Watching competitors is easy; deciding on the basis of what they do is harder. A new campaign, more followers, a redesigned website, a discount on a few products – every move looks like a signal and invites a response. Only a few of them are useful: the ones that can change your customer’s choice. The rest is best let go on purpose, so the time goes into your own store.
First be clear about whom you are watching
For this purpose a competitor is not everyone selling similar goods. It is a store the customer genuinely chooses between you and it: the same or interchangeable products, the same kind of customer, a similar price band. Three to five such stores are usually enough for regular monitoring. It is worth knowing the wider market, but a move by a store you do not meet in the customer’s choice rarely calls for a decision.
Watch the changes that alter the customer’s choice
Run every signal through the same question: will the customer see it while choosing, and can it change their decision? If so, it goes on the list. Five areas usually qualify.
Price and availability on the same product. Comparison sites show offers for the same product side by side, so a price gap is visible at once. How the site ranks offers matters, though. Heureka, the largest Czech price comparison site, fills the four recommended offers on a product page using a score that combines the cost-per-click bid with the product price, availability and the store’s rating; according to Heureka, an offer without a known delivery time will not get there. On Zboží.cz, whose advertising has been managed in Sklik as Seznam Nákupy since September 2025, recommended offers depend on the cost-per-click bid and relevance, and below them offers are listed by selling price, availability and other factors. Seznam had earlier announced that a markedly more expensive offer or a poorly rated store would no longer appear among the recommended ones. A competitor’s price therefore matters mainly for products you both sell, and only as one of several factors.
Product range. A competitor that starts stocking your core category, or leaves it, changes the choice your customers face more than a one-off promotion does.
Store rating. On comparison sites the rating feeds directly into who makes the recommended offers, and the customer sees it next to the price. A lasting fall or rise in a direct competitor’s rating is worth attention.
Brand demand and search visibility. When people search more for a competitor’s name, or when it overtakes you in search results for the keywords that carry your sales, the shift is slow but persistent.
Delivery and terms. A lower free-shipping threshold, faster delivery or a longer returns window are visible to the customer and easy to compare.
What you can safely ignore
At the other end are moves that are easy to track but rarely change a customer’s choice: follower counts, posting frequency, website redesigns, individual campaigns unrelated to your products, or short-lived price swings of a few percent.
A large study of responses to promotion and advertising attacks across more than 400 consumer-goods categories over four years supports not reacting to most competitor moves. Passivity was the most common response, and often a sound one. Firms that did retaliate often used instruments that did not work, and reactions had few long-run consequences. The authors conclude that a campaign’s impact depends mainly on how consumers respond, not on how vigilant competitors are. The study comes from bricks-and-mortar sales of fast-moving consumer goods, so its exact proportions do not transfer to a Czech online store. The principle does: before you respond, check whether the competitor’s move has reached your customers.
Competitors without checking their websites by hand
Keep visibility, brand searches, ratings and website changes of your direct competitors in one place, and hear only about material shifts.
Read a competitor’s price as a snapshot, not an instruction
The most common temptation is to match the price. Two things argue against it.
First, the price you see today may not hold tomorrow. A study of the five largest US online retailers in one product category found that two changed prices within the hour, one daily and two weekly. The fastest reacted automatically to changes by slower rivals and had lower prices. A store that matches an automatically repricing competitor by hand is always late and playing by the competitor’s rules.
Second, price fights change customer behaviour. After a major price war in Dutch supermarkets, shoppers became more sensitive to prices and price image. That helped the initiator and the discounters; the losers were mid-level and upmarket chains whose price image did not improve. For a store that does not compete on the lowest price the risk is twofold: it gives up margin and teaches customers to compare exactly where it is weakest.
An illustrative, invented situation: a direct competitor cuts the price of a product you both sell by a tenth. Before touching your price, three questions are enough. Does the product sell through a comparison site where the customer will see the gap? How much margin is left after matching, and is this a product that carries revenue or a marginal line? And do you hold enough stock for the sale to be worth fighting for? If any answer is no, it is sensible to wait and see whether the discount lasts and whether it shows up in your own sales.
What public data cannot tell you
Public data shows what a competitor does, not how well it is doing. Auction insights in Google Ads compare your impressions only with advertisers competing in the same auctions: six metrics for Search, such as impression share, overlap rate and outranking share, and three for Shopping. The report does not appear below 10% impression share, and the share you see for a competitor may differ from what the competitor sees in its own report. The documentation mentions nothing about the competitor’s budget, bids, conversions or profitability. A competitor’s high impression share means it is often visible in the auctions, not that it is making money.
In the same way, the number of reviews is not the number of orders, and higher search visibility is not higher revenue. When you do not know why a competitor did something, do not copy it: a discount that may be clearing stock for them could mean a loss for you on goods that sell without it.
Where the line is: watch, never coordinate
Tracking publicly available prices and offers is a normal part of a market. The Czech competition authority (ÚOHS) does not regard information that is relatively easy for anyone to obtain as problematic, and notes that publicly announcing current prices does not reduce uncertainty about competitors’ future behaviour. By contrast, it generally treats the exchange of individual data on planned prices as prohibited. The Czech Competition Act prohibits agreements between competitors that distort competition, in particular agreements that directly or indirectly fix prices. A conversation with a competitor about “how we will price this season” has no place in competitor monitoring.
Signals, responses and what they do not prove
| Signal | When it deserves a decision | What it does not prove |
|---|---|---|
| Lower price on the same product | The product carries revenue, sells through a comparison site and the change lasts | That you must match it; that the competitor sells it at a profit |
| New or dropped product range | It affects your core category | That the category is working for the competitor |
| Change in store rating | A lasting shift at a direct competitor | Order volume or revenue |
| Growth in brand searches or visibility | It lasts several months and touches your keywords | Market share or profit |
| Higher impression share in auctions | Your own share or sales fall at the same time | The competitor’s budget, bids or conversions |
What to do now
- Pick three to five direct competitors. Stores the customer really chooses between, not the whole sector.
- List five to seven signals. Price and availability on shared products, product range, rating, brand searches and visibility, delivery terms.
- Set a threshold for each signal. Write down in advance which change calls for a decision and which is noise. Check the rest once a month.
- Decide from your own numbers. For each response, check margin, stock and the product’s share of revenue. If you do not know the answer, wait to see whether the change shows up in your sales.
- Record what you did and why. A month later you will see whether the response changed anything or merely cost money.
In its Competitors section, Korzaro tracks the measurable moves of selected competitors automatically: rank and gap in search visibility share over four and twelve weeks, brand search volumes from Google, ratings, catalogue size, social activity, and new or removed pages on their websites. It alerts you when a direct competitor overtakes you in visibility. Korzaro does not track competitors’ prices, and the decision on how to respond stays with the store owner.