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This article will look at the specifics of how you can become a price monitoring expert by gaining meaningful insight in to competitor pricing. You will be given the knowledge to become the ultimate Price Spy, always on top of competitor analysis and pricing strategies that make you as profitable as you can be.
Competition – the What, the Why, and the How
Pricing should never be a guessing game. This is particularly true if you sell goods which others sell too. Competition is only increasing. In instances where you are directly competing with others, your pricing strategies have to reflect the science of competitive price monitoring. They need to be flexible and in tune with the market on a continual basis.
Your customer’s have the tools at their fingertips to know who offers them the product at the best price. In e-commerce the consumer has the information they need, easily accessible, to make a purchasing decision based solely on price. Price comparison websites make things simple for them. Your price therefore needs to be the one they choose. This requires hacking your competitor’s online pricing strategy. It’s about pricing intelligence.
Despite consumers being savvy to use the tools at their disposal, ecommerce retailers still tend to be somewhat insular when it comes to both price setting, and price monitoring. Manually undertaking a price compare process which is out-of-date the moment it is complete. It’s frustrating, and it is unnecessarily time consuming.
The more savvy ecommerce retailers have turned their attention to getting a price tracker on board. However, price trackers are not created equally and the same name can describe the most basic tool as well as the complex features of a more insightful, dynamic, and automated tool such as the Automatch feature in Competitor Monitoring.
Being a Fly on the Wall of Your Competitor’s Pricing
All price trackers undertake price monitoring with the view of creating competitive pricing strategy. In this way they are largely no different from price comparison websites. However, the best price trackers put you in the position of gaining fly-on-the-wall insight in to competitor pricing strategies, and crucially give you the tools and knowledge to take action on that information.
This is where the most basic price trackers run in to difficulties. The internet is awash with information. Too much information can be as difficult to act on as none at all. You need to be able to see the wood for the trees. Therefore, you need to identify your lead products and your main competitors and look at these through the eyes of a digital Price Spy so that you can hone and refine your pricing strategies. In this way, the insight you gain is wiser, providing competitor analysis which is akin to gate-crashing their pricing meetings.
Competitor Pricing Insights Using Digital Tools
A price tracker will give you the bare bones of information you need. An exceptional and dedicated tool such as Competitor Monitor will transform you in to the ultimate Price Spy. This is because it goes far beyond the basics, and instead gives you on the ground insight in to minutiae whilst eliminating the background noise. You can see which promotions work, which don’t, and which aren’t economically viable despite any sales surges. This takes some complex algorithms behind the scenes.
However, what you get is a dashboard which puts you in the driving seat of competitor analysis. The automation, and automatch approach takes place without the need for constant human monitoring. You’re also not leaving things to chance. It’s easy for a retailer to whack on a low price tag when an item is out of stock, for example, therefore your price tracker needs to be wiser with its insights.
Your price monitoring tool can also do something even the most super-human ecommerce manager can’t: work constantly. The need to amend and update prices, or react to sales or promotional events, will vary enormously from product to product and retailer to retailer. However, even the most constant product pricing needs someone, or something, watching it 24/7 for change. With consumer expectations for rapid and next day delivery so high, you cannot afford to miss a day. Competitive Price Monitoring using Competitor Monitor makes this possible.
How to Make Sure You’re Continually Hacking Your Competitor’s Online Pricing Strategy
So it’s not a one-off exercise. Competitor price tracking whilst adjusting pricing strategies through competitor analysis is a continuous process. How can you keep pace?
Again, it comes back to the tool you choose. Some price trackers require a greater degree of manual intervention and wading through the data to be useful. Conversely, a dashboard view with notifications, alerts, and easily actionable reports makes you a wiser price spy. For example, a morning log-in to Competitor Monitor will show you the hotspots which need your attention, or an alert can be programmed to tell you when you need to take action when a competitor runs a discount.
Then there’s the science behind it all. Price monitoring shouldn’t be solely reactive. You need to be able to spot and utilise historical trends to make future decisions. In this way you hack not only in to your competitor’s pricing meeting, but get a look in to their diary too. This combination – of the here and now, with insights from the past, is exceptionally powerful.
How Do You Become a Price Spy?
