How to monitor your products' prices at online retailers

What price monitoring is useful for, what to record, how often to check, and where the legal line sits in the EU.

Casper BrixOct 20, 2026 · 4 min read

Your products are sold on dozens of retailer websites. Each one shows its own price, its own campaigns and its own stock status.

Most brands only see this when a customer or a partner complains. By then the campaign is over.

This guide covers what price monitoring is useful for, what to track, and where the legal line sits in the EU.

What price monitoring is

Price monitoring means recording the prices retailers publish for your products, over time.

It is normal market practice. In the European Commission’s e-commerce sector inquiry, 53% of retailers said they track competitors’ prices, and two thirds of those use automatic software.

Brands do it for different reasons than retailers. A brand wants context for its own decisions. Stock, campaigns, channel planning.

What it is useful for

Spotting partner campaigns early. When a partner starts a campaign on your products, demand goes up. If the partner runs out of stock halfway through, everyone loses the sale. Seeing the campaign start gives you time to offer a restock.
Planning your own campaigns. If three partners run campaigns on the same product in November, your own webshop campaign on that product will struggle. You can move yours or pick another product.
Reading sell-through correctly. A partner whose sales jumped may be running a campaign. A partner whose sales dropped may have changed its price. Price explains a lot of what your sales data shows.
Finding unauthorised sellers. Shops selling your products that you never supplied often show up first as unfamiliar prices.
Seeing channel performance by market. Price levels differ between countries. That affects where wholesale grows fastest.

What to record

Keep it simple and factual. For each product at each partner:

The published price and the date you saw it.
The discount the retailer shows on its own page, as a number.
Campaign start and end, if visible.
Stock status on the same day.

Record price and stock together. A discounted product that is out of stock tells you something very different from a discounted product that is selling.

How often to check

Weekly is enough for most of the year.

From early November to Christmas, check daily. Black Friday campaigns often start a week early and change daily. Weekly checks will miss most of them.

Doing this by hand across 20 partners and 100 products means 2,000 page visits per round. That is where most brands stop. Software does it every day without anyone opening a browser.

Where the legal line sits in the EU

Watching prices is lawful. Using what you see to control a retailer’s price is not.

Under EU competition law, the retailer sets its own resale price. A brand may recommend a price and may set a maximum price. It may not set a fixed or minimum resale price, directly or through pressure or incentives. This is Article 4(a) of the Vertical Block Exemption Regulation.

In practice that means:

Do not contact a partner about its price to get it changed.
Do not tie discounts, rebates, marketing money or delivery to a partner’s price.
Do not ask a partner to confirm it will hold a price.
Do not treat a partner’s campaign as a reason to slow supply.

Use what you see for your own planning. Stock, campaigns, your own pricing, which partners you work with going forward on objective criteria. The full rules are in who sets the retail price when you sell wholesale in the EU.

This is a general description, not legal advice. Have your distribution agreements reviewed by a competition lawyer.

How Atlo handles it

Atlo records the stock and price your retail partners publish for your products, every day. It shows the numbers. It does not set, recommend or judge any price.

Retailers set their own resale prices. Atlo shows prices as retailers publish them, for your own pricing, campaign and partner planning, never to influence what a retailer charges.