How to choose scan timing after a competitor price move

When a price change lands at the wrong moment

A competitor price move is easy to miss when it happens between your team’s regular checks. The problem gets sharper when that move lands just before a promotion, a campaign handoff, or a pricing review. At that point, the issue is not whether you are monitoring competitors at all. It is whether the scan timing is tight enough to catch changes before they affect margin or positioning.

That is where Oltora Price Monitor fits a WordPress workflow. It tracks price increases and decreases across supported WooCommerce and Shopify competitor stores, while keeping the core monitoring data in the WordPress database on the site where the plugin is installed. If your team needs to make pricing calls from the same environment it already manages, that architecture matters.

You can review changes from the WordPress dashboard, choose a scan frequency for each competitor, and share daily email summaries with the people who need them. The practical question is how to set that timing around the moments when price movement actually matters.

Start with the trigger, not the schedule

It is tempting to pick one scan interval and use it everywhere. That sounds tidy, but it usually ignores how pricing work happens. A fast-moving competitor might change prices around campaigns or short-lived promotions. A steadier store may only shift around planned events. If both are scanned on the same cadence, one of two things usually happens: you either miss important movement, or you collect more noise than your team wants to review.

A better approach is to ask what event makes a late discovery costly. Examples include:

• a competitor discount that appears while your own promotion is live
• a price increase that opens room for a margin adjustment
• a product-level change that affects a weekly pricing meeting
• a campaign window where timing matters more than broad trend watching

Once that trigger is clear, the scan interval becomes easier to justify. You are no longer asking for “more monitoring” in the abstract. You are matching the check to the moment when the change becomes decision-ready.

How the monitoring setup is separated

The useful part of this workflow is that the moving pieces stay distinct. Oltora Price Monitor does not force every competitor into one shared rhythm. Each monitored store can have its own scan frequency, and the available intervals include every hour, every 3 hours, every 6 hours, every 12 hours, every 24 hours, and every 48 hours. A manual Scan now option is also available when you want to request a fresh check.

That separation is what makes the system workable for a team with mixed priorities. One competitor can sit in a tighter schedule because it moves quickly around promotions. Another can stay on a slower cadence because it only matters for longer-cycle review. The dashboard then shows what changed, when it changed, and which store needs attention.

This also helps preserve the state your team actually needs: the record of previous and current prices, the date of the detected change, and the history behind repeated shifts. When the monitoring data stays inside WordPress, the team is not forced to reconstruct that history from separate tools or browser tabs.

Use the scan rate to protect your review time

Scan timing is not just about catching changes sooner. It also affects how much time your team spends sorting through alerts and summaries. A scan that is too frequent for a slow-moving competitor can create extra review work without improving decisions. A scan that is too slow for a highly active competitor can leave you responding after the pricing window has already narrowed.

In practice, the right setup usually depends on the role each competitor plays in your pricing process:

• Fast-moving reference stores may deserve tighter checks because they influence short-cycle decisions.
• Campaign-sensitive competitors may need scans timed around known promotion periods.
• Lower-priority benchmarks can usually sit on a longer interval if they inform general positioning rather than daily action.

The point is to keep the right changes visible at the right time, not to scan everything as if every store had the same business weight.

What the dashboard can show once the timing is right

When scan timing lines up with your trigger points, the dashboard becomes easier to use. You can review competitor price increases and decreases, filter by date ranges such as Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days, Last 30 days, or a specific date, and open individual price analysis records for more context. Those records can include the product thumbnail when available, product name and SKU when available, previous price, current price, absolute movement, percentage change, and a direct link to the competitor product page.

That level of detail matters because a price move is rarely useful by itself. The team still needs to see how large the move was, which product changed, and whether the shift happened in the window that matters for a current decision.

If you need a report outside the dashboard, price-change data can also be exported to CSV. That gives pricing, ecommerce, or commercial teams a way to use the same record in internal analysis without rebuilding the source data elsewhere.

Daily summaries work best when they match the same logic

Scan timing and email summaries should follow the same thinking. Oltora Price Monitor lets you configure daily digests independently for each monitored competitor. You can decide whether the digest is enabled, whether it includes price increases, whether it includes price decreases, the preferred send time, and which email addresses receive it.

That matters when different people need different parts of the same market picture. A pricing manager may want one competitor’s changes. An ecommerce manager may care about another. A commercial team may only need summaries on the stores that affect a current campaign. Multiple recipients can follow the same competitor, and different competitors can have completely different recipient lists.

So the scan schedule is only half the architecture. The other half is making sure the right people see the right change at the right time.

When the default capacity is enough, and when it is not

Each licensed WordPress installation includes capacity for up to 1,000 monitored competitor products. That is enough for many setups, but the inventory also allows capacity upgrades when a site needs room for more monitored products. The upgrade adds additional 1,000-product units to the selected installation and remains active until the annual license expires.

For an agency or multi-site setup, that distinction matters because each activation can keep its own monitoring load and capacity. The point is not to spread one store’s behavior across every site. It is to keep each WordPress installation aligned with the competitor list and review process it actually handles.

The simple rule for choosing timing

If a competitor’s price move would change what you do next week, scan it often enough to catch the move before that decision window closes. If the change only matters as background context, a slower cadence is usually enough. The useful setup is the one that matches the timing of the business decision, keeps the price history inside WordPress, and gives the team one clear place to review what happened.

If you want to see how that workflow is structured inside WordPress, start with Oltora Price Monitor. The plugin is designed for teams that need competitor price changes, history, and alerts to stay tied to the site they already manage.