Retail pricing used to move at the speed of a spreadsheet update. A pricing analyst would check a handful of competitor websites each morning, log the numbers manually, and adjust prices once a day if they were lucky. That approach worked when catalogs were small and markets moved slowly. It does not work anymore.
Today, prices on Amazon can shift dozens of times in a single afternoon. A regional competitor can run a flash promotion that undercuts an entire product category before lunch. Manual c