What is fair game
- Anything on the public page: prices, titles, what is for sale today, the refund terms, the words they use to sell it.
- Changes over time: a price that moved, a listing that appeared or vanished, a policy that quietly got shorter.
- Their public cadence: how often the shop changes, roughly - not who their customers are.
The line, in one paragraph
- Read public pages, at a polite pace, the way a buyer would. Do not log in as anyone, do not bypass a block, do not collect people's personal data from reviews or comments, and do not hammer a small shop's server with a scraper running every minute.
- Once a day is more than enough. Any signal that matters to your pricing is visible on a daily rhythm; anything faster is noise plus a rude amount of traffic.
- If a site says no - a robots file, a block, a terms page that forbids it - respect it and move on. There is always another question to answer.
What to actually do with what you see
- Note price moves on products like yours, with dates. One move is trivia; a pattern over a quarter is information.
- Note new listings in your category. They tell you where a market is heading before the blogs do.
- Note the words in their titles and summaries - not to copy, but to notice what they emphasize and what they leave out.
- Change one thing in your own shop per week based on what you learned. A file of observations that never changes anything is a hobby, not a strategy.
What watching will not do for you
- It will not tell you their sales, their traffic, or their rank. Those are behind logins, and anyone selling you that numbers-from-nowhere story is guessing on your invoice.
- It will not beat them for you. Watching is how you stop being surprised, not a substitute for making your own shop better.
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
Store Eye can watch any public shop, not just yours - one address, once a day, a short letter about what moved. 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 watching a competitor's shop legal?
Reading public web pages at a normal pace is what every browser does. The creepiness people worry about - logins, personal data, aggressive scraping - is exactly what a fair watcher avoids by design. Read the public page, keep it slow, skip anything personal.
Read next
How to know your online store broke before your buyers do, What website change monitoring is, and when you do not need it.