Case Study: How Pricing Optimization Helped KTC Increase Sales

Client

KTC is one of the most visited online hardware and electronics stores in Ukraine with a strong regional network of 26 offline stores.

Since 2022, the company has successfully partnered with Pricer24 using our solution to streamline pricing processes.

In this case study, KTC’s category management specialists share their experience of how Pricer24 helps them increase sales based on competitor pricing data.

Task

Over the past 10 years, there has been a struggle for a buyer in the Ukrainian retail market for appliances and electronics. Small and large retail chains, marketplaces, price aggregators appeared – the supply grew. As a result, today’s buyer no longer faces the problem of choosing a place and a way to buy goods.

On the other hand, the significant economic turmoil due to the pandemic and subsequent full-scale war led to a decrease in purchasing power, so buyers became more willing to seek the best price.

In 2022, we set ourselves the goal of increasing sales by revising our pricing policy while maintaining, and in the long term increasing profits for certain categories and positions.

In order to achieve this goal, we needed to monitor our competitors’ prices on a daily basis, as well as always have up-to-date supplier prices at hand in order to find the best deals to buy and be able to offer our customers the best price.

1. Quickly understand our price indices across all categories and products

We need to have up-to-date information every day about our price indices compared to competitors: in the context of different categories, brands and individual positions in our catalog.

After all, a price that is too high or low can scare away buyers and lead to loss of sales, while a market price, on the contrary, will help increase our market share.

2. Promptly change prices on the website

Among our competitors are retail chains and marketplaces with large marketing budgets, entire teams of category managers for various product groups, and with extensive technical capabilities. The prices on these websites are updated quite often, so the second critical aspect for us is the ability to quickly adjust the prices on our website.

For this, we needed a powerful tool that would be able to:

• regularly monitor the market;
• frequently update large data sets;
• provide them in a visual and convenient form for our managers.

In addition, the ability to export this data in one click is necessary for further processing by the team responsible for adjusting prices on the website.

3. See when competitors deviate from MSRP

Brands featured on our e-shelf set manufacturer’s suggested retail prices (MSRP) for their products so that all market players can make money from the sales of their SKUs.

However, retailers sometimes resort to tricks: they set prices below the MSRP at night and on weekends. Without monitoring tools, vendor brand managers simply do not see these actions. However, buyers are quite active during these periods of time. If neither vendors nor we enforce the MSRP, the playing field becomes unequal, and not at all in our favor.

Monitoring MSRP is a strategic task for both brands and their sales partners: for the former to maintain price positioning, and for the latter to maintain the rate of return on products.

Vitaliy Skyba, Delivery lead | Pricer24

We needed to find a solution that would allow us to get accurate retrospective data on competitor price changes not only during business hours, but also at night and on weekends.

We started looking for solutions for all these tasks and turned to Pricer24.

Solution

Data parsing

We gave Pricer24 specialists our catalog and a list of competitors for monitoring.

The client gave us a list of products containing 10,000 SKUs. Multiplied by 13 competitors, we got more than 130,000 SKUs for matching. Our team of content managers, dealing with customer product vs competitor product, processed this vast volume in a month.

Dmytro Shvets, Project manager | Pricer24

After the preparatory stage was successfully completed, the service began to regularly, 7 times a day, collect relevant data on the prices of our goods from all competitors on the list.

It was a pleasant surprise that Pricer24’s basic package also includes data collection about the availability of products from competitors, their ratings and the number of reviews. We see all this in reports, can easily compare, draw conclusions and export to Excel.

Reports and analysis

At Pricer24, we monitor our price index compared to competitors, the dynamics of price changes on their sites, and also monitor the current prices of suppliers. Our department regularly uses the “Price Comparison” and “Price History” reports.

Price Comparison Report

Thanks to this report, we carry out operational control: how many of our products are sold on the market at a higher price.

We double-click on the red piece of the “pie” – and a table opens with items that we sell at a higher price than our competitors:

We see how significant the difference is, with whom and for which products the biggest gap is, and we can make decisions about price changes. Data can be sorted by brands, categories and competitors. Our managers use this report every day.

How Online Store Can Fight Competitors’ Price Dumping — Guide

Price History Report

Pricer24 makes it possible to show data history within MSRP deviations, that is, we can quickly understand which online store was the first to price below the MSRP for a particular product.

This report also lets us see which competitors are deviating from their suggested price on weekends and nights.

With this information at hand, we can provide it to the vendor with a request to take measures to comply with the rules of fair competition between its partners.

Results

Monitoring of market prices combined with adequate actions by our category department and purchasing department resulted in increased product sales.

Thanks to the automation of data collection and the possibility of exporting it in the format we need, the time for making decisions and changing prices has been reduced from days to hours.

The introduction of Pricer24 gave us the technical ability to quickly respond to price changes on the market. This had a positive effect on the following indicators (compared to the same period when we did not use the service).