How E-commerce Competitive Intelligence Helps Online Stores Improve KPIs

“Know your enemy and know yourself,” said Sun Tzu in The Art of War. While the battle for customers may not resemble a battle between armies, the e-commerce market remains competitive. By predicting your competitors’ actions, you can skillfully resist your competitors’ strategies.

In this article, we explore how competitor analysis in Pricer24 assists category managers in making informed decisions and achieving the most important KPIs for online stores.

Contents:

1. Competitive Intelligence in Pricer24: What We Analyze and How We Collect Data
2. Tracking and Comparing Current Product Prices
3. Monitoring the History of Price Changes
4. Analyzing Product Availability
5. Analyzing Changes in Availability
6. Monitoring the Number of Reviews and Average Product Ratings
7. Analyzing Product Promotions

Competitive Intelligence in Pricer24: What We Analyze and How We Collect Data

The age-old phrase knowledge is power holds practical value in today’s data-driven business environment: the more information you have, the better decisions you can make.

The good news is that there is no longer a need to collect competitor data manually or rely on primitive parsers that only provide lists of products with prices. In Pricer24, with just a few clicks, you can not only view prices but also competitors’ promotions and installment purchase terms, and you can analyze competitors’ products or the popularity of specific items.

The Pricer24 parser monitors specified websites several times a day, collecting data related to SKUs available in both your assortment and your competitors’. This information is organized into reports within the system, allowing you to add them to dashboards for quick access.

By analyzing and comparing competitors’ data with their own, category managers can quickly make tactical decisions to achieve planned KPIs and increase their market share.

Tracking and Comparing Current Product Prices

Using the Price Comparison feature on the Pricer24 platform, category managers can quickly find answers to the following questions:

• At what price are competitors selling a particular product?
• Are competitors’ prices higher, lower, or aligned with the market?
• What is the price positioning when compared to competitors (for similar items)?

You can generate a report with pricing information on all of your market offerings, showing the number of items priced equal to, higher than, or lower than competitors prices. You can also display separate lists of these SKU.

Using this data, you can make decisions regarding:

• Product price changes
• Promotional activities
• Changes in product margins
• Adjusting your sales plans

By comparing your prices with those of competitors, you can quickly identify problematic areas and start working on them. For example, if you have a large number of products priced higher than the market average, you may need to lower your prices to ensure sales. Conversely, if your prices are below the market average, you should analyze sales and profit and increase prices to maintain the desired level of category or segment profitability.

Monitoring the History of Price Changes

Pricer24 has another interesting feature: the platform stores historical data on price changes. This information helps the category manager understand:

• What pricing strategy competitors use
• How frequently competitors change prices for similar products

Using this data, you can make decisions regarding:

• Changes in product prices
• Promotional activities
• Changes in product margins
• Adjustments to the sales plan

Analyzing price history helps you identify market trends. For example, if competitors periodically lower prices for products during specific periods of the year or sales events, the category manager can apply a similar strategy to attract customers.

Combining price history data with your internal sales data allows you to identify the correlation between price changes and product demand.

This feature can also be used to analyze violations of the manufacturer suggested retail price (MSRP) in the market. You can quickly determine which online store first sets a price below MSRP for a particular product. Additionally, you can track specific trends, such as a peak in MSRP violations on weekends.

You can then provide this information to vendor partners, requesting that they take measures to adhere to rules of fair competition.

Analyzing Product Availability

By having data on product availability (statuses such as in stock, out of stock, and not found for both your products and competitors’ products), you can compare the size of your assortment with that of competitors, identify shortcomings in your product representation, and identify gaps in the market as potential areas for growth.

This data in Pricer24 is displayed in the Assortment Analysis report. It helps you to quickly understand:

• How your catalog size compares to competitors in terms of the number of offerings
• The number of products currently out of stock or not found for both you and your competitors
• The availability of your key positions, known as category drivers (AX-products), with high sales and stable demand
• How well your competitors represent products from your assortment
• Trending items on competitors’ digital shelves (new products in the market)

Using this data, you can make decisions regarding:

• Adjusting your assortment policy (expanding or narrowing your catalog)
• Establishing supply chains and filling your online store with new items or products with unsatisfied market demand
• Overstocking or liquidation of certain products

Analyzing competitors is the best option to determine whether your product range is too narrow or too extensive and to make informed decisions about expanding or consolidating your offerings.

Category managers can also identify segments where competitors do not sufficiently meet the market’s needs. These gaps represent potential opportunities. By filling them with your products, category managers can attract customers looking for specific items and thus increase sales.

For example, an online store called TELEMART.UA managed to increase its market share in the graphics cards and personal computers categories by creating a flexible system of reports on product availability from distributors and competitors for reservation and procurement purposes. This allowed them to introduce new products to the market ahead of their competitors. You can read about the details in our case study.

Analyzing Changes in Availability

To effectively monitor a product’s presence on the market, continuous analysis over time is crucial, and this can be achieved using historical data on changes in availability status. Pricer24 provides this option, and such data is displayed in the Dynamics of Assortment Changes report.

Using this data, you can make decisions regarding:

• Adding new SKUs to your assortment
• Procuring products currently in deficit?

If significant deviations occur within a category, you can identify product shortages or, conversely, instances where the market has been flooded with new products. By analyzing these deviations on the chart, you can determine which products have influenced the market situation.

Monitoring Product Reviews and Average Ratings

In Pricer24, category managers have access to information about the products with the highest number of reviews and the highest average ratings.

Using this data, you can make decisions regarding:

• Adding specific products to your assortment
• Focusing marketing efforts on top-performing products, such as by launching promotional activities

Analyzing this data reveals customer preferences within a category: which features, attributes, and advantages make a particular product popular. Additionally, you can evaluate interest in specific items. For example, if a product receives numerous reviews or questions, it indicates considerable interest from the target audience.

This information is valuable when introducing a new product category to the market. By analyzing average ratings and the number of reviews received by products on different trading platforms, you can understand which items are worth stocking up on and which are not.

Product Promotion Analysis

In Pricer24, you can generate a report showcasing current promotional products that can significantly impact sales performance. This report provides insights into:

• Specific products that competitors are prioritizing through promotions
• Promotional conditions that competitors are offering
• Promotional prices that competitors are offering

With this data, you can make informed decisions about launching your own promotional activities in response to your competitors’ actions.

Furthermore, you can study your competitors’ various types of promotional campaigns, discount levels, and mechanics. This allows you to compile a list of typical promotional tactics prevalent in the market and assess the effectiveness of your own promotional activities compared to those of your competitors.

Summary

To effectively achieve planned metrics, you should have a comprehensive solution.

Pricer24 provides category managers with up-to-date information about products on competitors’ digital shelves. By comparing this data with your own and analyzing it correctly, your marketing department can make data-based decisions.

Decisions based on facts, not intuition, contribute to business growth and the achievement of set KPIs.