Glossary

E-commerce price and stock monitoring glossary

Plain-English definitions of the pricing, stock, and data-extraction terms you will run into while monitoring competitors.

Dynamic pricing: A strategy where prices change automatically in response to demand, competition, stock levels, or time. Retailers use it to protect margin and stay competitive. Monitoring competitors is what makes dynamic pricing possible.
Price monitoring: The ongoing, automated tracking of product prices on other websites. It replaces manual spot-checks with scheduled checks and alerts. The goal is to learn about a competitor's price change soon after it happens.
Competitor monitoring: Watching the prices, stock, and product changes of specific rival sellers. It is broader than price alone and can include availability and assortment. It helps you react to the moves that affect your sales.
MAP (minimum advertised price): The lowest price a brand allows resellers to advertise a product for. Advertising below MAP can trigger penalties or loss of authorization. Brands monitor listings to catch and correct violations.
Repricing: Adjusting your own prices in response to the market, often to match or beat a competitor. It can be manual or driven by rules. Reliable competitor data is the input that makes repricing work.
Stockout: When a product is temporarily unavailable to buy because inventory has run out. For your own catalog it means lost sales; for a competitor it can be an opening. Stock monitoring flags these moments as they happen.
Back-in-stock alert: A notification sent when an out-of-stock product becomes available again. Shoppers use it to buy, and sellers or buyers use it to time campaigns and pricing. It is triggered by a change in a product's stock status.
Price elasticity: A measure of how much demand for a product changes when its price changes. Highly elastic products lose many sales from a small price rise. Understanding elasticity helps you price without giving away margin.
SKU: Short for stock-keeping unit, a unique code that identifies one specific sellable item. Each color or size of a product is usually its own SKU. Price and stock are tracked per SKU.
Variant: A specific version of a product, such as a particular size, color, or configuration. One product page can list many variants, each with its own price and stock. Accurate monitoring reads pricing per variant, not just the page headline.
Out-of-stock arbitrage: Capturing demand that a competitor can no longer serve because they have sold out. Buyers shift ad spend or bids toward those categories to win the traffic. It depends on learning about the stockout quickly.
Price drop alert: A notification that fires when a tracked product's price falls, often past a set threshold. Shoppers use it to buy at the right time, and sellers use it to react to undercutting. It is one of the most common monitoring triggers.
Web scraping: Automatically reading data, such as prices, from web pages. It is the underlying technique most price monitoring relies on. Modern tools handle the fetching and parsing so you do not have to write code.
LLM extraction: Using a large language model to pull structured details like price and stock out of messy page content. It handles layouts that rule-based scrapers miss. Respot uses it as a fallback when structured data is not available.
Structured data: Machine-readable product information embedded in a page, such as JSON-LD, microdata, or Open Graph tags. When present, it is the most reliable source of price and stock. Monitoring tools read it first before falling back to other methods.
Buy Box: The featured purchase option on a marketplace product page, most famously on Amazon. Winning it usually means winning the sale, and price is a major factor. Sellers monitor it closely to stay competitive.
Price parity: Keeping the same price for a product across different sales channels or regions. Brands enforce it to avoid channel conflict and confusion. Monitoring reveals where parity is breaking down.
Markdown: A deliberate reduction of a product's price, typically to clear inventory or respond to demand. Tracking competitor markdowns tells you when the market is discounting. It is different from a pricing error or a temporary glitch.
Margin: The share of a sale left after the cost of the product, usually shown as a percentage. It is what price changes ultimately protect or erode. The point of monitoring is to defend margin without losing sales.
Dropshipping: A model where a store sells products it does not stock, forwarding each order to a supplier who ships it. Because margins are thin and prices move fast, competitor and supplier price monitoring is essential. Small price shifts can decide whether a sale is profitable.