Competitor Price Monitoring Alerts

1. The Problem

In any market where competitors adjust pricing dynamically — e-commerce, SaaS, professional services — being the last to know about a significant price change puts you at a structural disadvantage. Manual competitor monitoring is sporadic, slow, and unreliable. Most businesses only discover competitor price movements when a customer mentions them in a negotiation — at which point the damage is already done.

2. Integration & Webhook Setup

Follow the exact steps below to configure and deploy this automation inside your OpenClaw workspace.

1. 1Create a new agent named `price-monitor`.
2. 2Configure your `COMPETITOR_LIST` section: enter the URLs of specific pricing pages (not homepages) for each competitor product you want to monitor.
3. 3Set your `ALERT_THRESHOLD`: a percentage change that triggers a notification. Default is 5% — adjust based on how price-sensitive your market is. Sub-1% movements are noise; 10%+ movements are urgent.
4. 4Configure price extraction: OpenClaw documentation contains a CSS selector guide for the most common e-commerce platforms (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento). For custom sites, you may need to identify the price element's CSS selector manually — this takes 5 minutes per competitor.
5. 5Set your alert delivery: WhatsApp, email, or Slack. For urgent competitive intelligence, WhatsApp is recommended.

3. The Context Payload (context.json)

Save this file as: .openclaw/agents/competitor-price-monitoring-alerts/context.json

{
  "automation_id": "8",
  "title": "Competitor Price Monitoring Alerts",
  "level": 1,
  "tier": "Solopreneur Engine",
  "setup_time": "Under 60 min",
  "estimated_api_cost": "~$2–$5/mo",
  "client_price_range": "$250–$500",
  "agents": [
    {
      "role": "orchestrator",
      "model": "claude-3-5-sonnet",
      "temperature": 0.2,
      "max_tokens": 4096
    }
  ],
  "memory": "session",
  "output_format": "structured_json",
  "human_review_gate": true,
  "documentation_standard": "required"
}

4. Execution Commands

Run these commands from your openclaw-workshop/ directory to validate, test, and schedule this automation. Commands are taken directly from The OpenClaw Income Engine, Appendix E.

# ── STEP 1: Validate all CSS selectors (dry run — no alerts) ──
$ openclaw run price-monitor --test --verbose
$ 
# Expected output:
# [PASS] Competitor A / Starter Plan: $49.00 extracted successfully
# [PASS] Competitor B / Professional Tier: $129.00 extracted successfully
$ 
# ── STEP 2: Set baseline prices from first successful run ──
$ openclaw run price-monitor --set-baseline
$ 
# ── STEP 3: Simulate a price change to test alert delivery ──
$ openclaw run price-monitor --simulate-change --competitor "Competitor A" --new-price 39.00
$ 
# ── STEP 4: Confirm alert received on WhatsApp ──
# Check your WhatsApp — you should receive the PRICE ALERT message.
$ 
# ── STEP 5: Schedule live monitoring ──
$ openclaw schedule price-monitor --cron "0 8,14,20 * * 1-5"
$ 
# ── Add a new competitor at any time ──
$ openclaw config edit price-monitor
# Add new object to competitor_list array with name, url, selector