Introducing the sales tracker
Track any store in RivalSonar and see its estimated hourly orders and which products sold. Here is how the sales tracker works, when your first report is ready and where the method has limits.
On this page
A store profile tells you where a competitor stands. The sales tracker tells you what changes. Track a store and RivalSonar checks it every hour, estimates its orders hour by hour and shows which products sold. It is the closest you can get from outside to watching a competitor's day.
What it shows
For each store you track, the sales tracker shows:
- Estimated hourly orders, so you can see when a store sells, not just how much
- Which products sold, so you can see which items drive its orders and when that changes
- Estimated daily totals that add up the hourly figures
Every order and revenue figure is an estimate, and the tracker labels it that way.
How it works
When you start tracking, we begin checking the store's public catalogue every hour. We read the same public sources we use everywhere else: storefront pages, public product feeds and sitemaps. We never log into the store, never bypass bot protection and never see the store's orders or customers.
Changes in the catalogue between checks, together with the store's estimated traffic and conversion, are used to refine its estimated orders and to work out which products sold. The more hours we watch a store, the better its estimates become, which is why tracked stores usually have better figures than untracked ones.
For the full model behind the estimates, see why store sales estimates are wrong, and how we model ours.
When your first report is ready
The first report is ready about 24 hours after you start tracking. We need a full day of hourly checks before the numbers mean anything, because a single hour, or even a few, says very little about a store. After the first day, the report updates as each new hour is checked.
Email reports
You can get tracker reports by email, so you do not need to open the app to see what your competitors sold. The report covers the stores you track and highlights the products that sold.
Slots, not credits
Tracking does not use credits. It uses tracking slots. Each plan includes a number of slots, and each tracked store takes one. Hourly checks run in the background without touching your credit balance. When you stop tracking a store, its slot is free for another one. Plans and their slots are on the pricing page, and our post on how credits work explains why we split it this way.
The ad tracker
The ad tracker works alongside it. Track a store or an advertiser, and new ads we find from them appear in your ad tracker. Put the two together and you can see when a competitor launches a new creative and whether their estimated orders, or a particular product's sales, move in the days after.
How to use it
Track your closest competitors
Pick the stores that sell to the same customers as you. Watching their best sellers change week by week tells you more than any single snapshot.
Track stores selling a product you are considering
If you are thinking about testing a product, track two or three stores that already sell it. A product that sells steadily day after day is a better bet than one with a single spike.
Watch launches and promotions
When a competitor adds products or starts a sale, the tracker shows whether orders respond. That tells you how price-sensitive their customers are.
The guide on how to track competitor sales daily covers the method in depth, including how to do it by hand.
Limits worth knowing
We would rather you know where the tracker is weak than trust it blindly.
- Every figure is an estimate. We cannot see a store's real orders.
- Catalogue noise. Restocks, price edits, new variants and catalogue clean-ups can look like activity. We filter what we can, but some noise gets through.
- Stores that hide signals. Some stores expose little catalogue detail. Their per-product figures are less certain.
- Off-site sales. Orders through marketplaces, social shops or wholesale do not show on the storefront and are not counted.
- One day is noisy. Look for patterns across a week or more before you decide anything.
Try it
Pick a store, start tracking and come back in 24 hours. If the figures look wrong for a store you know well, tell us. That kind of feedback is how the model gets better.
Store owners who do not want their store tracked can ask us to hide it on our data removal page.
