Competiview

Track competitor updates in real time

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Inspiration

Small and medium business owners spend most of their time keeping the business running such as serving customers, managing inventory, and handling day-to-day tasks. Unlike big companies, they usually do not have dedicated market research teams, so competitor product launches and pricing shifts can slip by unnoticed and cause financial harm to the company. Competiview allows users to track competitor website changes to stay in the loop.

What it does

1) Onboarding You start by entering: your business category, location, and the competitors you want to track (or pick from a suggested list). This creates your monitoring “watchlist” so Competiview knows which websites matter to you.

2) Competitor pages get tracked automatically Competiview regularly checks each competitor’s product page and captures a snapshot of what the page looks like. It keeps a history so it can compare the “latest version” to the last saved version.

3) Change detection finds what changed When a competitor updates their site, Competiview detects the difference It focuses on two following business changes:

  • Product updates (new items added, items removed)
  • Price updates (price increases/decreases)

4) You get a clear “before vs after” summary

Each update becomes a simple card showing:

  • What changed
  • The specific item affected (ex: “Veggie Pizza”)
  • The exact change (ex: “$14.99 → $16.49” or “New item added: ‘Truffle Mushroom Pizza’”)

5) You can get alerts when high-impact changes happen.

How I built it

Competiview was built using:

Frontend: Next.js and TailwindCSS

Backend: Next.js API Routes, JavaScript

APIs: Google Places API to find local competitors

Challenges I ran into

One of the biggest challenges was building a convincing demo, because Competiview’s core functionality relies on tracking real website changes over time. We can not count on real companies to update their sites on demand during a live presentation, which made it hard to reliably show change detection in action. To solve this, I built a customizable mock website where we can instantly add new products and edit prices, letting us trigger updates on command and demonstrate the full Competiview flow end-to-end.

Accomplishments that I am proud of

One part I’m proud of is the competitor discovery powered by the Google Places API. It was my first time working with the API, and it felt like a big win to get it returning relevant local businesses reliably based on a category and location.

What's next for Competiview

Next, we want to add a visual change viewer that opens the competitor’s webpage and clearly highlights exactly what changed. Instead of reading a text-only update, users would be able to see the page with the changed sections emphasized (for example, a new product tile outlined or a price field highlighted), along with a quick before-and-after comparison. This would make it instantly obvious what was updated and where, and would make Competiview’s change detection feel more transparent and demo-friendly.

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