Real-Time Competitor Price Monitor

Manually monitoring competitor prices is tedious and impossible to do frequently. Market price changes can happen at any time, and noticing them late means losing clients who find better deals elsewhere, or losing margin by charging too much compared to the market.

A Python script using BeautifulSoup and requests that runs every morning at 06:00. It visits configured competitor product or listing pages, extracts current prices, compares them with the previous day's values in SQLite and with the owner's prices. If a competitor changes a price beyond the configured threshold (default 5%), an alert email is immediately sent with the change details.

1. Competitor URL list configured in a JSON file 2. Scrape pages with requests + BeautifulSoup every morning 3. Extract prices and compare with previous value in SQLite 4. Calculate percentage deviation per SKU / service 5. Immediate alert if change > configurable threshold 6. Weekly report with price trends across all competitors 7. Auto-updated CSV dashboard for manual analysis

Continuous monitoring of 20–50 products across 3–5 competitors with no manual intervention. Price change response time reduced from days to hours. Pricing strategy optimisation with real data updated every 24 hours.