The short answer
- Check five things on every listing, every day: is it published, is the price what you meant, is the file attached, does the cover load, do the links on the page still land.
- A human will not do this daily for thirty listings. It is boring, it is repetitive, and the day you skip is the day it breaks. This is a job for a script, not for willpower.
- The check has to read the store the way a buyer reaches it - the public page - not the inside of your dashboard, because the buyer never sees your dashboard.
- Compare today against yesterday, and say only what moved. A daily report that lists everything is a report nobody reads by Thursday.
- Worst thing first. An unpublished listing costs money every hour; a changed cover picture can wait until lunch.
The four ways stores break silently
- The unpublish: a toggle slips, a draft is saved over a live listing, a platform migration flips a switch. The buy page returns a 404 and every link you ever posted now leads nowhere.
- The missing file: the listing is live, the price is right, and the download is empty. The buyer pays, gets nothing, and asks for a refund - or worse, does not ask and never comes back.
- The price typo: 19 becomes 1.9, or 199. One sells at a loss, the other stops selling at all. Nobody emails you either way.
- The quiet rot: a cover image host dies, an external link rots, a refund policy line gets deleted in an edit. Each one alone is small; together they read as neglect to a first-time buyer.
Make the check run itself
- Pick the pages that matter: the storefront, each listing, and the one or two landing pages you actually send people to.
- Put a small script on a schedule - cron on a Linux box or a Mac, Task Scheduler on Windows, or a free GitHub Action. One line, runs once a day.
- The script fetches each page the way a browser does, pulls out the fields a buyer would see, and saves today's snapshot.
- The next day it compares, and writes one short letter: what changed, worst first, each line pointing at a page and a moment.
- Read the letter with your morning coffee. Ninety days out of a hundred it says nothing moved. The tenth day is the one that pays for the other ninety.
What monitoring cannot tell you
- Visits, sales and search rank live behind logins. A public-page watcher cannot see them, and a tool that claims otherwise is guessing.
- Nobody can watch your store more honestly than the page itself. If the buy button is on the public page, it gets checked; if it is behind a login, it does not, and the report should say so.
- Monitoring is not the same as fixing. It tells you the listing is unpublished by 9am; you still have to click the button.
The free tool for this
There is no calculator that answers this one honestly, so here is the free set: eight calculators for rates, quotes, invoices, splits, prices and fees. They run in the page and send nothing anywhere.
If you would rather not build it yourself
This is the job Store Eye does: it reads your public pages daily, compares against yesterday, and writes one letter, worst thing first. Pure Python, no accounts, no keys. Store Eye is $29. See it on the shop, and there is a plain page about it here: what it holds.
Questions people actually ask
Is once a day enough?
For a small store, yes. Platforms already watch their own uptime; what they do not tell you is when your own listing quietly stops being for sale. Once a day catches that within a day, which is about a hundred times faster than most sellers find out.
Do I need to give a monitoring tool my store password?
No, and you should not. Everything worth checking - published state, price, files, cover, links - is on the public page. A tool that reads only public pages has nothing to leak.
Read next
What website change monitoring is, and when you do not need it, How to watch a public shop without doing anything creepy.