Ecommerce competitor monitoring glossary

Compare-at price

Compare-at price is the "was" price a Shopify store enters alongside the current selling price to display a product as discounted, for example a crossed-out $80 next to a $60 sale price. It is set manually by the merchant and is not validated against any real sale history. For a Shopify store owner, tracking whether a competitor keeps items permanently marked down at a compare-at price shows whether their "sale" is a real event or a standing pricing strategy.

Learn more: How common permanent compare-at pricing is

Price change noise

Price change noise is small, sub-1% price fluctuation caused by automated repricing tools, currency rounding, or bulk pricing rules, rather than a deliberate pricing decision. Most raw price-change data is dominated by this kind of noise, not meaningful moves. Filtering it out is what separates a real signal, like an actual price cut, from routine background activity that does not need a response.

Learn more: How much of competitor price data is noise

Catalog-wide price change

A catalog-wide price change is when many SKUs from the same store change price at the same time, typically 50 or more. It is almost always a sign of automation, a repricing app running a rule, or a sitewide sale going live, rather than a single human decision on one product. Spotting the pattern helps a Shopify store owner tell a targeted competitive move apart from a routine automated event.

Learn more: How to spot automated catalog-wide changes

Significance scoring

Significance scoring is an AI classification, low, medium, or high, applied to each detected competitor event to separate background activity from events worth a person's attention. Only a small share of events are typically flagged high-significance. This lets a Shopify store owner skip routine updates and focus on the handful of changes, like a real price cut on a bestseller, that actually call for a response. Available on the Growth plan and above.

Learn more: How significance scoring splits real event data and Weekly Competitor Report features

Weekly Competitor Report

The Weekly Competitor Report is Beaconmon's scheduled Slack or email summary that groups every competitor change detected over a period into a plain-language digest, rather than a raw list of diffs. It is available on the Starter plan and above. Instead of checking a dashboard, a store owner or their team gets a readable roundup of what competitors did and when.

Learn more: How the Weekly Competitor Report works

CSS-selector monitoring

CSS-selector monitoring means tracking one specific element on a competitor's page, a price, a stock badge, a promo banner, by its CSS selector, rather than comparing the entire page as an image. This is more precise than pixel-diffing because it targets the exact piece of content that matters and ignores everything else. For a Shopify store owner, this means an alert only fires when the price or promo actually changes, not when a blog timestamp or a navigation menu updates.

Learn more: How CSS-selector change detection works

Content monitoring vs. uptime monitoring

Content monitoring watches for changes on a page you don't control, like a competitor's pricing page. Uptime monitoring watches whether a page you do control, like your own storefront, is up and responding. Both matter to a Shopify store owner: uptime monitoring protects your own revenue by catching outages, while content monitoring keeps you aware of what competitors are doing on pages you have no control over.

Learn more: The uptime monitoring guide and Shopify competitor monitoring

Data tier (full catalog, selected products, limited)

Data tier describes the depth at which Beaconmon can track a given competitor, ranging from full product-feed access down to a handful of manually specified product URLs. A competitor with a full catalog feed gets broader, more automatic coverage, while one tracked at a limited tier only reports changes on the specific pages a store owner has added. Which tier applies to a given competitor depends on what data that store's site exposes, not on the plan a customer is on.

Restock speed / stockout resolution time

Restock speed, or stockout resolution time, is the time between a product going out of stock and coming back in stock. A fast restock, hours rather than days, often points to manufactured urgency rather than a genuine shortage, while a slow restock suggests a real supply constraint. Comparing restock speed across competitors helps a Shopify store owner tell which "low stock" messaging is a sales tactic and which reflects an actual inventory problem.

Learn more: Median restock speed across tracked competitors

Product churn (Shopify)

Product churn is when a new product listing appears in a competitor's catalog and then gets pulled again within a short window. It often signals a failed test launch rather than a permanent addition to the catalog. Tracking churn tells a Shopify store owner which of a competitor's new products are worth watching and which were pulled before they gained any traction.

Learn more: How often new Shopify listings churn

Domain / SSL expiry alert

A domain or SSL expiry alert is a warning fired when a monitored domain's SSL certificate or registration is approaching expiry, at 30, 14, and 7-day thresholds. It is distinct from an incident because it does not indicate current downtime, only a risk of downtime if the certificate or registration is not renewed in time. Catching this early gives a store owner time to renew before a browser starts warning visitors that the site is not secure.

Learn more: How Beaconmon handles security and monitoring data

The two tribes of DTC discounting

The two tribes of DTC discounting is Beaconmon's own term for a bimodal pattern in how direct-to-consumer brands discount: most brands cluster into one of two groups, those that almost never discount and those that almost always do, with comparatively few landing in the middle. Knowing which tribe a competitor belongs to tells a Shopify store owner what to expect from their pricing behavior, rather than reacting to each price change as a surprise.

Learn more: The two tribes of DTC discounting, explained