Running an e-commerce website or a physical brand nowadays relies on an ecosystem of suppliers, competitors, resellers shipping companies and many others.
Thriving requires however to keep close track of all sorts of information related to these companies and partners, price and availability being an important factor that drives strategic and operational business decisions.
Monitoro makes it easy for Marketing and Purchasing and any other non technical professionals to get price and availability in real time, keep track of it in a Google Sheets, and receive alerts in communication tools such as Slack or MS Teams when important changes happen.
B2B use cases
- Market research
- Market watch
- Dynamic pricing
- MSRP tracking
- Competitive intelligence
- Purchasing and Procurement
- Operational Supply Chain Management
This tutorial is also available as a video:
Let's make the price tracker!
Building the price tracker can sound complicated - and it would have been, if you went the traditional way - however, it won't take us more than a few minutes to do it with Monitoro.
Use the video as a guide, or follow these steps:
Step 1: Create the project using the "Price & availability" template
The first step is to create a new project in Monitoro, using the Price & Availability template.
Step 2 : Add the product pages you want to monitor
Now add the links you want to extract prices and availability from.Just click on the big blue button and add your links.
Step 3: Select the data to extract
Once in the editor, click on name on the right, then on reselect data.Now click on the price from the webpage, and select the price from the result.
Do the same for price and availability.
Step 4: Sync data to a spreadsheet on Google Sheets
Now data is being monitored and extracted continuously. Let's open the Integrations tab to setup data syncing.3 rules are already created for you using the template. The first one, Price & availability sync triggers services whenever any data changes, including price and availability.
- Click on + trigger another service, and then select an existing Google Sheets integration (or create a new one). These instructions also work for syncing with Airtable.
- When you select Google Sheets (or Airtable), choose the Upsert action.
- In the conditions section, select Page link and map it to the column in Sheets where you store the URL of the pages to monitor.
Then in the data section, map Price and Availability to the sheet column names accordingly. In the end, the integration will look similar to this (replace the column names with yours).
The sheet will be updated with the price and availability every time either changes. It will look like the following. Add more links and they will fill more rows in the sheet.
Step 5: Receive alerts in Slack when price or availability has changed
Now that data is syncing to the spreadsheet, let's setup an alert to be notified of two events happening:
- The availability status has changed.
- The price has dropped.
We're not limited to these two of course, and you can create any custom alert you want by setting up the right rule conditions.
To receive an alert when the price drops, let's open the Price drops rule and add Slack, just like we added Google sheets in Step 4. Choose then a channel, and compose your message in a similar way to this:
To receive availability changes, repeat the same instructions but using the Availability changed rule.
When that happens, your Slack channel will receive a message like this:
That's it, you're done!
Bonus: Extending the price tracker
We built the price tracker, so what's next?
Adding more links
You can add more links to the project by clicking on + add links at the top of the project page, and they will be monitored automatically. The data will be then synced and used to send alerts when the right conditions are matching.
You can also add pages from multiple different websites. If Monitoro cannot recognize a webpage, then open the Data tab, click on that link, then reselect the data like what we did in Step 3.
Monitor and extract other data
Do you need to extract additional data, such as delivery options, related items or more?
In the Editor tab, click on + monitor new data and select it from the page, just like in Step 3.
Adding custom alerts and events
You can sync data or receive alerts when different conditions are met, for example when the price drops by €10, or the availability changes to Not in stock.
Open the Integrations tab and click on + event.
Then select a column, and a condition to check for:
Then connect the service of your choice, and set it up accordingly:
Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash
