How to see a competitor's plans and price history

Watch a page as Pricing and Rival Radar does more than tell you it changed. It reads the plans and prices off the page, keeps them, and records every change with a date, so you end up with a running history rather than a pile of alerts.

A new price has to be seen twice in a row before it goes into that history. That's deliberate, and it's the difference between a price change and a price test.

Why a price has to be seen twice

A price you see once isn't always a price. Companies run A/B tests on price, charge differently by country, show a currency based on where the visitor is, and roll a new price out gradually. Any of those can show you a number that isn't what they actually charge.

So Rival Radar waits. The first time new prices appear it records that it saw them and says so on the card. If the next check sees the same thing, the change is confirmed and goes into the history. If the next check sees the old prices again, nothing goes into the history and you were never told about a change that wasn't one.

You still hear about the page changing, because that's a page change and it happened. What waits for confirmation is the price history itself.

There's more on telling a test from a decision in the guide on whether a competitor is testing prices.

When prices can't be read

Three things can show instead of a list of plans, and each says exactly what's going on.

• Plans and prices will show up here after the next check means the page hasn't been read yet. New pages usually fill in within a few minutes.
• We couldn't read the prices on this page reliably means the page was fetched but the plans couldn't be picked out with enough confidence. Showing nothing is better than showing wrong numbers, so nothing is what you get. You still hear about the page changing.
• This page doesn't list prices publicly means they don't publish a price. That's a finding in itself, and it's covered in the guide on competitor pricing monitoring software.

Pages that build their prices with JavaScript are the usual cause of an unreadable read. Watching a second pricing page, if they have one, sometimes gets round it.

History from before you started

Some of the entries in Price history are marked as coming from archived copies of the page, with a range of dates rather than one. Those are reconstructed from the Internet Archive when you first add the competitor.

They have a date range because the archive only has a copy from whenever its crawler happened to visit, so the change is known to have happened between two of those visits rather than on a particular day. See earlier versions of a page.

Questions