The Ecommerce Pricing Glossary
Plain-English definitions for every key term in ecommerce competitive intelligence — MAP enforcement, dynamic pricing, SKU diffing, promotion detection, and more.
26 terms across 5 categories
Pricing Strategy
MAP, MSRP, dynamic pricing, and price management concepts.
MAP Enforcement
MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) enforcement is the process by which a brand monitors its authorized and unauthorized sellers to ensure no one advertises a product below a pre-agreed minimum price.
MSRP (Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price)
MSRP is the price a manufacturer recommends a retailer charge for a product. Unlike MAP, it is non-binding and a retailer may sell above or below it.
Dynamic Pricing
Dynamic pricing is an algorithmic pricing strategy where a product's price is continuously adjusted in real time based on market conditions, competitor prices, demand signals, and inventory levels.
Price Parity
Price parity means maintaining the same price for a product across all sales channels — your own website, marketplaces, and retail partners — to prevent channel conflict.
Price Elasticity
Price elasticity of demand measures how much the quantity demanded of a product changes in response to a price change. A product is "elastic" if a small price increase significantly reduces demand.
Repricing
Repricing is the automated or manual process of adjusting a product's price in response to changes in the competitive environment, typically to win or maintain a marketplace Buy Box position.
Channel Conflict
Channel conflict occurs when different sales channels (e.g., DTC website, Amazon, wholesale partners) compete against each other for the same customers, typically due to inconsistent pricing.
Promotions & Sales
Flash sales, BOGO, free shipping, and promotion detection.
Flash Sale
A flash sale is a short-duration, time-limited promotional event that offers steep discounts — typically lasting hours rather than days — to drive urgency and rapid purchase decisions.
BOGO (Buy One Get One)
BOGO is a promotional format where a customer who purchases one product receives a second product free or at a significant discount, effectively creating a bundled value offer.
Free Shipping Threshold
A free shipping threshold is the minimum order value a customer must reach to qualify for free delivery, commonly used to increase average order value.
Sitewide Sale
A sitewide sale is a promotional event where a discount (typically a percentage off) applies to all or most products across an entire online store, rather than a specific category or product.
Promotion Detection
Promotion detection is the automated process of identifying when a competitor has launched a new promotional offer by scanning their website for discount banners, sale badges, coupon codes, and checkout discount applications.
Catalog & Inventory
SKUs, variants, product detection, and catalog tracking.
SKU (Stock Keeping Unit)
A SKU is a unique alphanumeric identifier assigned to a specific product variant — including its size, color, and other attributes — used to track inventory and sales.
SKU Diffing
SKU diffing is the process of comparing a competitor's current product catalog against a previously captured snapshot to identify what has been added, removed, or changed.
Catalog Intelligence
Catalog intelligence is the practice of systematically monitoring a competitor's full product catalog to track product launches, discontinuations, variant changes, and pricing shifts at the SKU level.
New Product Detection
New product detection is the automated identification of products or variants a competitor has added to their storefront that were not present in a previous catalog snapshot.
Variant Tracking
Variant tracking monitors changes within a single product's available options — such as size, color, or material — to detect when a competitor adds, removes, or modifies specific variants.
Technology
Scraping, proxies, headless browsers, and crawl infrastructure.
Web Scraping
Web scraping is the automated extraction of structured data from websites using software that simulates browser behavior to load pages and parse their content.
Residential Proxy
A residential proxy routes web requests through real consumer IP addresses assigned by internet service providers (ISPs), making automated traffic appear to originate from ordinary home internet users.
Headless Browser
A headless browser is a web browser that runs without a visual interface, used in automated scraping to execute JavaScript, handle cookies and sessions, and render dynamic content exactly as a real user would see it.
Anti-Bot Detection
Anti-bot detection systems identify and block automated web traffic through a combination of IP reputation checks, browser fingerprinting, behavioral analysis, and CAPTCHA challenges.
Crawl Frequency
Crawl frequency refers to how often a competitive intelligence platform re-visits and re-scrapes a competitor's website to capture fresh price, promotion, and catalog data.
Strategy
Competitive intelligence, price history, and business strategy.
Competitive Intelligence
Competitive intelligence (CI) is the systematic collection, analysis, and use of information about competitors' products, pricing, promotions, and strategies to inform business decisions.
Price Scraping
Price scraping is the automated collection of competitor product prices from their websites or marketplaces, typically to monitor market pricing and inform repricing decisions.
Price History
Price history is a time-series record of how a product's price has changed over time, used to identify seasonal patterns, discount cycles, and average selling prices.
Discount Depth
Discount depth is the average percentage by which a product is reduced from its regular price during promotional events, used to benchmark how aggressively a competitor discounts.
See These Concepts in Action
GetStoreIntel puts all of this into practice — tracking prices, promotions, and catalog changes across Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Magento stores.