What VantageDash reads on your store, and how

• The public pages of online stores that a merchant using VantageDash has added as a competitor, and the merchant's own store.
• On those stores: robots.txt, sitemaps, product and category pages, and the public product data a shop platform publishes. On Shopify that is the product list at /products.json and, for a few products, the public Storefront API, to see the price a shopper in the store's country pays.
• One store's address when someone types it into our free price checker or our search for competitors.
• From those pages it keeps product names, prices, pack sizes, product codes, images, links and whether an item is in stock.
• It never opens a cart, a checkout, a customer account or a sign-in page, never places an order and never reads anything behind a password.

A merchant's competitors are checked by themselves on the schedule of the merchant's plan:

• Scout: once a week.
• Basecamp: at most every 2 days.
• Vantage: at most once a day.
• Summit: at most once an hour.

A merchant can also start a check by hand, at most once every 5 minutes. Each merchant's check is their own, so a store that several merchants follow is read once for each of them. One check of one store stops after 4 minutes.

• At most 5 requests a second to one store.
• When your robots.txt sets a Crawl-delay, we wait that long between pages, up to 30 seconds.
• When your store answers "too many requests" (429) or "service unavailable" (503), we wait longer between pages, up to 8 seconds, and after 8 such answers in a row we stop.
• When your server refuses our connection, we ask it for nothing more in that check. 8 dropped connections in a row end the check too.
• On Shopify, the product list is read one page at a time, each page waiting for the one before it. When Shopify asks our server to slow down, we stop reading every Shopify store for 10 minutes.
• A merchant's own store is read at 1 page a second.

We read your robots.txt first. We follow its Crawl-delay and use the sitemaps it names.

On a store on Shopify, every request we sign (below) checks your robots.txt first and does not ask for an address it disallows. A group for User-agent: VantageDashBot speaks to us alone; without one, we follow the group for all bots (User-agent: *).

Our readers for PrestaShop, DanDomain, Gambio and Ecwid shops also follow its Disallow lines. On other stores our general reader does not follow Disallow lines yet, so there a Disallow line is not a sure way to keep us out: please write to us instead (below).

Our reader runs on our own server, at the address 178.156.233.202.

When a store refuses our server, asks it to slow down, or shows a check for bots, a check may ask for a limited number of that store's pages again through a paid web access service. Those requests come from that service's addresses, not ours, and are not signed.

Our requests to stores on Shopify are signed with Web Bot Auth, a signature that lets a store check that a request really comes from us. They carry a Signature-Agent header naming https://www.vantagedash.io, the public key that checks the signature is published at https://www.vantagedash.io/.well-known/http-message-signatures-directory, and their browser name (user agent) is a current version of Chrome followed by VantageDashBot/1.0 (+https://www.vantagedash.io/bot).

Our requests to other stores carry the browser name of a current version of Chrome. They do not name VantageDash.

Write to support@vantagedash.io with your store's address and we will stop reading it. If you can, write from an address at your store's domain, so we know the request is yours.

For anything about our reader, a problem with our requests or a question about this page, write to support@vantagedash.io.