“I already monitor prices manually in a spreadsheet.” This is one of the most common responses from online retailers discovering a solution like Comparzeo — and it is a perfectly reasonable starting point. The issue is not the manual method itself, but its true cost, which is rarely measured in full.

The visible cost: time spent

Manually checking five competitors' prices for 100 products typically takes several hours a week: opening each product page, noting the price, comparing and updating the spreadsheet. Over a year, that often adds up to many dozens of hours — time that could be invested in customer acquisition or supplier relationships.

The less visible costs

Prices that change between checks

Manual monitoring, however diligent, usually happens only once or twice a week at best. Everything that happens between checks — a competitor's price drop or a stockout that pushes a price up — remains invisible until the next check.

Copy-and-paste errors

A price copied incorrectly, a shifted spreadsheet row, one product reference confused with another: these errors are statistically inevitable in a repetitive manual process, and they can lead to pricing decisions based on incorrect information.

The cost of not doing it regularly

This is the hardest cost to quantify, yet the greatest: weeks when price monitoring is simply postponed for lack of time. A method that depends on one person's availability will sooner or later stop at the worst possible moment.

What automated monitoring changes

A dedicated tool checks competitors' prices every day across your entire catalogue, without manual intervention or data-entry errors. Time previously spent collecting prices can then be redirected entirely towards analysis and decisions — the truly strategic part of the work.

Calculate the cost for your shop

A simple rule: multiply the weekly hours spent monitoring prices by your hourly rate, or that of the person doing it. Compare that figure with the price of a tool like Comparzeo, which starts at a few dozen euros per month. In the vast majority of cases, automation pays for itself from the first month — even before counting sales potentially recovered through faster reactions.

To understand how to organise effective price monitoring, whatever method you choose, our complete guide to price monitoring is a good starting point.

Try Comparzeo free for 14 days, with no credit card required, and see the time savings for yourself.