Alerts

Alerts tell you when something worth your attention happens to your prices. A competitor undercuts you, a product moves above the market average, a retailer changes its price, or a MAP violation opens. You define the conditions once. Aperture then watches for them continuously.

Alert rules

0:00 / 0:57 Set up MAP violation alerts

Recorded against an older version of Aperture. Steps may differ. The text on this page is current.

0:00In this video I will show you how to set up an alert when a retailer offers one of your products below the agreed minimum advertised price, MAP.

0:09Open Alerts under Monitoring. This is your inbox for pricing signals. Click Create alert rule.

0:16Name the rule, and choose the scope. Company-wide covers your whole catalog. Specific products lets you pick which products to monitor.

0:24Pick the alert type. In this example, that's MAP violation.

0:28Set the threshold. 0% will alert on any violation. 10% only fires when a price is ten percent or more below MAP. Filter to first-party sellers if you like.

0:39Choose who gets notified. Email is on, with you already added. Add a teammate by name.

0:44Review the rule, check how many products it covers, and save.

0:49From now on, every retailer that drops below your MAP lands here, with the price, the retailer, and how far below.

You create an alert rule in a three-step wizard:

Trigger. Choose the pricing signal to monitor. Brand users also see a Governance category. The triggers are grouped under Pricing signals and Price movement. The pricing triggers are named from your perspective: a retailer sees Competitor cheaper than us and We are overpriced vs market, while a brand sees Retailer cheaper than your store and Your store is overpriced vs market. Margin opportunity, MAP violation, Price decrease, and Price increase read the same either way. Picking a trigger moves you straight to the next step.
- MAP violation, brand only. Fires when a retailer prices below your Minimum Advertised Price.
- Competitor cheaper than us (Retailer cheaper than your store for brand users). Fires when a competitor undercuts your price by a set threshold.
- We are overpriced vs market (Your store is overpriced vs market for brand users). Fires when your price exceeds the market average by a threshold.
- Margin opportunity. Fires when your price is below the market average by a threshold.
- Price decrease and Price increase. Fire when a retailer’s price falls or rises by at least the threshold.
- Availability change appears on this step marked Coming soon and cannot be selected. If a rule of this type already exists, it still shows in the wizard but never fires, because Aperture does not evaluate this type yet.
The three triggers that compare a price with yours (Competitor cheaper, Overpriced, and Margin opportunity) need a store of your own to compare against. Without one, their tiles are disabled and read “Needs a store of your own to compare against”.
Scope. Choose which products the rule watches: Assortment, a hand-picked set of Specific products, or a saved list. A list-scoped rule follows the list automatically as products are added to or removed from it. If the list is later deleted, the rule asks you to pick another list.
- Under Assortment, a switch offers All products or My products. My products covers the products you sell and appears only if you have a store of your own. The three triggers that compare against your price only cover products you sell, so All products is disabled for them. For MAP violation rules the switch shows only All products, already selected, and there is no My products option. These rules cover the whole brand catalog.
- Under Specific products, search by name, brand, or EAN and tick the products to watch.
- Under List, a searchable Saved list menu shows each list with its product count. A dynamic list also shows a Dynamic badge and a sentence describing its rule.
Configure & name. Set the threshold and filters, choose delivery, and name the rule.
- Set the threshold as a percentage or a currency amount. For Price decrease and Price increase, the threshold cannot be negative, and a threshold of 0 is treated as the default of 10 (10% for a percentage threshold, or 10 in the listing’s currency for a currency threshold). For price movement rules, a currency amount is read in each listing’s own currency, with no conversion between currencies. MAP violation rules work a little differently. You can optionally restrict monitoring to specific retailers. Leave the selection empty to monitor all of them. You can set a minimum violation threshold as a percentage below MAP. A threshold of 0 alerts on any violation, however small.
- For Competitor cheaper, Overpriced, Margin opportunity, and the other non-MAP types except the price movement triggers, a Compare against control offers Any competitor or Specific competitors. If you choose specific competitors, the rule compares only against those. For Price decrease and Price increase, a Limit to specific retailers option under Optional filters works the same way: the rule fires only when the selected retailers change price.
- For the five non-MAP pricing triggers, a Matching control lets you choose between Exact only, which compares only identical products, and Exact + Equivalent, which also includes each product’s Equivalent Match from Market Benchmarks. A new pricing rule on a brand account is locked to Exact + Equivalent, because Exact only is not used for brand pricing alerts.
- An optional filter lets you restrict monitoring to first-party sellers only, which excludes marketplace and third-party sellers.
- Name the rule. A suggested name is pre-filled based on your choices so far. You can edit it and optionally add a description.
- Choose delivery: email, sent to org members or external addresses you add, and a Slack channel via a configured integration. You can use either or both. A Slack rule must name one of your enabled Slack integrations, and an email rule needs at least one recipient. New rules pre-select the current user as an email recipient by default.
- Before you save, a summary shows the trigger, scope, and notification settings, plus an estimate of how many products the rule will monitor.

Price movement alerts

A Price decrease or Price increase rule fires when a retailer changes a price by at least your threshold, measured against that listing’s previous price. Moves across different currencies are ignored. Your own store’s price changes never trigger the rule.

Aperture groups moves into one alert per product per day. If several retailers move the same product that day, they share the alert, and a retailer that moves twice in a day counts once, from its first price to its latest. The trigger text names the retailer and the change, for example Costco lowered the price from $10.00 to $8.00 (−20.0%). With several retailers it gives the count and the biggest mover.

