How Scout reads store pages

Scout watches public store collection URLs — the page a shop already serves to any visitor, such as a Shopify collection or category listing. It never logs into a shop, never bypasses a paywall, and never reads a page that requires an account. If you would have to sign in to see it, Scout will not fetch it.

What it reads. Scout supports known cycling shops, generic Shopify collections, and pages that publish their listings as JSON-LD. You paste a URL, Scout fetches it on your schedule, and it compares the list of products against what it saw last time.

The first scan is a baseline. A new watch records what already exists on the page without emailing you. Only products that appear after the baseline trigger an email, so a page that already has 40 items does not send you 40 “new” alerts.

When it cannot read a page, it says so. Listings can change shape — a shop can move to a new template, rename its markup, or block automated fetches. Scout reports the failure on your watch instead of pretending to keep watching, and stops the email until the page is readable again.

Be a good fetcher. Only submit URLs you are allowed to fetch. Respect the shop’s robots.txt, terms, and rate limits — Scout paces its own fetches and expects you to pick cadences that do the same.

Watches are limited to 10 per account on the dogfood plan. See plans and limits for the details.