Competitor Intelligence Automation. How Pricer24 Simplifies Price Monitoring For Online Stores

How can you influence the buyer’s choice if one can buy the same product with dozens of online retailers?  According to Google, the decisive argument in favor of purchasing a certain product in a particular online store is the lower price. Around 70% of online stores’ clients are searching for a cheaper option. Buyers no longer need to get up from the couch to buy something on the Internet, and they can compare prices for goods online.

And although the price does not always define everything, it is only possible to imagine product category management and marketing in retail by using various pricing strategies. And effective strategies always start with data processing.

If your responsibilities include monitoring competitors’ prices, you know better than anyone what a mundane task it is. You have to collect information over and over again: how the price of certain products and groups of products changes, what promotions competitors are currently running, etc. Manual collection of data about all competitors can take so much time that it makes no sense at a certain point.

Theoretically, you can track competitors’ prices manually, but it is impossible when it comes to thousands of product items and hundreds of stores.

In competitive markets, the speed of decision-making is crucial. That is why leading companies use automation tools that parse prices from websites. In this article, we will show what our solution can do.

Meet our user, Maria. She works as a category manager in an online consumer electronics store, managing the “PC Peripherals” category.

User Story 1

There is a large stock of Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless gaming keyboards in the warehouse, and Maria plans to hold a promotion to sell them off. She wants to find out at what price competitors are selling this product, who is selling more expensive, and who is selling cheaper.

Maria enters the “Products” module in Pricer24, searches for this product, and sees a snapshot of all the competitors:

Maria can run a promotion and lower the price even more than the market minimum to the extent of the need to keep her margin or to sell her stock surplus. In our example, all competitors adhere to RRP, so price promotions and RRP violations are impossible. Maria decides to stimulate sales with promotions that do not affect the price and asks colleagues from the marketing department for help ?

User Story 2

Maria received new quarterly sales KPIs for her category from the management. To prepare a strategy to achieve the goals, she needs to understand the following:

• how the category she works with is positioned in the market in general;
• how customers perceive her store’s prices as compared to the competitors — are the prices higher/the same /lower?

She clicks the “Price Comparison” graph, selects the display of data in the form of a pie chart, and gets a holistic picture:

Maria concludes that quite a large share of products is available from competitors at a lower price than in her store. To start working with this problem area, Maria needs to double-click on the red piece of the “pie,” and she immediately sees a list:

• Which items her store sells at a higher price.
• How significant the difference is, with whom.
• For which products the gap is the biggest.

She finds 50 offers with the lowest prices and asks herself questions:

1. Which of the competitors is dumping?
2. Which brands are sold at a lower price in competitors’ stores? Maybe it’s necessary to change vendor terms?

Maria switches the report view to tabular and finds the answer to the first question:

Then she looks closely at the brands:

So in just one report, Maria can quickly change the level of understanding of the situation: from general to specific. She finds 50 offers with the lowest prices, compares them with her sales, and sees their potential. And so she starts working on this problem area based on the relevant data and analysis results ?

User Story 3

Maria receives a letter from the vendor that her store has violated the RRP for 10 products. She knows that her competitor was the first to “drop” the price, and her store just reacted to his actions in order not to lose market share.

Maria has a tool for historical price comparison from Pricer24. So she opens the relevant report and takes screenshots to confirm the price change for each of the 10 products.

“Competitor 1” dropped the price at 13:11 and her store at 3:14 the next day, reacting to the dumping actions of a competitor. Pricer24 can show historical data within the framework of RRP violations (i.e., for vendors or stores that want to find and show “persistent violators”).

User Story 4

After the quarterly report, Maria received a new task. She has to monitor the prices of the top three competitors regarding web traffic. The goal is to always “be in the market” with them in the “PC Peripherals” category by a specific brand.

Since Maria often works with the Price Comparison report, she combines different filters (by brand, competitor, category, etc.). To analyze the top three, she created tags and assigned them to the three competitors. Now Maria can quickly filter these three competitors by tag.

She prepares a report only for competitors from the top three for a specific category and brand.

Maria can see all problem areas in a few clicks and reconfigure the data display most conveniently according to her task.

Maria saves the most valuable reports in her configurations and the most important ones — on the Pricer24 dashboard in the form of widgets. So the key indicators are always in front of her eyes.

With Pricer24 tools, you will always have up-to-date information on competitors’ prices. And even more — using the Dynamic Pricing solution, you can automate price changes in your online store in case of price changes from competitors or suppliers.