companies of all sizes
Live crawling (or both together) is what you need for accurate, timely competitor price monitoring.
Feeds alone are fine for bulk catalog discovery where exact timing doesn't matter.
Live Crawling vs Merchant Feeds: Key differences
Feed-only price monitoring reads whatever a merchant chose to publish in their product feed, which can lag the live site, exclude flash sales, or simply be wrong. Crawling the live product page catches what a real shopper would see, including prices and stock states that never made it into a feed.
| Feature | Merchant Feeds | Live Crawling |
|---|---|---|
| Freshness | Merchant's refresh cadence | Your own crawl schedule |
| Catches flash sales | Only if the feed updates in time | Yes |
| Detects soft-block / fallback pages | No | Yes (product-signal scoring) |
| Cross-currency price conflicts | Manual | Automatic (exchange-rate normalized) |
When to choose each approach
What feeds are good at
Feeds are cheap to ingest and structured by design — useful as one input among several, especially for bulk catalog discovery.
What feeds miss
Feed refresh cadence is controlled by the merchant, not you. Flash sales, temporary price drops, and stock changes that happen between feed syncs are invisible until the next export.
- Stale prices between feed refresh cycles
- Feeds can omit sale/promo pricing shown only on-page
- No visibility into soft-block / bot-served fallback content
- No cross-currency comparability unless you build it
Live Crawling vs Merchant Feeds: Full comparison matrix
A complete feature overview across both options.
| Feature | Merchant Feeds | Live Crawling |
|---|---|---|
| Freshness | Merchant's refresh cadence | Your own crawl schedule |
| Catches flash sales | Only if the feed updates in time | Yes |
| Detects soft-block / fallback pages | No | Yes (product-signal scoring) |
| Cross-currency price conflicts | Manual | Automatic (exchange-rate normalized) |