Managing alert rules

The Manage rules tab lists all your rules, each with its type, scope, status, and count of open events. Summary cards at the top show Total rules, Active rules, and Open events. Editing, deleting, and sending a test notification to verify that delivery works are limited to the rule’s creator or an organization admin; other members don’t see those actions. The enable/disable toggle stays visible to everyone, but only the creator or an organization admin can use it. Anyone else sees it greyed out, with a tooltip explaining who can change it. The test covers email, Slack, and proactive chat, whichever channels are configured.

Anyone can still subscribe or unsubscribe themselves from a rule’s email notifications from its row menu, independent of edit permission. The Email me column shows a You badge when you receive this rule’s emails.

The alert inbox

Matching alerts collect in the inbox. The filter bar sits at the top of the page. Summary cards below it show counts across four categories: New alerts, High overpricing risk, Margin opportunities, and MAP violations. The MAP violations card is for brand users. Retailer users see Price aligned instead.

Below the cards, the alert list defaults to the last 7 days and shows 25 alerts per page. Use the filter bar to narrow by time range, by state, or by one or more alert types. The time range options are 24h, 7 days, and 30 days. Each row shows the signal, the affected product, a short trigger description, when Aperture detected it, its current state, and row-level actions. You can sort by product name, detection time, or last activity.

Each alert has one of three states:

State	Meaning
Unread	Newly fired. Needs your attention.
Read	You have reviewed it.
Postponed	Snoozed until a chosen time.

Click an alert row to open a preview dialog. Opening the preview marks an Unread alert as read. A postponed alert is left as-is, so opening it does not cancel the reminder you scheduled. Use Mark as read or Unsnooze to change it. In the preview you can review the details and go to the affected product or MAP violation case. Per-row overflow actions let you review the alert, mark it read or unread, postpone or unsnooze it, or go directly to the rule that triggered it. For MAP-violation alerts, the overflow actions also let you jump straight to the underlying MAP violation case.

An alert stays open as the same entry while the underlying issue continues. For example, if a retailer stays below MAP for several days, Aperture does not create duplicate alerts for it. A fresh alert appears only after the issue is resolved and then recurs.

Example: a MAP violation alert

A MAP-violation row carries a red MAP violation badge in the Signal column. If one retailer is below MAP, the Trigger column reads, for example, Costco pricing below MAP threshold. With two or three violating retailers it names them all, for example 3 retailers pricing below MAP threshold (Costco, Target, Walmart). With four or more it gives only the count.

Click the row to open a preview. At the top of the dialog, a product header shows the product’s image, name, and EAN when known, plus a price slot. On a MAP violation alert the slot is labelled MAP price, shown only when a single MAP price covers every violator. On competitor cheaper, overpriced, and margin opportunity alerts it is labelled Your price. Price decrease and price increase alerts show Lowest new price or Highest new price with the retailer name instead. Click the header to open the product. A Trigger line above the Market context card states the situation as a sentence, for example “Costco is pricing below MAP.” or “3 retailers are pricing below MAP.”, in the past tense with ”, last seen” once the alert has ended. This sentence is not identical to the text in the row’s Trigger column. The Market context card opens with a sentence naming how many retailers are below MAP and the MAP price, when a single MAP price covers every violator, then lists each violating retailer with its advertised price and its percentage below MAP. The Impact card shows the headline figure -12.4% below MAP, with one decimal place, taken from the worst violator.

If several retailers are below MAP on the same product at once, the rule still raises a single alert for that product. The trigger and impact reflect the worst violator, and the jump to the violation case lands on that retailer’s case.

Postponing alerts

Postponing marks the alert Postponed and schedules it to come back at a time you choose. It stays visible in the inbox with a badge such as “Postponed · in 2 days”, unless you filter by another state. Use the Postponed state pill to see only these alerts. Quick presets include Later today, Tomorrow, and Next week. A custom date and time picker is also available. Aperture rounds postpone times to whole hours.

When the postpone deadline arrives, Aperture automatically re-sends the original notification and flips the alert back to Unread in the inbox, so it resurfaces for action. The email version carries the prefix “[Reminder]”. The Slack version carries the prefix “:alarm_clock: Reminder”. You can postpone a resurfaced alert again as many times as needed.

Bulk actions

Select multiple alerts with the checkboxes. A floating action bar then appears at the bottom of the screen. Click Actions, or press ⌘ K, to open the command palette for bulk mark-as-read, mark-as-unread, postpone, or unsnooze. Changing the filters clears the selection.

Alerts on product pages

Each product’s detail page has an Alerts tab that lists all open alerts for that product, whether unread, read, or postponed. Alerts that have ended appear only in the inbox. When the product has unread alerts, the tab label shows a red dot and switches to a ringing-bell icon. Hover over the tab to see the exact unread count. Click any row to open the same global preview dialog as the inbox.

Proactive alerts in chat

When enabled for your workspace, the assistant can surface newly fired alerts inside a conversation, so you do not have to open the inbox. The assistant surfaces alerts only to the people set as recipients on the rule, and only if they individually have proactive chat enabled. It pushes only new alerts. It does not re-send an alert that is still open from an earlier fire. All alerts from a single rule evaluation arrive as one consolidated message.