Competitor prices for Black Week: tracking pricing pages

Why competitor prices move faster during Black Week

In 2026, Black Friday falls on November 27, the day after the US Thanksgiving holiday on November 26 (OPM). Cyber Monday follows on November 30. For many shops the promotion period starts much earlier, as a Black Week or with early deals, and it often runs past the weekend. In this window, price is the argument that wins or loses customers.

The figures from the German retail federation show how large this window is. For Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025, HDE expected sales of 5.8 billion euros (HDE). With 48 percent, almost half of the respondents planned to go bargain hunting on Black Friday (HDE); more than 1,000 online shoppers were surveyed in October 2025 (HDE). The focus is online: 69 percent of Black Friday and Cyber Week shoppers in 2025 planned to use the deals online (Bitkom), according to a representative survey of 1,120 people aged 16 and over (Bitkom).

Official statistics also show how strongly online retail grew in the sale month: according to preliminary results, sales in German online and mail-order retail in November 2025 were 5.9 percent higher in real terms than in the same month of the previous year (Destatis). Why such comparisons need careful reading when the sale calendar shifts is explained in the article on year-over-year comparisons in Q4.

Two things follow: many prices change several times within a few days, and customers are particularly well informed. Consumers can instantly obtain and compare product and price information online, as the European Commission notes (European Commission 2017). Retailers, for their part, ranked price as the most or second most important parameter of competition in all sectors examined (European Commission 2017).

What retailers actually do with competitor prices

Robust European figures on this come from the sector inquiry into e-commerce. Between June 2015 and March 2016 the Commission sent questionnaires to market participants; among others, 1,051 retailers from the member states responded (European Commission 2017). The final report of May 10, 2017 states that a majority of retailers track the online prices of competitors (European Commission 2017). Two thirds of them use software that automatically adjusts their own prices based on the observed competitor prices (European Commission 2017).

These figures date from 2017 and apply to the participating retailers from across the EU, not to all shops in Germany; the report gives no exact percentage at this point. They do show the direction, though: price tracking is not an exception in online retail but routine, and a considerable share of market participants reacts automatically.

This does not mean that every shop should adjust prices automatically. The value of tracking lies first in knowledge: which competitors cut prices, when, by how much and on which items? If you record this for your own key items across the sale week, you can manage price and margin deliberately instead of reacting to chance findings. What competitor tracking records besides prices is shown in the article on metrics in competitor monitoring.

Legal framework: watching yes, coordinating no

Looking at prices that any visitor can see in a competitor’s shop is unproblematic in principle. The Commission’s guidelines on horizontal co-operation put the starting point like this: each company determines its own conduct on the market independently (Horizontal Guidelines, para. 374). This principle does not prevent companies from adapting themselves intelligently to the conduct of their competitors (Horizontal Guidelines, para. 374).

The guidelines also name the technical route explicitly: companies may independently use algorithms to monitor competitors’ prices and feed this information into their own pricing (Horizontal Guidelines, para. 379). According to the guidelines, using publicly available data as input for algorithmic software is lawful (Horizontal Guidelines, para. 402).

The line is drawn by Article 101 TFEU and Section 1 of the German Act against Restraints of Competition (GWB). Agreements between undertakings and concerted practices that have as their object or effect the prevention, restriction or distortion of competition are prohibited (GWB, Section 1). European law explicitly names the direct or indirect fixing of purchase or selling prices as an example (TFEU, Art. 101).

It becomes delicate where tracking turns into coordination. In 2017 the Commission already warned that the availability of real-time pricing information may also trigger automated price coordination (European Commission 2017). If one provider’s shared pricing tool pools sensitive data from several competitors, this may amount to horizontal collusion (Horizontal Guidelines, para. 402). If companies use algorithms to agree on key parameters of competition, the guidelines speak of collusion by code (Horizontal Guidelines, para. 379).

• Permitted: viewing publicly visible prices, recording them and basing your own pricing decision on them, also with software.
• Prohibited: agreeing on prices, promotion periods or discounts with competitors, directly or via third parties.
• Delicate: announcing future prices publicly as a signal to competitors; a public announcement does not rule out a concerted practice (Horizontal Guidelines, para. 398).

