How Do You Track Competitor Prices Every Day? Hand the Phone Patrol to a Computer

Anyone doing competitor analysis knows what to look at. The difficulty is looking every day.

Once is easy. A week is sustainable. By three months people are skipping days, and by six it has quietly stopped. That is not a discipline problem. It is what repetition does when something more urgent always shows up.

Which is why competitor tracking is one of the few jobs genuinely worth automating for the labour alone: its value is not in any single pass, it is in the continuity.

What to actually watch

Settle this first, or the automation produces nothing useful.

• Price：The most direct field. Note that you want the effective price, not the list price. Once discounts, coupons and member pricing are applied, the gap often looks nothing like the sticker.
• New listings：What models, styles or variants a competitor has recently added. Suited to a weekly pass rather than daily.
• Hero image and copy changes：Underrated. A new hero image usually means they are running a test, or that the old one underperformed. Watch for a few rounds and you can see the direction they are probing.
• Sales and review volume trends：A single reading means nothing; the slope does. Twelve hundred reviews today against eleven eighty yesterday implies roughly twenty sales.

The first three show what they did. The fourth shows whether it worked. Together they support a judgement.

Why phone apps make this awkward

If all of this lived on the web, the problem would be simpler. Much of it does not.

The difficulties concentrate in four places. Pages must be scrolled screen by screen, where the web loads dozens of rows at once. Sessions expire, so a script reaches a login wall and stops. Popups arrive constantly, one on launch, one on entry, one again on the way back. And apps are redesigned frequently, so coordinate-based patrol scripts often do not survive two months.

This is why most teams end up abandoning app-side patrol and going back to manual work. Not because they do not know what to watch, but because maintaining it costs too much.

Running the patrol from a description

iEasyRun works by having you describe the routine once and then running it on schedule.

The description reads roughly like this:

Open the competitor list on platform A and find these three stores. Visit each one, screenshot the first screen, and note the price of every listed item. If a promo popup appears, close it and continue. When finished, save the screenshots to a folder called competitor patrol on the desktop, named by date.

Three things sit in that paragraph: what to look at, what to work around, and where results go. Nothing about how to find buttons.

Compared with scripting it, the differences are:

• Layout changes need no rework, because it identifies by text
• Popups need one rule rather than a branch each
• An expired session can be handled by adding “if asked to log in, run the login flow”

That third point is the practical one. Scripts handle expired sessions badly, because the login flow itself can change. In a description it is one more sentence.

Scheduling it

• Run it before the day starts：Then the first thing you do at your desk is read the results, and they are usable in whatever morning review you run. “Two of the three repriced yesterday” is worth far more than “I had a look recently”.
• Add an evening pass for volatile categories：Comparing morning and evening readings surfaces same-day adjustments, which matters during promotional periods.
• Switch new listings and review trends to weekly：Daily readings drown in noise.

One principle: align the patrol with when you decide. If your bidding strategy is set at ten each morning, the patrol should finish before nine. Running without reading is the same as not running.

Storing the output

Keep both.

• Screenshots：let you revisit the state at the time. When something needs checking, flipping to the image is fastest.
• A spreadsheet：is for trends. Four columns minimum: date, competitor, field, value. Drop one and three months of data becomes unanalysable.

If that feels like admin, have the patrol append a row to a fixed sheet each run. Three months later you have data you can chart, rather than a pile of loose screenshots.

Before you start

• Limit the scope：Do not open with ten competitors and eight fields. Take three, watch price and hero image, and run it for a week to see whether the output is what you wanted. Widen the scope and the judgement criteria blur.
• Keep to public information：The normal shape of competitor tracking is browsing someone’s public pages the way a person would. Anything behind a login, or explicitly restricted by the platform, should be left alone. Do not rush the frequency either; a human browsing pace is fine.
• Give it two weeks before concluding：A single pass tells you where a competitor stands. Two weeks of continuous data tells you where they are heading, which is what competitor analysis is actually for.

After each run, check the execution history. Which store stopped midway, which field failed to capture, all visible at a glance. The software is completely free and runs on your own computer. For related routines, see what to do when a phone keeps going offline or daily app operations for Amazon sellers.