Competitor Price Monitoring
Competitor price monitoring that flags the shelf before the customer notices.
The wholesaler baseline said your prices were right. Then someone finally measured the basket against the big box down the road — and the keys, the batteries, the tape were priced over it. We build AI that reads competitor shelf prices against your price file every week and alerts your merchants before your regulars do.
Built with the leading AI platforms
NVIDIA
Anthropic
The blind basket
No competitor price analysis — just blind hope the baseline is right.
From pricing desks we have sat inside: a hardware retail co-op member running twenty-odd stores and a couple hundred thousand item records, where the wholesaler sets the base retails and nobody checks them against the market.
Blind hope as a pricing strategy
The honest version, said out loud on the call: we don’t house a database for competitive pricing — it is blind hope that the co-op is doing their job well. The wholesaler’s baseline becomes the price file by default, because nobody has the market’s numbers.
1.15 trusted, 1.19 discovered
The plan was to ride the wholesaler baseline at 1.15 times the index. When someone finally measured the full basket, it sat at 1.19 — four points of drift nobody saw, because nothing was watching.
The keys a regular can price cold
Every store carries the two or three hundred items customers already know the price of — the keys, the tape, the cleaner. Be over the big box on those and you are outpriced out of the market one basket at a time, driving footsteps out of the business.
The customer is the alert system
The worst version of the week: a regular mentions the big box sells it cheaper, and that is how the pricing desk finds out. The market moved — your data just wasn’t in the room.
A price file with no outside view
Two hundred thousand item records priced against costs, hot sheets, and a baseline — and not one of them priced against the store down the road. After a year of taking price, there is nothing left to push against: you can’t take price year over year forever.
Nobody knows what a move did
You raised the price and the volume moved — but nobody can say by how much, because the competitive context was never captured. Raised prices X, killed the volume by Y, and nothing pushes that to the merchant.
What blind trust costs
The basket drifts four points while nobody watches.
What the blind spot looks like inside a twenty-store retail group pricing off a wholesaler baseline. Your numbers will differ — the first competitive read puts figures on yours before anything gets built.
From an anonymized engagement — a hardware retail co-op member with twenty-odd stores, $100M+ revenue, and a wholesaler-set base retail
How it works
Competitor price monitoring run against your price file, every week.
No new system for your merchants to learn. The comparison your best merchant does in the parking lot becomes the system — AI reads the market overnight, and the pricing desk starts the week with only what needs a decision.
- 01
Build the competitive database you don’t house
The big-box stores and local competitors that matter, the categories that matter, the known-value items first — a watchlist that lives in a database you control, not inside a vendor’s seat license.
- 02
Encode your floors and your gaps
Margin floor by category, how far over the big box is too far on a known-value item, where a premium holds because you have it and they don’t — the judgment your merchants carry becomes written rules, yours to keep.
- 03
AI reads the shelf every week
Agents collect competitor shelf prices — the price scraping is the easy part — match them to your item master, run the gaps against your floors, and flag what you are over on with the explanation attached. A merchant approves before anything moves: trust, but verify first.
Price monitoring software scrapes. It doesn’t know your margin floor.
Price monitoring software and competitor price tracking software sell seats on a scrape: enterprise price, enterprise implementation, a dashboard somebody has to open. The tool can tell you the big box moved a price. It cannot tell you that the item is one of your three hundred known-value items, that the gap breaks your margin floor, or that a 1.19 basket is four points off the baseline you trusted.
We are an AI operating partner — we build and run the machine. Competitive price tracking runs against your price file, on your rules, in your cloud, and lands as a short exception list with the why attached. Your merchants keep their judgment; they just stop being the alert system.
Led by Peter Enestrom.
Questions
Asked by merchants and pricing leads.
The straight answers, before you book anything.
What’s holding your business back?
A workflow ready for automation. An AI product you want to build. A problem that has sat on the roadmap for years. Let’s talk about what it would take to solve it.
Talk to Zaigo