Can You Show Competitors' Prices on Your Website?

As an online retail business, you might be constantly trying to come up with ways to boost sales and drive traffic away from your competitors.

As an online retail business, you might be constantly trying to come up with ways to boost sales and drive traffic away from your competitors. As such, you might have considered listing your competitors’ prices on your own site as a way of showing that your prices are cheaper, or better value. But can you legally do this? In this article, we go over the legality of sharing your competitors’ prices on your website, as well as a few other details to help you out.

So, can you show your competitors’ prices on your website? You can legally show your competitors’ prices on your website, but you must ensure that prices are up to date, and gain any necessary permission to feature logos, trademarks, or other resources. Not doing this can result in a lawsuit.

Read on to learn more about featuring your competitors’ prices on your website as a sales tactic.

Can You Show Competitors’ Prices on Your Website?

Whilst you can legally show your competitors’ prices on your website, you must do so ethically. By this, we mean that you must obtain any necessary permissions to feature logos or trademarks, etc and that you keep the listed prices up to date. Not doing so is false advertising, and risks a lawsuit.

It can be a time-consuming process to list competitor prices on your website in an ethical, professional manner. As such, we’ve listed a few advantages and disadvantages of this practice below to help you make an informed decision.

Advantages of Showing Competitors’ Prices on Your Website

There are some clear advantages to showing your competitors’ prices on your website if you know that you offer better value in one way or another, but there are some other advantages that you may not have considered:

Trust – Showing your competitors’ prices on your website helps to build trust amongst your customers, especially if you’re willing to show when they are actually cheaper than you.
Repeat Custom – Sharing your competitors’ prices on your website will help your customers to save time, as well as money. This could be a great tactic for encouraging repeat custom.

Disadvantages of Showing Competitors’ Prices on Your Website

Whilst there are some great advantages to this tactic, there are also some disadvantages that you should consider before making your decision:

Risk of Lawsuit – If you don’t keep on top of your competitors’ prices, you risk being sued under false advertising. You must always show correct prices for this practice to be fully above board.
Time-Consuming – Because of the above, this can be a time-consuming practice. However, there are various tools that you can use to reduce your time spent here. A price monitoring tool can help you keep on track of competitor price changes.
Advertising the Competition – Whether the prices are in your favour or not, you’re still advertising the competition, who may be able to offer better value in other ways.
Unprofessional – Some competitors may see this as being unprofessional as there is more to sales than just pricing. For this to work, you’ll need to offer more value than just the best price.

How Do You Find Out Competitors’ Prices?

There are a variety of ways to find out competitors’ prices, either manually, or via a tool. When searching manually for prices, the best way is to simply check your competitors’ websites, resellers, and partner sites. If you’re doing it this way, though, bear in mind that you will need to regularly check these listings to ensure that the price that you feature on your website is accurate and up-to-date.

If you don’t fancy doing it manually, competitor price tracking software, such as our at Price Trakker, will help you to keep track of your competitors’ prices, without having to manually trawl their sites. With the help of Price Trakker, you’ll receive daily actionable insights to help you drive sales.

Of course, you’ll still need to manually update your website based on this information, or you could hire a developer to automate this process for you.

Competitor Price Tracking with Price Trakker