Last year, online shopping sales hit a record $108.2 billion and this figure is set to grow in 2018 according to the National Retail Federation. About a third of shoppers start before Thanksgiving, but the day after Thanksgiving is still the biggest one day shopping event and not just in the US. According to Shopify, Black Friday has become a global phenomenon. Then, of course there’s Cyber Monday!

Holiday shoppers most often know what they want and are looking for the best price. So, what’s your price strategy to stay competitive?

With Import.io you can start monitoring your competitor’s pricing now to determine a few things that will help you during the precious holiday shopping season:

• First, develop a baseline of how your pricing compares to your competitors on key items.
• Ongoing, determine how often they change prices and if there’s a pattern.
• And, find out when they run out of inventory on key items.

Import.io extracts pricing data from your competitor’s websites and provides this data in a spreadsheet along with the item name, SKU, or any other data you need. That’s useful in and of itself, but Import.io takes it a step further by providing monthly, weekly, daily, or even hourly reports showing what prices have changed. This allows you to track and spot trends in competitor pricing.

In addition to tracking price changes, the Import.io reports also show what items have been removed from a website or added. For instance, if you are tracking a category of products such as hot toys on Amazon, you will know when they add a new toy or run out of inventory.

The data is available in a PDF report as well as a spreadsheet. Here’s a sample PDF Import.io Price and Item Change Report showing Amazon’s top toy category during the 2017 shopping season: