# Get Slack Alerts When Competitor Prices Drop Below Yours 12 min setup No coding required Runs automatically Stay ahead in the competitive market by monitoring competitor prices effortlessly. This MESA workflow template tracks selected product pages and sends a Slack notification if a competitor’s price drops below yours. React quickly to adjust your pricing, boost sales, and enhance customer loyalty. Save time with automated alerts that help you maintain strategic pricing and optimize profit margins. Schedule Scrape Webpage Prompt (Check if Product is On Sale) Prompt (Extract Sale Price) Filter (Compare Competitor Price to Your Price) Send Message ## How it works 8 steps to start monitoring competitor pricing and receiving Slack alerts ### Schedule App connector: [Schedule](/content/apps/schedule/integrate "View Schedule integration page"/index.html)• Time to complete: 1 minute **Why this matters:** This trigger runs the competitive pricing check automatically on a regular schedule, ensuring you catch price changes without manually checking competitor websites multiple times per day. Without automation, your team would waste hours visiting competitor sites to track pricing. The schedule trigger runs every hour at the top of the hour (for example, 9:00am, 10:00am, 11:00am). Each time it runs, it kicks off the entire workflow to scrape the competitor page, analyze pricing, and notify your team if needed. You can adjust the frequency by modifying the schedule—for example, you could change it to every 4 hours, twice daily, or daily if hourly checks seem excessive. The trigger automatically initiates at the configured time with no manual action required. ### Scrape Webpage App connector: [Scraper](/content/apps/scraper/integrate "View Scraper integration page"/index.html)• Time to complete: 2 minutes **Why this matters:** This step fetches the live content from your competitor's product page, which contains the pricing information you need to compare against. Without scraping the actual page, there's no way to access their current pricing since most competitors don't provide APIs for this data. You'll configure one critical field: the competitor product page URL. This should be the direct link to the specific product you're monitoring—for example, " [https://www.competitor.com/products/blue-widget-pro](https://www.competitor.com/products/blue-widget-pro)". The scraper visits this URL and converts the webpage into markdown text, which makes it easier for the AI to read and extract pricing information in the next steps. Copy and paste the exact URL from your browser when you're viewing the competitor's product page to ensure accuracy. ### Prompt (Check if Product is On Sale) App connector: [AI](/content/apps/ai/integrate "View AI integration page"/index.html)• Time to complete: 1 minute **Why this matters:** Not all competitors show sale prices the same way—some have strikethrough pricing, some use sale badges, some show "Was $X, Now $Y" text. This AI step interprets the page content to determine if the product is currently on sale, which determines whether the workflow should continue to price comparison or stop here. The AI receives the scraped webpage content in markdown format and analyzes it to determine if the product shows sale indicators. The prompt asks the AI to respond with only "yes" or "no"—keeping the response simple ensures the next filter step can make a clean decision. The temperature is set to 1 for this binary decision task. You can customize the prompt if your competitor uses unusual sale formatting, but the default prompt handles most common ecommerce sale patterns. ### Filter (Check if On Sale) App connector: [Filter](/content/apps/filter/integrate "View Filter integration page"/index.html)• Time to complete: 0 minutes (Auto-configured) **Why this matters:** This filter prevents the workflow from wasting processing time and API calls when the competitor product isn't on sale. If they're not running a promotion, there's no need to extract pricing or compare against your product—the workflow stops here until the next hourly check. The filter checks if the AI response from Step 3 equals exactly "yes." If it matches, the workflow continues to extract the sale price; if the AI responded "no" (product not on sale), the workflow stops here and waits until the next scheduled run. This is a hard-coded filter comparing against "yes" with no configuration needed—it automatically manages the workflow flow based on whether a sale is detected. ### Prompt (Extract Sale Price) App connector: [AI](/content/apps/ai/integrate "View AI integration page"/index.html)• Time to complete: 2 minutes **Why this matters:** Once a sale is confirmed, you need the exact numeric price to compare against your Shopify product. This AI step extracts just the sale price number from the potentially messy page content that might include currency symbols, multiple prices, or formatting variations. The AI receives the same scraped webpage content and extracts the sale price as a numeric value. The prompt is specifically designed to look for the sale price pattern on the competitor's page and return just the number without currency symbols or text. You may need to customize this prompt based on how your specific competitor formats their pricing—for example, if they show "Sale: $49.99" versus "Now Only $49.99" versus just a strikethrough with new price below. The temperature is set to 1, and the AI is instructed to return a number type for clean comparison. ### Retrieve Product App connector: [Shopify](/content/apps/shopify/integrate "View Shopify integration page"/index.html)• Time to complete: 2 minutes **Why this matters:** To compare prices, the workflow needs to know your current product price in Shopify. This step fetches your product details including the current price so the next filter can determine if the competitor is actually undercutting you or if your price is already lower. You'll configure one field: your Shopify product ID. This is the numeric ID of the product you want to monitor against the competitor—you can find this in your Shopify admin by viewing the product and checking the URL (it's the number after /products/). The step retrieves the complete product record including all variants, and the workflow uses the first variant's price for comparison. If your product has multiple variants, make sure the first variant is the one you want to compare, or consider customizing the workflow to specify a particular variant. ### Filter (Compare Competitor Price to Your Price) App connector: [Filter](/content/apps/filter/integrate "View Filter integration page"/index.html)• Time to complete: 0 minutes (Auto-configured) **Why this matters:** This filter is the critical decision point—it determines if the competitor's price is actually lower than yours, which is the only scenario where your team needs to be notified. If your price is already equal to or lower than theirs, there's no action needed and the workflow stops to avoid unnecessary alerts. The filter compares the competitor's sale price (extracted in Step 5) against your Shopify product's price (retrieved in Step 6) using a "less than" comparison. If the competitor price is lower, the workflow continues to send the Slack alert; if your price is already competitive, the workflow stops here. This is a hard-coded numeric comparison with no configuration needed—it automatically handles the price comparison logic. ### Send Message App connector: [Slack](/content/apps/slack/integrate "View Slack integration page"/index.html)• Time to complete: 2 minutes **Why this matters:** This step delivers the competitive pricing intelligence to your team when action is needed. The Slack notification provides all the context—your product name, the competitor's lower price, and a link to their page—so your pricing team can quickly review and decide whether to adjust your pricing. You'll configure one field: the Slack channel where pricing alerts should be sent. This could be a dedicated #pricing-alerts channel, your #ecommerce team channel, or wherever your pricing decision-makers actively monitor. The message automatically includes your product title, the competitor's sale price, and the competitor's product page URL for reference. Make sure to invite the MESA Slack app to your chosen channel before selecting it in the configuration.