Help
Everything you need to use Price Gap
From pasting your first URL to reading the results - this page covers every step, every status message, and every common question.
How to use Price Gap
- 01
Create your account
Click Get startedand enter your email address. You’ll receive a magic link - click it and you’re in. No password to set or remember.
- 02
Start a new analysis
From the dashboard, click New analysis. You can also reach it directly via the navigation.
- 03
Enter your shop URL
Paste your own shop’s URL into the first field. You can include or omit
https://andwww.- Price Gap normalizes URLs automatically.Your shop is scanned the same way as competitor shops. The result is cached for the day and reused across all your analyses.
- 04
Add competitor URLs
Add one competitor URL per line. Free plan allows 1 competitor; paid plans allow up to 5. Price Gap detects the platform automatically - you don’t need to specify Shopify vs WooCommerce.
- 05
Choose scan type
Fast scan finishes in under a minute for most shops and works reliably for Shopify and WooCommerce. Choose Deep scanif your competitors run Magento, PrestaShop, Shopware, or any platform that doesn’t expose a product listing API - Deep scan visits individual product pages to find pricing data.
If a Fast scan returns no results for a shop, a banner will appear offering to re-run as Deep scan with a single click.
- 06
Review your results
When the analysis finishes, the results page shows three headline numbers - products matched, average confidence, and average price gap - followed by the full match table and an extraction quality panel. Each matched pair shows the competitor’s price, the difference, and an action signal so the next step is obvious.
Understanding your results
Match types
Price Gap tries to identify the same product across different shops. Each match is labelled with the method that made the identification.
- EXACT
- Both products share the same international barcode (EAN or UPC). The most reliable identification - these are the same physical item.
- PART №
- Both products share the same manufacturer part number. Common in auto parts, electronics, and hardware where the brand assigns a universal code regardless of which retailer sells the item.
- CODE
- Both products share the same internal shop code (SKU) after stripping formatting differences. Reliable when both shops carry items directly from the same supplier.
- SIMILAR
- The product names are very similar and the prices are within a reasonable range of each other. Lower confidence than the identifier-based methods - review these matches if the product names look slightly off.
Action signals
Every matched pair gets a signal that tells you what to do next.
- You’re X% cheaper
- Your price is lower than the competitor’s. You have room to raise your price or use the gap as a selling point.
- X% more expensive · risk
- Your price is higher than the competitor’s. Customers who comparison-shop may choose them. Consider adjusting your price or highlighting other value (warranty, service, speed).
- Market match
- Prices are within 3% of each other - effectively the same. No action needed.
Extraction quality panel
- cached today
- Data was retrieved from a shared cache rather than scanning the live shop. Results are at most one calendar day old - fresh enough for the weekly pricing cycle most shops operate on.
- fast / deep
- Shows which scan mode was used for each shop in this analysis.
- ⚠ partial
- Extraction completed but not all product pages could be reached - the number shown is how many were successfully extracted. Matching continues with the available data.
- ✗ extraction failed
- The shop could not be scanned. See the FAQ below for the most common causes and what to do next.
Frequently asked questions
Which shop platforms does Price Gap support?
Price Gap fully supports Shopify and WooCommerce. It also covers OpenCart (by crawling category pages), Magento, PrestaShop, Shopware, and custom shops that publish structured product data. JavaScript-only storefronts without server-side rendering are supported via a headless browser fallback in Deep scan mode.
What is the difference between Fast scan and Deep scan?
Fast scan uses the shop's native product listing API (Shopify products.json, WooCommerce Store API) to pull the full catalog in seconds. Deep scan visits individual product pages to extract additional product identifiers and pricing data. Deep scan is slower (5–15 minutes for large catalogs) but is required for Magento, PrestaShop, Shopware, and shops that don't expose a central API. OpenCart shops are read by crawling their paginated category pages — Fast scan covers a few hundred products in ~45 seconds, Deep scan walks the entire catalog.
Why does my competitor's shop show extraction failed?
The most common causes are: (1) The shop is protected by Cloudflare Enterprise or a similar enterprise bot-protection system that blocks cloud IPs - no scraper can bypass this without a residential proxy. (2) The shop runs on an unsupported platform with no structured product data. (3) The shop rate-limited the requests. Try clicking 'Re-run with Deep scan' - if the error persists, the shop cannot currently be analyzed.
Why are there few or no matches in my results?
Price Gap matches products by finding the same item in both catalogs. If you and your competitors sell different products under your own brand names - rather than reselling the same third-party items - there are no shared identifiers and fewer matches are expected. Matches work best when both shops carry identical products from the same manufacturers.
What does 'cached today' mean in the extraction quality panel?
Price Gap shares extraction results across all users. If someone else already scanned the same shop today, your analysis reuses those results instantly - no new requests to the competitor's server. The quality panel shows 'cached today' and how recent the data is. Cached results are at most one calendar day old.
Can I export my results to Excel?
Yes - click the 'Export CSV' button on any completed analysis. The file is UTF-8 encoded with a BOM so Excel opens it correctly without any import wizard, including shop names with accented characters. CSV export is available on Starter, Pro, and Business plans.
What does the confidence score on each match mean?
Each matched pair shows a confidence percentage that reflects how reliably the engine identified the products as the same item. A score of 99% means an exact barcode match - the gold standard. Lower scores indicate the match was made on less definitive signals such as a product code or name similarity. Higher confidence means fewer false positives.
What happens when I reach my monthly analysis limit?
The analyze form shows a clear message and the reset date (the first of the next calendar month, UTC). All existing analyses and their results stay fully accessible - only starting new runs is blocked until the limit resets. Upgrade to a higher plan to immediately unlock more analyses.
How long are my analyses kept?
Completed analyses are kept for your plan's history window: Free 14 days, Starter 3 months, Pro 1 year, Business unlimited. You can open or delete any of them from the History page within that window. Cancelled analyses (runs you stopped) are removed automatically after 7 days. If you downgrade or your subscription lapses, your analyses are kept for an extra 30-day grace period - resubscribing with the same account restores your full history before anything is removed. Fast and Deep scans currently follow the same per-plan window.
Can I filter my analyses to find specific results?
Yes. The Analyses page has four filter tabs available to all users: All, Matched (analyses with at least one match), Cancelled, and 0 matches (completed runs that found nothing). Pro and Business users also see a Favourites tab. If you have many analyses, the list paginates automatically at 25 per page - each page is bookmarkable.
What are Favourite analyses and how do I use them?
Pro and Business users can mark any analysis as a favourite by clicking the heart icon inside the analysis row on the Analyses page. Favourited analyses appear under the Favourites tab for quick access. The heart toggles instantly - no page reload required. Favourites are stored per account and are not affected by the history window or plan changes.
Can I sort the matches table to find the biggest price gaps first?
Yes. Click the column header for Gap, Action, or Match Confidence to sort the matches table. Clicking the same header again reverses the order. The Gap column sorts by percentage price difference, the Action column sorts by urgency (most expensive relative to competitors first), and the Confidence column sorts by how reliable the match is.
Need more help?
If your question isn’t answered above, reach out by email. We respond within one business day.