Every competitor price carries a scraped-at timestamp
A competitor price means nothing without knowing when it was captured. Comptrace stamps each scraped row with the exact collection time and a status state, so current evidence is never confused with an old crawl, a delayed queue, or a source page that stopped responding. Already-supported public URLs preview almost instantly; new or hard products can take up to about 15 minutes, and the timeline stays visible the whole way.
- Attach a scraped-at timestamp to every competitor offer.
- Keep queued, running, completed, and failed states distinct and visible.
- Surface stale rows as exceptions before they reach alerts or price pushes.
Failed checks are stored, retried, and clearly marked
Price checks fail for real reasons: a source blocks the request, times out, changes its markup, or returns inconsistent data. Comptrace stores the request before the check starts and keeps the source error tied to the product, so a gap is shown as a tracked exception with its status and timestamp instead of a silent or stale result.
- Save each request before the source check begins, then follow up.
- Keep errors attached to the specific product and competitor source.
- Hold results back until the check completes rather than showing partial data.
Freshness gates protect every pricing decision
Price rank, average gap, and trend are only as reliable as the rows behind them. Comptrace uses freshness as a gate so stale competitor data cannot quietly drive alerts or pricing decisions. When evidence is current, action can move forward; when it is old, the row is flagged, not trusted.