Managing competitors

A competitor is any online store whose products and prices you want to monitor. VantageDash fetches their catalog on demand or on a schedule and stores each product with its price for matching and history.

Adding a competitor

1. Open the Competitors page.
2. Click Add competitor.
3. Paste the store's website and click Continue. Any form of the address works: with or without https:// or www., or a link to any page on the site. You can also type the store's name to search for it.
4. VantageDash finds the store, fills in its name from the store's own website, and picks a brand color from the store's icon. Check both and change them if you like. If the icon is black, white or grey, it picks the color your other competitors use least.
5. Click Add competitor.

VantageDash saves the address the store itself uses, following it if it sends visitors somewhere else, and tracks the whole store even if you pasted a single product page. If no website exists at the address you typed, it tells you before anything is added, so you can fix the spelling. Two competitors can't share a website or a name.

VantageDash works out which platform the store runs on and reads it the way that platform allows. Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, Square Online, Ecwid and most custom-built shops are read. A shop that sells one product in several sizes is listed with a line for each size, at that size's price. If a store's products don't show up after a scrape, send us a note via the Feedback button and we'll take a look.

Stores that turn away automated visits

A few stores refuse every automated visit, and an online ordering page on Toast always does. Before you add one, VantageDash tells you what will happen on your plan:

• On a paid plan these stores are read another way, within a monthly allowance. An ordering page is read whole at each price check. Any other store is read a few pages at each price check, so its prices can take several checks to fill in.
• On every plan, the free one included, the first read of a new store like this is on us, up to a few hundred of its pages, so you can see where you stand. Five such stores a month get a first read.
• On the free plan they are not read again after that. You can still enter the products you care about yourself, from the Add product button on the store's page.

When their prices are not on their website

Some businesses, cafes and restaurants especially, have a website with no prices on it and take orders on a separate ordering page. When you add the website, a price check looks for a link to that ordering page and reads the prices from there. The competitor's page then says Prices are read from with the address it found. If the business has several locations it takes the first; click Change to pick another.

If no link is found, open the competitor, click Edit, and paste the address into Where their prices are listed. Saving it starts a price check. Empty the box and save to go back to reading their website.

Finding competitors to add

If you are not sure who to compare against, open the Competitors page and click Find competitors. VantageDash reads your own product list, works out what you sell, and suggests stores that sell the same kind of thing. It checks each one before showing it, so the stores on the list are real and reachable. This takes about a minute, and the stores appear as each one is checked.

Suggestions are worked out from your own products, so you need at least three of them in VantageDash first. Until then the Competitors page points you to the Products page instead of offering Find competitors.

If the page says Suggestions are not available right now, the fault is on our side and not with your store or your account. Click Try again a little later. Meanwhile Add Competitor works as usual for any store you already know.

Nothing is added until you say so. Each suggestion shows what to expect:

• We can track prices here means we should be able to read that store's prices.
• We will try to track prices means we could not tell in advance, so we will try.
• You may need to add prices by hand means the store turns away automated visitors. It can still be worth tracking; see adding prices yourself.

Click Add to start tracking a store, or the x to hide a suggestion you do not want. Hidden stores are not suggested again.

These are suggestions, not recommendations. We can tell you a store exists and sells a similar sort of thing; only you can tell whether it is really one of your competitors, so have a look before you add it.

You can look again at any time, though not more than once every fifteen minutes. Each look only suggests stores you have not already seen or added.

Running a scrape

Two options on the Competitors page:

• The price check button on a competitor's card (the radar icon) reads just that store.
• Check Prices at the top of the page reads every competitor, one after another.

Progress is shown in the button itself. You can leave the page during a price check; it runs in the background. When it completes, a notification appears and the new prices populate the Comparison and Price History pages.

Each competitor's card says how many of its products we hold, for example "162 products". A store we have read nothing from says "No products yet" once nothing is running. While a price check is running or waiting, a store with none says nothing, and the note at the top of the page tells you which store is being read. When the check ends the number appears by itself.

Automatic price checks

Your competitors' prices are checked on a schedule, without you clicking anything. The schedule is switched on for you: once a week on the free plan (Scout), from when you add your first competitor; every 2 days on Basecamp, every day on Vantage and Summit, from when the plan starts. Open Settings → Scheduling to change how often, or to switch it off.

When your products come from your website, each scheduled check reads your own store first, so your side of every comparison is as current as your competitors'. It is skipped when you imported in the last 24 hours, and it never runs for products that come from Shopify.

Each plan has a shortest gap. Basecamp can check as often as every 2 days, Vantage as often as every day and Summit as often as every hour. You can always choose a longer gap, up to every week. On the free plan (Scout) prices are checked once a week, and you can also start up to 5 checks a month yourself.

See Plans and billing for what each plan includes.

Editing a competitor

Click a competitor's name on the Competitors page to open its detail view. You can rename it, change the URL, say where their prices are listed when that is not their website, swap the logo, or pick a different brand color. The brand color is used to identify the competitor across charts, comparison cards, and alerts.

Renaming keeps everything: its products, matches, alert rules, price history and past alerts all move to the new name. Two competitors can't share a name, so pick one no other competitor uses. If a price check or product matching is running, wait for it to finish and save again.

If you used the competitor's old name in any match keywords, update those keywords too. They look for the words you typed, not for the competitor itself.

Removing a competitor

From the Competitors page, click the trash icon next to a competitor. Before anything is deleted, VantageDash tells you what goes with it:

• the products tracked for that competitor, including any you added by hand
• every match with it, including matches you made or rejected yourself
• its price history

Confirm to remove all of it. This can't be undone. Your own products are never touched, and alerts you were already sent stay in your alert history.

If a price check or product matching is running, wait for it to finish and try again. Otherwise it would put some of what you just deleted back.

To stop checking a competitor's website without losing anything, open the competitor and change How they sell instead.

How many competitors can I add?

Plan limits:

• Scout (free): 3 competitors
• Basecamp: 10 competitors
• Vantage: 25 competitors
• Summit: unlimited

See Plans and billing for details.