Do you track your competitor prices? How do you manage that process? Manually or by using a service?

For me I just do it in a very simple fashion, for a few competitors I just bookmark their pages and periodically check. With that being said, I don't typically try to complete by price point.

I believe tracking what competitors are doing is must and one must shape his business accordingly. As of now we are doing it manually.

Competion prices only matter when traffic knows/cares the competition exist.

Real example, you can sell the same type of item on both ebay and Amazon, double the price on one of the platforms, doesn't matter which one. As long as the product is in demand I guarantee you'll make sales on both sites.

My point is, very few people actually do comparison shopping unless price is the only buying point.

It's not even possible for people to know every single webpage/store that sells the same item.

The first site traffic finds has the upper hand on sales.

Knowing where your competition is a key to success, but you shouldn't be competing against price.

By competing against price you are going to improve your product to match the competition. In my eye this is a plan to only do the least amount of work.

You should know what your competitor has to offer and try to make your product better, thus being able to increase the price.

There are so many low end products in the market these days, we really should be focusing on making better products and being confident that our products deserve the higher price point.

Not that your product isn't good. If it is a great product, increase the price and market the value of that product.

So I work as a data analyst at a medium sized grocery chain. I built a web,scraper to get all the items listed on the competitions website and as a result we get about 18,000 items with all the details and I run the analysis.

If you are only competing on a handful of products then just visit their website and check the items out

Apple makes 80% of all smartphone profits, but only 20% of all smart phones sold our iPhones.

Your assuming it's all about price, and by tracking your competitors prices you're going to have better sales numbers.

The reason Apple is so successful isn't because they worry about competitors prices, it's because they look at competitors prices, then figure out how to make a much cheaper product, while still being able to give people exactly what they want, by isolating specific features and benefits to make others perceive their products as being as good (they have 1GB of RAM whereas many competitors have 2-4GB and dual-core processors, while competitors brag about quad-core, but most celebrities and movie stars (with endless money) still choose iPhones.

By knowing how to do this, you can make something that is 1/5 the cost of every other product in that product category, even make it look like an elite product, then sell it for more than products that cost over three times as much to manufacture and produce through efficiency.

If you're trying to compete on price, you're playing to compete with your competitors, and you're always going to be in a in a cutthroat war with them.

If you're competing on quality and value, you rise above your competitors, oftentimes just glance at their prices, but don't worry about them, because you market your products so specifically, and in such a precise way that people will pay the premium just to have your products, regardless of what else is out there.

E-Commerce is huge and the competition is really harsh especially in price wars. As online shoppers have an immense variety in the online market and have great ability to find the best deals, they don't hesitate even a second to prefer one of your competitors. Also, the majority (more than %90) of them consider pricing as the very first criteria affecting their buying decision.

So, under these conditions, applying competitive pricing strategy and tracking competitors prices are beneficial for e-commerce retailers in order to compete better in the market.

Also, what I realized from my research is that using competitor price tracking software is somewhat beneficial for e-commerce retailers to identify what competitors do and market trends in terms of price fluctuation.

I have been using an app called Prisync for a couple of years now and they have been a tremendous help in this exact need. They will work with you to help get everything working perfectly and also do a fantastic job in understanding the needs of online businesses.