XICTRAQ® is an observation tool here: competitor tracking only fetches publicly accessible pages, reports changes and does not set any prices.

Which pricing pages are suitable for tracking

Up to 20 individual URLs can be monitored per competitor, for example a pricing or product page (XICTRAQ® manual). How many competitors you can add depends on the plan: Free and Starter do not include competitor tracking, Business covers 3 and Agency 10 competitors (XICTRAQ® manual). The plan overview shows the limits per tier. With so few slots, a deliberate selection pays off.

A good pricing page has three properties: it shows exactly the price that matters for your comparison, it can be reached without logging in, and the price is already part of the delivered HTML. This results in a ranking:

For Black Week, a mix makes sense: a few key items per competitor as product pages with a selector, plus the promotion page without a selector so that the text diff shows new deals, durations and extensions. Choose items that you carry in your own promotion and whose counterpart at the competitor is unambiguous: same brand, same model, same pack size. Comparing prices across different variants leads to wrong conclusions.

If you already track the same competitors for technology or search signals, as described in the article on competitor monitoring for SEO, simply add the pricing pages there.

Setting the price selector correctly

For each URL you can enter a label and a CSS selector hint. If both are set, XICTRAQ® reads the price value specifically and reports a price change as a separate change rated critical (XICTRAQ® manual). Without a selector, only the content is compared with a text diff. The label appears in the Changes tab and in the competitor report, for example as “Price changed: coffee grinder model X”.

The selector hint is deliberately simple. A single class with a dot, such as .price-current, or a single ID with a hash, such as #product-price, is allowed (XICTRAQ® manual). Nested selectors such as .product .price, attribute selectors or combinations are not evaluated by the price tracker. You should know three rules that follow from how it works:

1. The class is searched as part of the class attribute, and the first match counts. .price therefore also matches price-old, price-strike or product-price. If a strikethrough price sits next to the sale price and comes first in the source code, the tracker reads the old price. Choose a class that only occurs on the price you want, or an ID.
2. The element is read up to its first closing tag. If the amount sits in an inner element behind a currency sign or another detail, the reading can stop before it. The most reliable choice is the innermost element that carries only the amount.
3. What counts is the delivered HTML, not the fully rendered page. The fetch does not run JavaScript. If a shop loads the price later via script, the price tracker does not see it on the page.

An excerpt from a typical shop template shows what matters:

<div class="product-price">
  <span class="price-old">€49.90</span>
  <span class="price-current" id="sale-price">€44.90</span>
</div>

With .price, the tracker would first hit the outer element product-price and read up to the end of the strikethrough price: €49.90. Only .price-current and #sale-price are unambiguous here; both return €44.90.

Before entering the selector, check with a simple fetch without a browser whether the price is in the delivered HTML. The first query lists all classes containing “price” in source order, the second shows what follows the ID:

If the second query returns nothing, the shop loads the price via script, or the site responds differently to a fetch without a browser. In that case, use content tracking without a selector for this URL, or choose another page of the same competitor. Why a page can look different in your own browser than in a tool’s fetch is also covered in the article The site works for us but not for the customer.

Schedule, scan on click and daily digest

How often the pricing pages are fetched depends on the plan. Competitors with auto-scan enabled are scanned again as soon as the last scan is older than the plan interval: every 6 hours on the Agency plan and every 12 hours on the Business plan (XICTRAQ® manual). Each scan also fetches the stored pricing pages. In addition, you can trigger a scan with a click at any time (XICTRAQ® manual), for example on the morning of Black Friday.

Changes are not reported one by one in real time. XICTRAQ® bundles the changes detected in the last 24 hours into a daily digest email (XICTRAQ® manual). The email lists the number of changes and the affected types per competitor, for example pricing, structured data or tech stack, and links to the dashboard (XICTRAQ® manual). You can see the old and the new value in the Changes tab, where every change carries a severity: info, warning or critical (XICTRAQ® manual).

The digest only includes competitors for which the change alert is enabled. You decide which change types it contains in the notification settings; messaging, WAF, advertising and CTA changes are switched off there by default (XICTRAQ® manual), while price changes are switched on. If the competitor category is enabled for further channels, such as a team chat, the daily report goes there too. How channels and responsibilities work together is described on the page about alerting and notifications.

