Shopify competitor price tracking, connected by app install

The Shopify integration imports your products, variants, SKUs and barcodes through a standard app install, so competitor price tracking runs against your live catalogue instead of a spreadsheet somebody has to re-upload every month. Competitor prices, stock status and promotions flow back against each variant. Writing a new price back to Shopify is a separate opt-in that is off by default on every store and every rule.

What connecting Shopify actually does

Three things, in order. It builds your product list without a CSV, so a new SKU added in Shopify on Tuesday is being monitored by Wednesday. It gives matching the identifiers it needs, because the variant barcode field usually holds a UPC or EAN and an exact identifier join beats every other method. And it gives repricing somewhere to send a price, if and when you decide to let it.

What data flows in each direction

How to connect a Shopify store

1. 1

   Install the app

   Open Integrations in your account, choose Shopify and enter your store domain. Shopify shows you the permissions being requested. Approve, and you land back on a catalogue import screen.

2. 2

   Choose what to import

   Take the whole catalogue or filter by collection, product type, vendor or tag. Starting with one category is easier than starting with 8,000 SKUs, because the first review pass is a human job.

3. 3

   Confirm the identifier mapping

   Tell us which field holds your GTIN. On most stores that is the variant barcode. If your UPCs live in a metafield instead, point at that field here and matching uses it.

4. 4

   Review the matches

   Matching runs automatically and each candidate arrives with a confidence score. Confirm the strong ones in bulk, correct the weak ones. Corrections are remembered and feed back into later matching.

5. 5

   Pick your destinations

   Send alerts to email or Slack, proposals to a review queue, exports to CSV, or prices back to Shopify. Write-back stays off until you enable it on a named rule.

Which identifiers Shopify competitor price tracking matches on

Variants are matched individually, not rolled up to the parent product. A 5Ah battery is compared against 5Ah listings, never against the 2Ah sitting on the same competitor page. Four signals are used, in this order.

• Barcode. The variant barcode field normally carries a UPC, EAN or GTIN-13. An exact identifier join is the strongest evidence available, so it is tried first and it resolves most of a typical catalogue.
• SKU. Your SKU identifies the variant on your side and keys the write-back. It rarely matches a competitor, because their SKU is their own invention, but it is what keeps the two systems in step.
• MPN and vendor. Where a manufacturer part number exists on the product or in a metafield, it narrows candidates alongside the vendor field. This carries most of the load in categories with poor barcode coverage.
• Title, attributes and image. With no shared identifier, matching falls back to title and attribute comparison, then image comparison, and reports a confidence score you can confirm or correct. The waterfall is explained in the product matching guide.

Price write-back, and why it stays off

Write-back updates the price on variants that already exist in your store. It never creates products, never deletes them, and never touches anything outside the variants a rule covers. It is enabled per rule, not per account, so you can push prices for 40 accessories while every other rule keeps proposing into a review queue. Write results are recorded honestly: if Shopify rejects a write, the change is marked failed with the error returned rather than counted as applied.

Running more than one Shopify store

Install the app on each store. Catalogues, matches and rules stay separate, so a US store and a Canadian store never share a price. Products, competitor sets, alerts and analytics roll up into one account. Two stores of 400 products each use 800 of the products on your plan, and there is no per-store fee, because pricing charges for scale rather than for connections.

What the Shopify integration does not do

• It does not read orders, customers, carts or payment data.
• It does not modify your theme, add script tags or touch storefront code.
• It does not create or delete products, collections or variants.
• It does not manage inventory, fulfilment, tax or shipping rates.
• It does not price your Amazon listings. Marketplace coverage is described on the Amazon integration page.

If your catalogue lives somewhere else and Shopify is only a storefront, a scheduled CSV over SFTP or the REST API is often the cleaner source of truth. Both are on every plan.