Get an Alert When a Competitor Changes Prices on Their WooCommerce Store

Published October 16, 2026 · Integration Yard

If you sell anything that other shops also sell, you've probably done this: open a few competitor tabs every Monday, scroll their catalogs, and try to remember what things cost last week. That works for 20 products. It breaks at 200.

This post covers a setup that does the checking for you: read a competitor's WooCommerce catalog from its own public API, diff it against the last snapshot on a schedule, and send only the changes — new products, removed products, price changes, stock flips — to Slack, email or a spreadsheet.

Step 0: the thing most people don't know about WooCommerce

Almost every WooCommerce store exposes a public, read-only Store API. It's what the block-based cart and checkout use, and it's on by default:

https://competitor-store.com/wp-json/wc/store/v1/products?per_page=100&page=1

Open that URL for any Woo store and you get clean JSON: product names, SKUs, prices in minor units (1650 means $16.50), sale prices and stock status. No login, no API key, no HTML parsing. That gives you two advantages over scraping product pages: it doesn't break when the store changes themes, and it's light on the store — a handful of paginated JSON requests instead of hundreds of page loads. (Private, password-protected and B2B stores turn this API off; that's fine, those aren't public prices anyway.)

Step 1: snapshot and diff on a schedule

Reading the API once is easy. The useful part is remembering last run's catalog and reporting only what changed. That's what WooCommerce Product Feed & Catalog Monitor does: the first run for a store records a baseline and is never charged for "changes", and every later run emits one dataset row per change, typed new, removed, price_changed or stock_changed.

{
  "storeUrls": ["https://competitor-one.com", "https://competitor-two.com"],
  "maxProductsPerStore": 1000,
  "outputMode": "changes",
  "stateName": "competitor-watch",
  "maxChargeUsd": 2
}

A change row looks like this:

{
  "recordType": "change",
  "store": "https://competitor-one.com",
  "changeType": "price_changed",
  "name": "Ceramic Mug - 12oz",
  "sku": "MUG-12",
  "price": 1650,
  "oldPrice": 1400,
  "currency": "USD",
  "stock_status": "instock",
  "permalink": "https://competitor-one.com/product/ceramic-mug-12oz",
  "detectedAt": "2026-10-16T09:00:00+00:00"
}

Keep stateName identical across runs — it's the key-value store holding the snapshot. Only change it when you want a fresh baseline.

Schedule it

In Apify Console: Schedules → Create new, pick the actor (or save the input above as a Task first, which we recommend), and set a cron expression — 0 7 * * * for daily at 07:00, or 0 */4 * * * for every four hours on fast-moving categories.

What it costs

A 1,000-product competitor checked daily with about 10 changes a day costs roughly $0.25 a run. Lower maxProductsPerStore or the schedule frequency to spend less. maxChargeUsd is a hard per-run cap, and stores that fail (no public API, network errors) return an error row and aren't charged.

Step 2a: alerts with Zapier

1. Trigger: Apify → Finished Task Run. Connect your Apify account and pick the task from step 1.
2. Action: Apify → Fetch Dataset Items, using the defaultDatasetId from the trigger.
3. Filter: only continue if recordType exactly matches change and changeType exactly matches price_changed (add a second path for stock_changed or new if you want those too).
4. Formatter → Numbers → Perform Math Operation: divide price and oldPrice by 100 to show dollars instead of cents.
5. Action: Slack → Send Channel Message with the formatted values and the permalink.

If a run returns many changes, Zapier sends one message per row by default; use Formatter → Utilities → Line-item to Text for a single digest message per run.

Step 2b: alerts with Make

1. Apify → Watch Task Runs (instant trigger; Make creates the webhook for you).
2. Apify → Get Dataset Items, with Dataset ID = defaultDatasetId from module 1.
3. Filter between modules 2 and 3: recordType = change and changeType = price_changed.
4. Google Sheets → Add a Row (a price-history log) and/or Slack → Create a Message.

Add a Router with one route per changeType: send new products to a "competitor launches" channel and stock_changed to an out-of-stock channel. A competitor selling out is often the best moment to push your own ads.

Step 2c: no automation tool at all

Apify has built-in integrations on every task — Slack, email, Google Drive, webhooks. Open the task, go to Integrations, and add Slack or Send Email triggered on Run Succeeded. You won't get per-row filtering, but you get a "the run finished, here's the dataset" notification for free.

The code version

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("dheerajitbhu/woocommerce-catalog-monitor").call(run_input={
    "storeUrls": ["https://competitor-one.com"],
    "outputMode": "changes",
    "stateName": "competitor-watch",
})

for row in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    if row.get("recordType") == "change" and row["changeType"] == "price_changed":
        old, new = row["oldPrice"] / 100, row["price"] / 100
        pct = (new - old) / old * 100 if old else 0
        print(f"{row['name']}: {old:.2f} -> {new:.2f} ({pct:+.1f}%) {row['permalink']}")

A few honest caveats

• You only see public prices. Member-only pricing, coupons applied at checkout, and B2B price tables aren't in the Store API.
• Prices come back in the store's own currency and minor units; convert before comparing across currencies.
• Be a good citizen: the actor makes sequential requests with small delays. Daily or every few hours is plenty for price intelligence. Use the data in line with each store's terms.

Wrap-up

Read the Store API endpoint, keep a snapshot, diff it on a schedule, and route only the changes to where you'll actually see them. That turns "check competitor sites every Monday" into a Slack message the moment something actually moves. Try it: WooCommerce Product Feed & Catalog Monitor on Apify.