Why is price monitoring important? The Ecommerce arena is highly competitive. With so many sellers competing for sales of similar products, the slightest advantage can make a difference. And pricing can a massive differentiator for the consumer.
The Need for Price monitoring
Price-monitoring is an important part of the strategy to stay competitive. Constantly keeping track of the merchandise and pricing moves of your key competitors helps you evolve your own strategy. In addition to your own internal data, it gives you deep insights into market trends and competition.
Pricing is a Prime Factor in Buying Decisions
More than 80% of customers do price comparisons for 50% of their purchases.
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Consumers have now made price comparison a normal part of their regular shopping routine. There are numerous comparison shopping sites and price comparison tools that enable them to do this easily. Showrooming is a practice that every retailer is now familiar with. Shoppers look at online prices of the products they are looking at in-store, If the online prices are better they decide to buy the item online.
Webrooming Is Catching On!
The opposite, webrooming, is also catching on. Buyers now look at online prices and if they see an offer in-store that provides a better deal, they may take an item out of their virtual shopping cart and add it to the real one in-store.
Your Competition Is Monitoring Your Prices
Competitor monitoring is an essential strategy to stay ahead in retail. This has always been part of sales strategies. Now, with the increasing use of tools like automatic price optimizers and dynamic pricing tools, it is more important than ever that you should have your own price monitoring tools and strategies in place.
Price Monitoring Enables You to Spot Market Trends and Future Opportunities
If you see a shift in prices for certain items, it could indicate a change in interest in certain products. A steep decline in price could indicate that a product is no longer popular and sellers are trying to clear their shelves of these products. Even a slight rise in price may indicate that many customers are showing interest in that product and its sales might shoot up. You can adjust not just your prices, but your inventory and your merchandising strategies by identifying these price shifts.
Price Monitoring and Technology
Theoretically, you can monitor competitor price moves manually and make changes to your own pricing. Practically, this is impossible. With the sheer number of products and the high level of competition these days, you need to make use of automated tools. Price monitoring or competitor monitoring software like Intelligence Node InOptimizer can help you quickly identify and analyze market trends and competitor moves and make automatic price adjustments. You can define the parameters within which to adjust prices. You can set minimum and maximum price limits, choose who to adjust prices against, which items should be subject to frequent price changes and so on. These AI-based tools learn with each iteration and become better with time.
Price monitoring and repricing is not about a race to the bottom. In fact, price monitoring helps you spot opportunities to increase prices, Price monitoring and using price optimizer tools are now vital for online retailers to survive and to come out ahead of the competition.
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