Amazon competitor tracker: prices, stock, Buy Box and delivery, daily

Most of what you need to know about a competitor is on their product page, and none of it is kept. Their price today, who is winning their Buy Box, whether they have gone out of stock, what delivery date a shopper in Dallas is being promised — all of it renders once and is replaced tomorrow. AMZ Selling Tools reads the listings you nominate once a day and keeps the answers, dated. It tracks any ASIN, not only your own, at the same flat price per listing.

No seller account to connect

There is no integration to authorise and no credentials to hand over. A check is an ordinary request for the public product page — the same URL a shopper opens — from a specific marketplace and delivery location. Nothing is submitted on your behalf, no seller identity is attached to the request, and the tracker never touches Seller Central or a seller API.

Two consequences follow. A competitor’s ASIN costs exactly what one of your own does, because the tracker cannot tell them apart: everything it knows comes off the page. And you can track a product you do not sell, in a category you are researching or a marketplace you have not entered yet.

What a competitor listing gives you, every day

Each check stores 92 columns from the live page. The ones that matter when the listing belongs to someone else:

• Price and promotions. Price, list price and sale price, the discount percentage, whether a deal or a coupon is running and the exact wording of each, the page badge, and the Subscribe & Save price.
• Buy Box and the other sellers. Who holds the featured offer, the top three offers by name with each seller’s fulfilment type — Amazon, FBA or FBM — their item condition and their price, how many other offers Amazon lists, and who actually dispatches the Buy Box offer.
• Stock. The availability line exactly as the page words it, from “In Stock” to “Only 3 left in stock” to “Currently unavailable”. Scarcity wording is where a competitor’s supply problem shows up first.
• Delivery promise. The standard and fastest delivery dates, the order-within countdown, the delivery fee — the literal “free” when it is free — and the Prime badge.
• Demand signals. Both Best Sellers Rank slots with their category labels, the rating, the review count, the full star histogram and the “bought in past month” figure.
• The listing itself. Title, bullets, description, A+ content and images, video, brand, variations and catalogue details — so a repositioning shows up as well as a repricing.

It all lands in one row with one timestamp, which is the point: a price cut read next to the stock line, the Buy Box winner and the delivery date from the same visit.

The same rival, read from six American cities

Amazon builds the product page for the shopper in front of it, so a single reading is a reading from one place. The delivery date differs, stock wording differs, and because delivery is understood to feed the featured offer, the Buy Box winner can differ too. A rival who looks unbeatable from your desk may be losing the featured offer two states away.

The United States is checked from Brooklyn, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Denver and Miami Beach; Canada from Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver; the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium and Australia from one location each — 22 locations across the 12 marketplaces. Each ASIN-and-location pair is its own row with its own daily history, so the same competitor tracked in three cities gives you three columns of answers side by side. Our guide to competitor prices, stock and delivery by ZIP code works through why the page changes and how to choose the locations worth paying for.

Building the competitor set

Adding listings is free and uses no checks, so a set can start wide. Two ways in:

• Paste them. Drop a list of ASINs, separated by commas or spaces, and pick the marketplaces you want them tracked in. One paste across three marketplaces creates three rows per ASIN.
• Upload a file. A CSV or TSV with asin, marketplace and an optional action column handles up to 500 rows at a time, which is the tidy way to move a competitor list out of a spreadsheet. The action column also lets you stop tracking a row while keeping its history, or delete it and its history outright.

Pairs you already track are skipped rather than duplicated, so re-uploading a longer list is safe.

Alerts worth setting on a rival

An alert is one field, one condition and the rows you apply it to. Four presets cover the usual cases — price drops below, rating drops below, availability changed, Buy Box winner changed — and 50 fields can carry a rule of their own. Text fields take changed, becomes, contains and stops containing; numbers take drops below, rises above, increased and decreased; flags such as Has Coupon and Has Deal take turned on and turned off.

• “Price drops below” your own — the undercut, on the morning it happens rather than at the end of the month.
• “Availability changed” — a rival going out of stock is the cheapest demand you will ever get, and the window is usually short.
• “Has Coupon turned on” — promotional pressure that never shows up in the headline price.
• “Buy Box changed” or “Offers Count increased” — a new seller is competing on that listing, whether or not the featured offer has moved yet.

Emails arrive after every check, or as one daily summary after the day’s last scheduled check. Three limits, stated up front: the delivery dates and the order-within countdown are recorded but cannot raise an alert, because they roll forward on their own every day; a rule compares a value with the previous one, so a field appearing for the very first time is written to the history rather than emailed; and there is no “hijacker alert” here, because Amazon exposes nothing that reliably identifies one. What you get instead is the dated record of who is on the listing, and alerts when the Buy Box winner, a seller name or the offers count changes. The Buy Box tracker covers that side in detail.

Export and price

Take the record with you: CSV or TSV of the columns you have on screen for the rows you select, including the full check-by-check history; a Google Sheet fed by one copied Apps Script; or a personal read-only API key. All three are included on every plan.

Tracking costs a flat $0.10 per ASIN per month — 30 daily checks of all 92 columns — and a competitor’s listing is billed exactly like one of your own. Fifty listings is $5.00 a month. Keepa, for comparison, covers 11 marketplaces without amazon.nl, .se, .pl, .com.be or .com.au; our comparison with Keepa sets out where a live listing tracker and a price-history database do different jobs. Every new account starts with a free 30-day trial of up to 10 products and 10 checks a day, with no card required.

Related

• Buy Box tracker — the winner, the top three offers, and an email when it turns over.
• Listing monitoring — title, images and A+ content, compared check to check.
• Bought in past month tracker — the demand badge on a rival’s listing, daily.
• Competitor prices, stock and delivery by ZIP code — why the same ASIN reads differently in Dallas and Brooklyn.