A Competitor Raised Prices. Should You Follow?

A competitor you watch just raised the price of a product you both sell. It's tempting to treat this as pure good news and do nothing, or to raise your own price the same afternoon. Before either, find out what kind of increase it is. A single product going up tells you something very different from a whole catalog moving overnight, and the right response depends on which one you are looking at.

First, check whether it is one product or the whole store

Before you think about your own price, look at the rest of their catalog. Every Shopify store publishes its products at /products.json (we walk through the format in the /products.json guide), so you can compare today's prices with a copy you saved last week. What you are looking for is the pattern:

• One or two products up, everything else flat: usually a product-level decision: a supplier changed, a variant is selling well, or a previous discount ended.
• A whole category up by a similar percentage: often a cost change from one supplier or a deliberate repositioning of that category.
• Most of the catalog up on the same day, by roughly the same percentage: a store-wide repricing. Something changed in their costs or their strategy, and it is unlikely to reverse next week.

Also check the compare_at_price field. If the "new" price is simply the old compare-at price coming back after a sale, nothing was raised at all: a discount ended. The compare_at_price explainer shows how to tell the two apart.

The pour-over set: a $6 gap opens overnight

Say you sell a ceramic pour-over coffee set for $48. It costs you $26 landed, so you keep $22 per sale, a 45.8% margin. Your closest competitor sold the same set for $46. This morning it shows $54.

You pull their catalog and compare it with last week's copy. Of their 40 products, 31 went up on the same day, all by 8% to 17%. Their compare-at prices are empty, so no sale just ended. They repriced the whole store.

Now you have three realistic options:

Which one fits depends on four things about your store and this product.

Four questions that decide whether you follow

1. Are your costs moving too?

If their whole catalog went up, ask whether the same pressure is coming for you: same supplier, same shipping lane, same category of goods. If your next purchase order will cost more, the competitor has simply moved first, and following them is a way to protect your margin before it shrinks.

2. Do your customers actually compare you?

A $6 gap only wins sales if shoppers see both prices. For products people search by name, that gap matters. For products they buy because they like your brand, it may not move anyone, and you are giving away $6 for nothing.

3. Can you handle more orders?

Holding your price makes sense when you want the extra demand. If stock is tight or the product is slow to reorder, being the cheaper store can empty your shelf and leave you out of stock exactly when shoppers start looking for an alternative.

4. Is this product how customers find you?

Some products bring in first-time buyers who then shop the rest of your catalog. Keeping those cheaper than the competitor can be worth more than the margin on the product itself. Others are bought on their own; for those, the extra profit per sale usually matters more.

What each response looks like in practice

Hold when your costs are stable, the product is compared directly and you have stock. Then make the gap visible by mentioning the price in your product description, ads or newsletter, because shoppers who never see it won't switch.

Follow part of the way when you want both margin and an edge. In the example, $51 adds $3 per sale and still leaves you $3 cheaper. This is often the safest choice when you are unsure how shoppers will react.

Match when your own costs are going up, when the product is not compared directly, or when you were underpriced to begin with. If you track a competitor price index, a store-wide increase on their side will drop your index, and matching on some products can bring you back to where you meant to be.

Whatever you choose, write down the date and the reason. A month later you'll want to know whether your sales changed, and you won't remember why you made the call.

Where watching by hand falls short

You need last week's prices for any of this. If you only notice an increase while browsing their store, you cannot tell whether it is one product or forty, or whether it happened yesterday or a month ago. Saving a copy of each competitor's catalog on a schedule fixes that, but it gets tedious beyond a few stores and is easy to forget.

There's also the question of whether the increase sticks. If a store raises prices and cuts them back two weeks later, it was probably testing what shoppers would pay. You only see that if you keep watching after you decide. The broader approach to reacting to price moves is covered in our guide to matching a competitor's price.

StoreSentry does the saving part for you: it checks the competitor stores you add and sends price increases and drops in a digest by email or Telegram, with a price history for each product. The decision about your own price stays with you.