PriceGuard is Price Parrot's answer to a simple problem: what happens when a competitor does something genuinely strange, and your repricing rule follows them off a cliff?
Maybe they entered a clearance sale. Maybe their pricing system glitched. Maybe a competitor went out of business and is liquidating. Whatever the cause, a normal repricing rule will obediently match their prices, and the merchant wakes up to find their entire catalogue priced 40% below cost.
PriceGuard sits between the repricing rule and the actual price update. The merchant defines a percentage threshold ("never let the price move more than 15% below my current price in a single update"). When the rule's proposed new price crosses that threshold, PriceGuard intervenes.
Two response modes are available:
Most automated pricing damage happens overnight, on weekends, or during low-staffing windows. By the time someone notices, hours of orders have shipped at unprofitable prices. PriceGuard is the difference between a system that needs human supervision around the clock and one that can be trusted to run without it.
It also alerts when prices fall below cost on any product, which catches the edge cases where the floor in your repricing rule is wrong (or missing) on specific SKUs. That alert is often the first signal a merchant gets that their cost data is out of date.
The right threshold depends on the category. Volatile categories (electronics, fashion at end-of-season) tolerate wider thresholds because legitimate price moves are larger. Stable categories (homewares, office supplies) should use tighter thresholds because any double-digit drop is more likely to be noise than signal.
A reasonable starting point: 15-20% for stable categories, 25-30% for volatile ones, then tighten as you observe how often PriceGuard fires and whether each trigger was a real anomaly or a missed opportunity.
Example: A pet supplies store runs PriceGuard with a 20% threshold and "hold" mode. On a Saturday night, their largest competitor briefly listed dog food at $18 instead of $48 due to a feed error. The store's rule would have matched, costing roughly $4,000 in margin overnight before anyone noticed. PriceGuard held the price, sent an alert, and the merchant resumed normal pricing on Monday once the competitor corrected.