 prices dropped, 2 by more than 10%.” (illustrative)
- A list of pages to check by hand, if any failed
Ways to track competitor prices, compared
There are five common ways to track competitor prices. Which one fits depends on how many products you track and how often the sites change.
| Method | Setup | Works on pages built with JavaScript, size pickers or “load more” | Keeps a history | Ongoing effort |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Checking pages by hand | None | Yes | Only if someone logs it | High: hours every week |
| Spreadsheet formulas such as IMPORTXML | Low | Rarely | Only with extra work | Breaks when page markup changes |
| Scraper scripts | High, needs a developer | With effort | Yes | Maintenance whenever a site changes |
| Price intelligence software | Medium, per-SKU pricing | Usually | Yes | Low, but limited to supported sites |
| A Sai routine | Paste the routine, add your sheet | Yes, it uses a real browser | Yes, a dated tab per run | Low: review the summary |
For very large catalogs that need hourly updates across thousands of SKUs, dedicated price intelligence software with data feeds is usually the better fit. For a focused list of the products that matter most, a routine is faster to set up and works on any site you can open in a browser. To collect other website data the same way, see website data to Excel or Sheets. If you are choosing a dedicated tool, Simular compares the options in competitor price tracking tools.
How often should you monitor competitor prices?
Weekly is the right starting point for most teams: it catches promotions and price changes without filling the sheet with noise. Track daily if you sell on marketplaces or in categories where prices move every day, and add a one-off run before your own promotions. Change the Repeat option in the demo above to see how each schedule lands on the calendar.
Set up the routine in Sai
- Copy the routine above and paste it into Sai, or click Start with Sai.
- Choose the schedule. Sai opens a New routine card. Pick Repeat and Time; Monday at 8:00 AM means the summary is ready when your week starts.
- Pick who runs it and decide whether Sai should ask you before acting. For read-only price checks you can leave approvals off; turn them on if the routine also updates your own store.
- Set a run limit with Stop a run after, so a slow site can never keep a run going for hours.
- Add your Tracker sheet with a Sources tab of product URLs, run it once, and check the first tab before letting it run on its own.
More on schedules, approvals and run limits in the Routines guide.
Why use a computer use agent for competitor price monitoring?
Competitor sites don’t offer an API for their prices, and the pages are built for shoppers: prices load with JavaScript, change with a size picker, or hide behind “load more”. A computer use agent reads them the way a person does, so there is no scraper to build and nothing to fix when a page is redesigned.
Reliability is what makes that practical on a schedule. Sai ranks at the top of OSWorld, the open benchmark for computer use, which is why a weekly routine can run without someone watching it. When a page does fail, Sai says so instead of guessing.
Skills this routine uses
- Website data to Excel or Sheets: Pull prices, listings and tables from websites with no export into a clean Google Sheet or Excel file, on a schedule if you want.
- AI brand visibility tracking: Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini your buyers’ questions every week and log which brands each answer mentions and cites.
- Excel automation: Clean, merge and update workbooks, refresh a model from new numbers, and build the weekly report in the real Excel app.
Related guides
- Routines in Sai: How schedules, approvals and run limits work
- AI e-commerce operations: Pricing, stock and listings for online stores
- Shopify × Sai: Keep your own catalog in step with the market