How to Monitor Competitor Pricing with a Simple API Call

In the competitive landscape of e-commerce and SaaS, pricing is a critical lever for growth. Manually tracking your competitors' pricing strategies is not just tedious—it's unreliable. By the time you spot a price change, you may have already lost customers.

Supacrawler’s Watch API provides a simple and powerful way to automate competitor price monitoring. You can set up jobs to check pricing pages on a daily or weekly schedule and receive immediate email notifications when a price changes. This allows you to react quickly, adjust your own strategy, and maintain your competitive edge.

This guide will walk you through setting up a watch job to monitor a competitor's pricing page.

Goal

To create an automated daily watch job that monitors a specific pricing element on a competitor's website and sends an email alert when it changes.

curl -X POST https://api.supacrawler.com/api/v1/watch \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://competitor-saas.com/pricing",
    "frequency": "daily",
    "selector": ".pricing-card__amount",
    "notify_email": "[email protected]",
    "include_image": true,
    "quality": 85
  }'

How It Works

1. URL: The target is your competitor's pricing page.
2. Frequency: daily is a good starting point for most SaaS or e-commerce products. For highly dynamic markets, you might choose hourly.
3. Selector: This is the most important parameter for accuracy. We use a CSS selector like .pricing-card__amount to isolate the exact HTML element that contains the price. This prevents false alarms from other page content changing.
4. Notify Email: Alerts are sent here. You can use a team email alias like [email protected].
5. Include Image: We've set include_image to true. When a change is detected, the notification email will include a screenshot of the page, giving you instant visual proof of the price update.

Once created, Supacrawler will check the pricing element every day. If the text inside that element changes—for example, from "$29/mo" to "$35/mo"—the API will detect it, record the change, and send an alert to your specified email.

Finding the Right CSS Selector

To find the perfect selector, visit the competitor's pricing page in your browser:

1. Right-click on the price you want to track.
2. Select "Inspect" from the context menu.
3. The browser's developer tools will open, highlighting the HTML for that element.
4. Look for a unique id (e.g., #price-tier-pro) or a combination of class names (e.g., .card .price).
5. Use the most specific selector you can find to ensure you are only tracking the price itself.

Advanced Use Cases

# Monitors an Amazon product page for a price change
response = requests.post(
    "https://api.supacrawler.com/api/v1/watch",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}", "Content-Type": "application/json"},
    json={
        "url": "https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08P2H5L72",
        "frequency": "daily",
        # This selector targets the main price display on an Amazon product page
        "selector": ".a-price .a-offscreen",
        "notify_email": "[email protected]"
    }
)
print(response.json())

To track multiple pricing tiers on the same page, simply create a separate watch job for each tier's unique selector.

Stay Ahead with Automated Monitoring

Automated competitor price monitoring is a strategic advantage. It frees up your team's time, provides timely and accurate data, and empowers you to make smarter pricing decisions. With the Supacrawler Watch API, setting up this powerful system takes only a few minutes.