We mapped 12,398 significant product price drops over the past three months. Almost two thirds went without any competitive response

We tracked the prices of identical products across 32 selected online shops in Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary. Between mid-May and the end of July 2026 we captured 12,398 significant price drops - 7% or more - on products demonstrably sold by direct competitors as well. For 8,078 of them (65.2%) not a single competitor answered with a price cut of their own within 14 days. Almost two thirds of significant price drops therefore went entirely without a price response. Where a response did come, it typically took 6 days.

E-commerce has a reputation as the fastest market in the world: repricing bots and automated price wars. Part of the market really does work that way. Our data, however, shows that silence is a far more common state.

What exactly we measured

So that the numbers can be checked and re-evaluated repeatedly, we work with fixed definitions:

• Price drop: a price decrease on the same product of 7% or more. We only count cases where we know the day of the change with an uncertainty of at most two days.
• Response: a competing shop that sells the identical product lowers its price by 2% or more within 14 days of the drop.
• Verified pair: we only count a “price drop → competitor” pair when the competitor genuinely offered the product on the day of the drop and we had it under observation at the end of the 14-day window as well. If the competitor was not visible during the window, we discard the pair. “Did not respond” therefore means demonstrably did not respond, not “we do not know”.

The main result: a response is the exception

Two numbers, each about something different:

• At the level of price drops: for 8,078 out of 12,398 drops (65.2%) no response came from any tracked competitor within 14 days. At least one competitor responded to 34.8% of drops.
• At the level of individual competitors: of 13,474 verified “price drop → specific competitor” pairs, 4,372 ended in a response, that is 32.4%. The average competitor left 67.6% of the drops it could have responded to unanswered.

Measured at the level of price drops: each drop is counted once, regardless of how many competitors could have noticed it.

The differences between segments are large:

Measured at the level of pairs. We report segments with at least 500 verified pairs.

By far the liveliest are pharmacies and drugstores, where two out of five drops get a response. In consumer electronics it is a quarter to a third. In furniture one in seven - six out of seven price drops there pass unnoticed. We will look at further segments in one of the next articles.

Where the game is fast: the shops that respond

“A response within 14 days” has one weakness: shops also cut prices on their own, for instance in clearances and seasonal campaigns. Part of the “responses” would therefore have happened without any competitive trigger. That is why we measured a baseline for every shop: how often its price falls by 2% or more in a random 14-day window - measured directly on the products on which we evaluate its responses, and over the same period as the study. Only what sits above the baseline is interesting. It is that lift which corresponds to genuine competitive monitoring rather than to business as usual.

For some shops the two cannot be separated. The clearest example is notino.cz: it answers 76.0% of competitor price drops, the most on the market. Its own promo rhythm is nevertheless so strong that on the same products its price falls without any trigger in 77% of fourteen-day windows. Whether it genuinely watches the competition cannot be told from prices - which is why it is not on the list. We treat as conclusive only shops that beat their baseline by more than the statistical error of the measurement would be.

Shops that conclusively beat their own baseline (on at least 100 verified pairs):

The baseline is measured on the same products on which we evaluate a shop's responses, and over the same period as the study. We treat as conclusive only shops whose difference is larger than the measurement error. notino.cz is an example of the opposite case: it responds the most on the market, but its own promo rhythm is just as strong, which is why it is not in the overview.

Two observations:

1. What matters is the lift above the own rhythm. The highest response rates are in pharmacies and drugstores, where prices also churn on their own (see notino above). A conclusive, if small, lead is held by drmax.cz (+2.9 points on 6,993 pairs) and nay.sk (+2.6 points). In electronics planeo.cz leads with +8.6 points.
2. The table shows that the furthest above its own rhythm is momenti.cz. It responds to 61.4% of price drops at a baseline of 40.6% - 21 points more, four times the response rate of its segment (furniture, 14.5%). In a quiet category that kind of attention stands out the most.

How long a price window lasts

If a response comes, the median is 6 days. With the fastest players a quarter of the answers arrive within 2-3 days - but that is a quarter of the responses, that is, a quarter of the minority of cases where anyone answers at all.

Cumulative share of verified pairs where the competitor has already cut its price. The curve stops at 32.4%: nothing more comes after that. A response after day 14 does not count towards the study.

In practice this means that a shop which cuts its price significantly almost always has at least a few days during which it is demonstrably the cheapest on the market with an identical product. In almost two thirds of cases that position lasts the full two weeks and longer, because nobody responds at all. We call that a price window. For competitors it is the time during which orders quietly drain away - often without them knowing.

When silence is a strategy

Not responding can be a legitimate strategy. Premium brands do not chase the lowest price and some shops deliberately protect their margin or target different customers.

Between strategy and blindness there is nevertheless a simple test: strategy means you know about the competitor's price drop and decided not to respond. Blindness means you never found out about it. Our numbers cannot tell the two apart. A segment where practically no response arrives over an entire quarter does not, however, look like a segment full of deliberate premium strategies.

What this means for pricing

1. The median response is 6 days and 65% of price windows never close. For most shops real-time repricing is therefore not the point. What matters is knowing about significant competitor changes at all, ideally within one to two days.
2. The category determines how much silence you can afford. In pharmacies and drugstores prices move constantly - there the question is whether you keep up. In furniture or hobby segments almost nobody is watching, and a few extra days of attention are a cheap competitive advantage.
3. The same data works in reverse. When a competitor raises prices or runs out of stock, a window opens for you: you can raise prices too, or hold and collect the demand. One of the next articles will be about that.

Methodology

• Sample: 32 online shops in CZ, SK and HU across six categories (electronics, home and furniture, pharmacies and drugstores, books, pet supplies, drones and modelling). In the segment totals we report only segments and shops with at least 100 verified pairs.
• Period: the study covers the last three months - every counted price drop falls between 14 May and 29 July 2026, collection closed on 12 August (the last drop needs a verified 14-day window, which is why it ends roughly two weeks before the end of collection).
• Product matching: we compare only identical products (same item, same variant) matched through a combination of several independent signals and additional validation.
• Data cleaning: 32 shops passed into the study window. Prices are final including VAT, excluding shipping. Time figures are reported in days.
• Errors point one way: the true number of significant price drops in the tracked sample is higher than 12,398 - we report only those we can stand behind.

What the study does not say, and does not want to

• We do not measure sales. We see prices and availability, not how much anyone sold. A “price window” is an opportunity, not guaranteed revenue.
• 14 days is a chosen cut-off. A response on day 15 comes out as a non-response in our numbers.
• A response does not mean proven causality. We usually cannot see into pricing managers' decisions. That is why the whole analysis rests on the comparison with a baseline rather than on individual cases.
• The sample is not the whole market. 32 shops is a lot for depth and little for representativeness of all of e-commerce. Read the numbers as a thorough look at a selected sample, not as a census of the market.

The study is built on DeepScout data. If it caught your interest, get in touch - we are happy to talk it through.