Pricing data

Pricing data tracks the prices of specific products or services across sellers over time. Retailers and brands use it for competitive price monitoring, minimum advertised price compliance and promotion planning. Investors and economists use it to study inflation and category trends, and travel, insurance and telecom companies track competitors' rate cards.

Typical fields

• Product or SKU identifier and matched product group
• Retailer or seller and country
• Current price, regular price and currency
• Promotion type, discount and shipping cost
• Availability at the time of collection
• Collection timestamp

Sources and collection

Most pricing data is collected from public web pages, apps and retailer feeds on a fixed schedule. Some datasets add in-store shelf prices gathered by field auditors or from receipts. The value depends on matching: a price is only comparable if the provider has correctly identified the same product, pack size and seller.

Delivery and pricing

Common delivery options are daily files, cloud shares, dashboards with alerts, and APIs. Cost usually scales with the number of products and competitors monitored, collection frequency, and whether the provider handles product matching or you supply the match list. Monitoring of your own SKU list is often sold as a managed service.

Before you buy

• Confirm which retailers, regions and channels (web, app, in-store) are covered.
• Ask how pack sizes, variants and third-party marketplace sellers are handled.
• Check whether prices include shipping, taxes and member-only discounts.
• Check the collection time of day and the gap rate when a page fails to load.
• Validate a sample against prices you can check yourself.