Product assortment and stock tracking
A complete picture of what a competitor sells, refreshed on a schedule, with the additions, removals and stock-outs marked between runs. Price tells you how the market is behaving today. Assortment tells you where it is heading.
A catalog is a competitor's strategy, written down
Every product a retailer adds is a bet, and every one they quietly delist is a bet that did not pay off. Watched over a few months, a catalog tells you which categories a competitor is expanding into, which brands they are betting on, what price tiers they are moving toward, and where their range has holes you could fill.
None of that is visible from a single snapshot. It only appears in the difference between one run and the next, which is why this service is built around change detection rather than raw export.
What a catalog export contains
The base export covers the catalog as it stands. Every recurring run adds the change fields at the bottom of the table.
| Field | Example | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| sku | IKEA-70543212 | Retailer identifier, the anchor for run-to-run comparison |
| title | MALM bed frame, high | |
| brand | IKEA | Present where the retailer exposes it |
| category_path | Bedroom > Beds > Bed frames | Full breadcrumb, not just the leaf |
| attributes | {"width":"140 cm","material":"particleboard"} | Structured per category, agreed during scoping |
| description | Full product copy | On request, for content analysis rather than reuse |
| images | [url, url, url] | All gallery images, not just the primary one |
| price | 279.00 | Included by default, since assortment without price is half a picture |
| in_stock | false | Availability as displayed at collection time |
| stock_state | low_stock | Where a site distinguishes low stock from sold out |
| variants | size, colour, finish | Flattened or nested, your choice |
| status | new / active / removed | Set by comparing against the previous run |
| first_seen | 2026-06-14 | When the product first appeared in the catalog |
| last_seen | 2026-09-08 | Last run in which it was still listed |
What teams do with it
Gap analysis
Line your range up against two or three competitors by category and price band. The empty cells are either an opportunity or a category somebody else already tried and abandoned — the historical view tells you which.
New product monitoring
A weekly list of everything a competitor added. For buyers and merchandisers this replaces the habit of browsing rival sites manually, and it catches launches that never get announced.
Stock-out tracking
When a competitor runs out of a product you carry, that is a window for a promotion or an ad spend shift. Sustained stock-outs across a brand also say something about their supply chain.
Catalog enrichment
Attributes, dimensions and image counts from established retailers make a useful reference when filling out your own product pages, particularly for shared manufacturer SKUs.
What makes a full catalog harder than it sounds
Getting to every product
Category pages rarely expose the whole range. Retailers cap pagination, hide long tail products behind filters, and sometimes list a product in one category but not another. Reaching a genuinely complete catalog means walking the category tree, slicing large sections until they fit under the pagination limit, and cross-checking against sitemaps and internal search. We report the coverage we actually achieved rather than implying completeness.
Deciding what counts as one product
A bed frame in three sizes and four finishes can be one product or twelve, depending on what you plan to do with the file. Merchandising analysis usually wants the parent; stock tracking usually wants the variant. We fix this during scoping, because changing it later means rebuilding the historical comparison.
Distinguishing removed from missed
A product that fails to appear in a run has either been delisted or simply not been reached because of a timeout or a block. Treating the second as the first fills your change report with noise. We confirm removals across consecutive runs and against a direct check of the product URL before marking anything as gone.
Two catalogs you can look at today
Both were produced by the same pipeline this service uses. Open them, check the field coverage, and judge the output before talking to us.
What it costs
A one-time catalog export is priced per source. Recurring tracking with change detection is quoted per source and interval. Catalog size matters less than how the site defends itself and how deep its category tree runs.
Assortment tracking, in practice
How complete is a full catalog, really?
On a well-structured site with an accessible category tree, close to everything. On sites that cap pagination aggressively or hide products behind faceted search, we quote a realistic coverage figure up front and report the number actually reached with each delivery. A vendor promising 100% without seeing the site first is guessing.
Can you track only one category instead of the whole store?
Yes, and it is usually the better starting point. A single category across three competitors answers more questions than one full catalog from one of them, and costs less.
Do you collect product descriptions and images?
We collect the URLs of all gallery images rather than the image files, so nothing is rehosted. Description text we collect on request, and it is worth being clear about what that is for: measuring how competitors write, how complete their listings are, which terms they lean on. It is analysis input, not copy to paste into your own catalog — descriptions can be protected work, and on many sites the text belongs to the manufacturer rather than the retailer. If you only need structured attributes, we leave the prose out and the file gets considerably lighter.
How accurate is the stock status?
It reflects what the site displayed at the moment of collection, which is the same information a shopper sees. Retailers that price and stock by location will show different availability depending on the zip code in session, so we pin one per feed and keep it consistent.
Can I get the change report without the full catalog each time?
Yes. Many clients take the full export once, then receive only the delta — added, removed, back in stock, out of stock — on each subsequent run. Smaller files, and the interesting part is not buried.
Other services
See a competitor's range in full
Send one store and one category. We will run a free sample so you can see the field coverage on a catalog you actually care about.