Merchant Feeds vs Live Crawling: Choosing How You Monitor Prices
Merchant feeds and live crawling answer a similar-sounding question—"what's this competitor's price?"—but they can disagree more than teams expect.
Merchant feeds
Cheap to ingest and structured by design. The catch: freshness is controlled entirely by the merchant's own refresh cadence, so a flash sale or a stock change between syncs is invisible until the next export.
Live crawling
Catches what a real shopper would actually see on the page right now, including sale pricing and soft-block/bot-fallback content a feed would never surface.
How to choose
Feeds alone are fine for bulk catalog discovery where exact timing doesn't matter. For accurate, timely competitor price monitoring, live crawling—or both together—is what actually catches the changes that matter.
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