Competitor monitoring for small DTC brands

The idea

Small DTC founders learn about a competitor’s price cut when a customer emails asking for a match, and about a rival’s launch from Instagram like everyone else. Enterprise price-intelligence tools start in the four figures and assume a catalog of thousands; below that, monitoring means a founder doom-browsing rival stores at midnight. Yet the actual job is small: watch a handful of named stores for price moves, restocks, new SKUs, and ad changes, and say something only when something changed.

Dropkiller proved e-commerce operators pay subscriptions for competitive intelligence, but its buyer is a dropshipper hunting winning products across the whole market — a churny, trend-chasing crowd. Pointing the same telescope at a brand operator’s 3-10 named rivals serves a calmer buyer defending a niche, who stays subscribed as long as the competitors exist. Technically it is also a far easier problem: most targets are Shopify stores exposing a public products.json endpoint, so the core scraper is closer to an API poll than a scraping war.

Who pays

Founders and heads of ecommerce at $500k-5M DTC brands — big enough to have named rivals, too small for Prisync-class tooling. $39-99/mo tiered on competitor count, with the daily digest as the retention engine: every morning it proves it watched. Distribution: DTC Twitter and communities like 2PM and eCommerceFuel, plus SEO on competitor-name comparison queries.

MVP scope

• Onboarding for 3-10 competitor URLs with automatic Shopify detection
• Nightly snapshot and diff engine: prices, SKUs, stock status via products.json, Playwright fallback
• Meta Ad Library monitoring per competitor brand
• Morning digest email with significance ordering and thresholds
• Dashboard with change feed and per-SKU price history
• Skip for v1: Amazon and marketplace monitoring, Slack integration, weekly PDF reports, repricing recommendations

Build RivalWatch, a competitor monitoring service for small DTC brands. Stack: Playwright scrapers on a scheduled worker, Next.js dashboard, Postgres, Resend for the daily digest email.

Core flow: onboarding asks for 3-10 competitor store URLs and the user's own store. For Shopify competitors — most of them — skip HTML scraping and poll the public /products.json endpoint, which returns full catalog, prices, and variant availability as clean JSON; fall back to Playwright with per-store CSS selectors for non-Shopify sites. A nightly job snapshots every competitor: product list, prices, variant stock status, and Meta Ad Library entries for each brand (active ad count plus creative text). Diff against the previous snapshot and classify changes: price cut or raise, new SKU, sold out, back in stock, new ad creative, ad paused. Each morning, Resend sends a digest ordered by significance — price moves on products overlapping the user's catalog first.

Non-obvious detail: store immutable daily snapshots, not just diffs, so you can ship price-history charts per competitor SKU later and backfill any new alert type; snapshots are cheap in Postgres JSONB.

Pages: onboarding wizard, dashboard (change feed with filters), competitor detail with price-history sparklines, digest settings (send time, thresholds like ignore price changes under 5 percent), billing.

Pricing: Solo $39/mo (3 competitors), Brand $69/mo (6), Portfolio $99/mo (10 plus Slack webhook).