Historical tracking and alerts
Coming soon
Today’s data is point-in-time: a search snapshot freezes the metrics at the moment of the search. The watchlist caches metrics until you refresh. There’s no historical view of how a product’s BSR or price has moved over weeks and months.
Historical tracking + alerts changes that.
What this will let you do
Historical views
- BSR over time per ASIN. A 90-day chart on the product detail page showing how the rank has moved.
- Price over time. Same window, same chart format.
- Review-count growth. Useful for spotting accelerating-growth listings (a sign the niche is hotting up).
- Average-rating drift. A drop in average rating is often the first sign a category is being filled with low-quality entrants — a leading indicator of saturation.
Alerts
- BSR threshold crossing — push a notification when a product’s BSR drops below or above a configurable threshold.
- Price drop / spike — push when the listed price changes by more than X%.
- Review-count spike — push when a competitor’s review count grows abnormally fast (potential review-farm abuse, or a viral moment).
- New competitor on your ASIN — push when an unauthorized seller appears (overlaps with Hilal Software’s listing-hijack alerts but specifically for products you’re researching, not selling).
How it’ll work (preview)
Historical tracking is a lightweight per-day snapshot system:
- For tracked products (default: every product on your watchlist), Hilal captures a daily snapshot of BSR, price, review count, and average rating.
- A background worker runs at off-peak hours and fetches these via SP-API.
- The data is stored in a time-series-optimized table.
- The product detail page renders the historical chart from that data.
For alerts, the alert engine evaluates each tracked product’s current metrics against your configured thresholds; when a threshold crosses, it pushes via the same notification pipeline as Hilal Software’s mobile alerts.
Configuration
You’ll be able to:
- Choose which products are tracked. Defaults to your watchlist; you can add more from search results.
- Set per-product thresholds. Defaults are sensible; tune per ASIN.
- Set notification delivery channels — in-app, email, mobile push, Slack/webhook (where Hilal Software supports them).
Why this isn’t here today
- The daily snapshot job is heavy. Tracking thousands of products per organization adds non-trivial backend load; we’re sizing the SP-API quota usage carefully.
- Alerts integration with the rest of Hilal Software’s notification system is in flux while the mobile push roadmap is being built. Sequencing matters.
- Storage cost. Per-product daily snapshots add up; we’re modeling whether retention is 90 days, 180 days, or 365 days.
Use cases this unlocks
- “Is the niche heating up?” A category-level historical view shows whether review-count growth is accelerating across the top listings.
- “Did my Q4 product peak yet?” Watch the BSR week-over-week to time your reordering / re-listing.
- “Should I worry about a competitor?” Track a specific competitor’s BSR trajectory; alert when they break into the top 100.
- “Is this niche dying?” Flat or declining BSR across all top listings = category falling out of fashion.
Status
- Concept design: in progress.
- Daily-snapshot worker: depends on SP-API quota provisioning.
- Alert delivery: depends on mobile push pipeline (Mobile App push roadmap).
- Beta: planned for a future release.