How price, stock, promo and review-change detection works
What gets checked on every competitor-link check, and why some data is recorded on every check while other data only writes a new row when it actually changes.
Every time a competitor link is checked, MarketPulse can capture more than just the price — stock status, promo/sale banner text, review rating and count, seller identity, shipping details, and any custom fields you’ve configured, where the tracked site actually publishes them.
Two different recording patterns
Price and stock are recorded on every check, so you get a full time-series history even when nothing changed — useful for confirming a check actually ran and for charting price movement over time. Promo text, review rating/count, and custom fields work differently: a new row is only written when the value actually changes from the last known value (or on first detection). This keeps that history meaningful — a promo banner that’s been up for three weeks doesn’t create twenty identical rows, but the moment it changes, that’s recorded.
Custom fields — track anything the page shows
Beyond the built-in fields, you can define your own — pack size, warranty length, shelf price, or anything else the competitor’s page displays. Give it a label, and MarketPulse searches the page for that label and reads the adjacent value automatically. If you know CSS, you can give a specific selector instead for a more precise, guaranteed match — but it’s not required.
Honest about what’s available
Not every field is available on every site. Review ratings, seller names and shipping details all depend on the tracked page actually publishing that data in a structured, machine-readable way. When it doesn’t, MarketPulse simply doesn’t show a value for that field — it never guesses or estimates a number it can’t actually confirm.
See this running on your own catalog.