How do you find out which competitors cost you the most on a Mirakl marketplace?

Why does it matter which competitors cost you the most?

On a Mirakl marketplace, each product has one page and any approved seller can add an offer to it. Mirakl is the platform behind the marketplaces on B&Q, Tesco, The Range and Argos. The order goes to whoever holds the PayBox, the offer at the top of the page with the buy button, which goes to the cheapest live offer. Read what the PayBox is and how to win it.

A seller with a few hundred products can easily face dozens of rivals. Most of them don't matter much: they list a handful of your products, sit above your price or sell the lines that rarely sell. A few matter a great deal. Your team's time is limited, so the useful question isn't “who are my competitors?” but “which of them are taking money from me, and where?”

Why isn't the rival on the most of your products the biggest threat?

The obvious way to rank rivals is by overlap: how many of your products they also sell. It's easy to count and usually wrong. A rival can list 400 of your products at higher prices and take nothing from you. Another can list 20 of your best sellers a few pence cheaper and take a large share of your revenue.

Three things tell you more than overlap:

• How many of your products they undercut. Being cheaper is what moves the PayBox, so count the products where their live offer is below yours.
• The PayBoxes they hold on your products. These are the orders you're not getting right now.
• Your revenue on those products. A rival holding the PayBox on a best seller costs more than one holding it on ten slow lines.

Worked example (made-up rivals and figures). You sell 500 products on one marketplace. BudgetBuild lists 300 of them and is cheaper on 140, but those are mostly slow lines: it holds the PayBox on 30, worth £1,800 a month of your revenue. Northern Tools Direct lists only 40 and is cheaper on 25, but they're your best sellers: it holds the PayBox on 22, worth £9,400 a month. By overlap, BudgetBuild looks like the main rival. By revenue at risk, Northern Tools Direct costs you five times as much.

How do you measure how much cheaper a rival is?

Use the median price gap across the products you share, not the average. The median is the middle value, so a few listings at silly prices, such as a clearance line at half price or a typo, can't drag it around. A rival whose median gap is 3% below you is consistently cheaper. One whose average is 3% below you might just have two odd listings.

Only compare against live offers. An offer that is out of stock or switched off doesn't compete for the PayBox, so including it makes the market look cheaper than it is. And look at the gap in pounds as well as per cent: 2% on a £300 garden furniture set is £6, while 2% on a £9 tap washer is 18p.

How do you find competitors you didn't know you had?

Rivals don't announce themselves. A new seller adds offers to your products, takes the PayBox on a few and the orders quietly stop. The only reliable way to find them is to check every offer on every product you sell, every time, rather than the products and sellers you already watch.

It also pays to look beyond single products. A rival that dominates a brand you sell, or lists products in your categories that you don't, tells you where the market is going. Those are range gaps, and they're often worth more than another penny off a price.

How does PriceSynergy rank your competitors?

PriceSynergy connects to each marketplace through its Mirakl API and finds every seller with a live offer on a product you sell, including ones you didn't know about. New sellers show up as soon as they list. Competitor monitoring then ranks them:

• A threat score from 0 to 100 for every competitor, relative to your other rivals. It weighs how many of your products they undercut, the PayBoxes they hold on your products and your revenue on those products.
• The median price gap for each rival, so a few extreme listings can't skew it.
• Head-to-head product lists for each rival: revenue at risk, products where they're cheaper and products where they hold the PayBox. Export any list to CSV.
• Brand and category pages: market share, who else sells each brand, range gaps, estimated revenue lost to rivals per brand, and commission-aware margin per marketplace category.
• Products with no competition, where there may be room to test a higher price.

Competitors, threat scores, brands, categories and range gaps are on every plan. See plans and pricing.

What should you do once you know your biggest threats?

Ranking rivals is only useful if it changes what your team does on Monday morning. A simple routine:

1. Open the top three rivals by threat score and their revenue-at-risk list.
2. Find the price that wins each product back, and check it against break-even. On Growth and Scale, PriceSynergy's PayBox tracking works out the price that makes you cheapest and flags it when that's below your min price or break-even. Read how to work out break-even after commission.
3. Hold where matching would lose money. Some rivals price below cost. Let them have those orders and put your effort where the margin is.
4. Change prices safely, in bulk where it makes sense. Margin-safe pricing checks every change against your min, max and break-even. On Growth and Scale you can send approved prices to Mirakl, with the live offer read again before each one goes.
5. Watch how the rival responds. Some rivals follow every move, which is how price wars start. On Growth and Scale, repricing insights show price wars and rival behaviour, and PriceSynergy keeps 90 days of price and PayBox history per product.

To see whether your response worked, monitor the products as a campaign: PriceSynergy compares units, revenue and profit before and since, with a plain verdict (Growth and Scale). Turn the rest of the list into tasks with an owner and a due date, which is on every plan. See team workflow.

How often should you review your competitors?

Look at the top of the threat list every week, and at new sellers on your best sellers as soon as they appear. Review brands, categories and range gaps monthly, or before you plan a new season's range.

If you sell on more than one marketplace, rank rivals per marketplace. The seller you fight on B&Q may not sell on Tesco at all. Read how to manage several Mirakl marketplaces from one place.

Questions sellers ask

Sources: Mirakl: B&Q launches marketplace on diy.com; ChannelX: Tesco Marketplace to replatform to Mirakl; ChannelX: The Range Marketplace re-platforms with Mirakl (April 2026); ChannelX: Prepare to sell on Argos Marketplace, powered by Mirakl. Marketplace names are trademarks of their owners. PriceSynergy is independent and isn't endorsed by any marketplace.