Why the price you see is not the price they show
Large retailers vary prices by geography as a matter of routine: currency, local tax, shipping cost, and what the market will bear. The same product page served to a German address and a Polish one returns different numbers, and neither is the number your competitor is quoting in Spain.
On top of that, many shops recognise repeat automated visitors from one address and start serving cached, stale or deliberately unhelpful pages. Monitoring from a fixed office IP is the fastest way to end up with a dashboard full of numbers nobody is actually charging.
Fetching each market from inside it
The fix is to make the request from the country you care about. Our pool covers over fifty, and the country is a field on the credential rather than a different product — the same plan checks a German price, then a Japanese one, then a Brazilian one.
Two details worth knowing. Some shops key off currency or language headers as well as IP, so send those to match. And some redirect to a country-specific domain, which means the URL you monitor may need to change per market rather than the address alone.
What daily tracking costs
| What you track | Checks per day | Per month | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 500 products, one market | 500 | ~1 GB | under $2 |
| 5,000 products, one market | 5,000 | ~10 GB | ~$12 |
| 10,000 products, three markets | 30,000 | ~60 GB | ~$40 |
| Hourly on 1,000 key lines | 24,000 | ~50 GB | ~$34 |
Assumes about 70 KB per product page. Measure your own targets on the free gigabyte first — a heavy JavaScript storefront can be five times that, and it changes the arithmetic completely.
How to run it without being noticed
- Spread the checks across the day rather than firing all of them at nine in the morning. A steady trickle looks like traffic; a burst looks like a scraper.
- Fetch the product page, not the search results. Search is heavier, more heavily defended, and gives you a price that may be rounded or promotional.
- Use sticky sessions for multi-step checks where a size or variant has to be selected before the real price appears.
- Record what you fetched, not just what you parsed. When a number looks wrong it is usually the page that changed, and without the raw HTML you cannot tell.
Common questions
Why do I need proxies to check competitor prices?
Because shops show different prices by country and often serve cached or degraded pages to addresses that visit repeatedly. Checking from one fixed office IP gives you neither the local price nor a reliable one.
How much traffic does price monitoring use?
About 70 KB per product page, so 5,000 products checked daily for a month is roughly 10 GB — around $12. JavaScript-heavy storefronts can be several times that, which is worth measuring before you commit.
Can I check prices in a specific country?
Yes. The country is a field on the credential, so the same plan can check a German price and then a Japanese one. Send matching currency and language headers too, since some shops key off those as well.
Is price monitoring legal?
Reading publicly displayed prices is ordinary competitive research and is done by every large retailer. What matters is respecting the site's terms, not overloading it, and not touching anything behind a login you do not own.
Try it before you pay for it
Connect Telegram and we credit 1 GB to your account — enough to measure your own traffic use on your own targets rather than trusting the numbers above. After that it is $0.70–$2.00 per gigabyte depending on volume, traffic never expires, and there is no monthly fee.