How MarketPulse finds the right way to track a competitor link

When you add a competitor link, MarketPulse doesn’t use one method for every site — it tries a chain of data sources, in order, and uses the first one that actually works, so each link is tracked as reliably as the site allows without you having to pick a method yourself.

The chain, in order

1. Shopify’s public storefront API — if the URL belongs to a Shopify store, its product data is read directly from Shopify’s own JSON endpoint. No login, no scraping.
2. WooCommerce’s Store API — the same idea for WooCommerce-powered sites, including real review rating and count data WooCommerce’s API already exposes.
3. Direct page fetch — for everything else, MarketPulse fetches the page’s HTML directly and reads structured data most e-commerce platforms already embed for SEO (schema.org JSON-LD, Open Graph tags, or — for sites that use it instead, like some spec-table layouts — schema.org microdata).
4. Stealth browser session — if a plain fetch gets blocked (a common anti-bot response) or the price only appears after client-side JavaScript runs, MarketPulse automatically falls back to a real, stealth-configured browser session instead of failing silently.

Regional marketplaces get routed directly

A handful of sites — Daraz, for example — are recognized by domain and sent straight to the stealth browser step, skipping the earlier attempts entirely, since their pricing is known in advance to only render after JavaScript runs. This avoids wasting a check cycle on a method that would never succeed for that domain.

You can add links two ways

Paste a URL directly in the dashboard, or use the MarketPulse Chrome extension to add the page you’re currently browsing with one click — the extension authenticates automatically against your dashboard session, no separate API key to manage.

See Daraz tracking for more on the regional-marketplace case, or how MarketPulse handles anti-bot blocking for more on the stealth-browser fallback.