A price change often appears twice: as a price change with the severity critical and as changed content of the tracked URL with a text diff. This is intended: the text diff shows whether delivery time or promotional notes changed as well.

Knowing the limits of the price tracker

A tool that reads pages from the outside only sees what the page delivers to it. These limits matter when planning for Black Week:

• No real-time alert. Price changes arrive in the daily digest and in the Changes tab, not as an instant notification.
• No JavaScript. The fetch does not see prices that are loaded later via script.
• Bot protection. On sites with an anti-bot WAF, the fetch can be blocked. The scan detects a rejection with 403 or 503 and still records the competitor as reachable (XICTRAQ® manual); a rejected page does not return a price, though.
• Gaps interrupt the comparison. A price change is only reported if the previous and the current scan both read a price. If a scan returns no price, for example after a rejection, the comparison starts again with the next value read; a change within this gap does not appear as a price change.
• Text is compared, not a numeric value. If only the notation changes, for example from “€44.90” to “EUR 44.90”, this counts as a price change.
• Public pages only. Prices after login, in the cart or for specific customer groups remain invisible.
• Variants. The page is read as it is delivered without a selection. If a variant has its own URL, store that URL.
• Plan. Competitor tracking is not included in Free and Starter; auto-scan, the competitor report and CSV export require the Business plan or higher (XICTRAQ® manual).

Setup in six steps

1. Verify your own domain. Competitors can only be added once the domain of your website has been verified (XICTRAQ® manual).
2. Add competitors. Manually by URL or via auto-discovery by industry and postal code.
3. Store pricing pages. In the competitor’s detail area, enter the path for each page, for example /product-a, or the full URL, together with a descriptive label and the selector.
4. Double-check the selector. Use the source code check from the previous section to make sure the class or ID occurs in the delivered HTML and matches unambiguously ahead of any strikethrough price.
5. Trigger the first scan with a click. It sets the baseline. A price change can only appear from the following scan on, because before that there is nothing to compare.
6. Check notifications. Make sure that the change alert and auto-scan are enabled for each competitor, that price changes are included in the digest and that the desired channels receive the competitor category.

Allow for a few days of normal operation before the sale week. That way you see whether the selectors hold and whether a competitor rejects the fetch. If you set things up on Black Friday itself, you have no comparison value for the most important day. The individual settings are described in the competitor tracking manual.

If you would like to see first what the comparison cards and the Changes tab look like, you can find both with sample data in the live demo, without signing up and without a domain of your own.

From the digest to your own pricing decision

A report is not an instruction. Before reacting, three questions are worth asking: is the item really the same, with the same variant and delivery terms? How long does the competitor’s promotion run? And what margin is left if you follow suit?

If you cut prices yourself and advertise a reduction, separate rules of the German Price Indication Ordinance apply to stating the previous price. Record your decisions: date, observed price, your own price, reasoning. Suitable attachments are the printable competitor report with its comparison table and latest changes, and the CSV export (XICTRAQ® manual).

Check your own site at the same time. When competitors cut prices during the sale week, customers come to you with clear expectations: the advertised price has to arrive in the cart, and the search has to find the promoted items. How the shop search can be checked in a browser for this purpose is shown in the article on shop search monitoring. After the sale week, a short review pays off; you compile the following six points from the Changes tab, your own notes and your shop statistics:

For agencies: price tracking as a client service

Agencies can offer price tracking for the sale week as a service of their own. The Agency plan provides ten competitor slots, and scans run every six hours (XICTRAQ® manual).

A clear division of roles matters: the agency delivers observations, the client decides on prices. If an agency looks after several shops that compete with one another, their pricing plans must not reach each other via the agency, because competitors that exchange sensitive business information through a third party can be party to an infringement of Article 101 (Horizontal Guidelines, para. 403). More on plans and features is on the page for agencies; how a free website check can bring in new inquiries is described in the article on the website check as a lead magnet.

Set up pricing pages now, not during the sale week

Black Week rewards preparation. If you add competitors now, store pricing pages with unambiguous selectors and read the digest for a few days of normal operation, you go into the sale week with reliable comparison values. XICTRAQ® competitor tracking takes care of fetching, comparing and the daily summary. It does not take the pricing decision, and that is how it should be: the decision stays where it belongs legally and commercially, within your company.