How do you know when competitors kick off their seasonal sales? I run a small homeware store and every year I get caught out by the same thing. I plan my seasonal promotions for a certain week, and by the time I launch, two of my main competitors have already been discounting for days. They take the early traffic, and I end up matching prices I could have set from the start if I had known when they were going to move. The problem is not seeing their current prices — it is knowing when a sale act ?

Checking every morning is exactly the approach that keeps failing, because the changes often happen late at night or over a weekend. What solved it for me was switching to proper ecommerce price monitoring instead of spot checks. The part that matters for seasonal timing is the history: you are not looking at a single snapshot, you are looking at when a price moved and how long it stayed there, so you can see the pattern across a competitor's previous promotions. You add your own catalogue, it finds stores selling the same products, and you approve the matches yourself before anything gets monitored. It compares at variant level too, which matters if you sell the same item in several sizes or finishes. There is a free sample report you can request with your own products before subscribing, which is a sensible way to check whether the matching works on your range before paying anything.