Quality and price are the two major factors that customers consider before they make a purchase decision. If you want to win in retail, you must master the two. With competition getting fiercer and new entrants making their way into the market, lazily pricing your products won’t do it anymore. You need to be aware and you need to proactively approach pricing decisions more seriously than ever before. This starts with knowing what your direct (and sometimes indirect) competitors are doing in terms of pricing their products.
Why can’t you simply price your products without considering your competition? The answer is simple; it is quite easy to lose customers to your competition. You need to put in all you have got to win a customer and keep them loyal to your brand. Customers have access like never before to tools that can easily compare product prices. If you are not taking your competitors and their price strategies into account, then you are fighting a losing battle. Now is the time to get price intelligence by using a competitor price monitoring solution.
Why retailers must embrace competitor price monitoring solutions
Retailers must use price monitoring to ensure they are ahead with the latest pricing trends and are offering competitive prices to their customers. Here’s why a price monitoring tool serves as an important part of a retail business.
Actionable pricing insights
Price monitoring solution provides actionable insights into pricing that make it irreplaceable. A dedicated price monitoring tool is constructed to give you all the information that you require to make the best pricing decisions. Do you need to lower the product price? Do you need to increase the product price? When should you change the price? These are some of the questions that are answered with a price monitoring tool as it gives you valuable insights so you can base your decisions on that. The insights are a window into competitor pricing so your decision is made based on all important factors.
Maintaining profit margins
A retail business can expand when it has high profit margins. Without a price monitoring system in place, it is easy to lose your way and make blunders with your pricing strategies. A monitoring system for pricing gives you price intelligence so you are pricing your products without losing out on the profits along the way. The best product price doesn’t mean the lowest price and so the monitoring solution ensures your profits are safe but you are offering products at a price that your customers are willing to pay. It offers a win-win situation.
Uncover opportunities and fill gaps
Your business has an opportunity to shine when gaps are left by your rivals. That is, when your competitor does not have the high-demand item or when they have sharply increased their product prices, you can step in and do something about it. These opportunities are often missed by retail businesses but can be an excellent way to attract new customers while retaining the existing ones. You will instantly be notified about any price jumps of your competitors and other changes enabling you to make changes in real-time.
Better stock availability
Pricing intelligence using price monitoring enables you to have sufficient stock thereby preventing out-of-stock and overstocking situations. These can have a direct impact on your bottom line and so you can increase revenue in this way. Let us say the software unveils an item that is always in demand. By keeping that product in stock, you ensure that you never run out when the demand is high. A price monitoring solution allows you to smartly price the item so that you are making the most in every situation. By understanding your competitor’s stock availability, you can ensure you are making the right decisions.
Unearth trends
A price monitoring system enables you to learn from your competitors. How many times are your competitors changing their prices? What pricing strategies are they utilizing? These are some key questions that you can answer with a monitoring solution. With the help of that information, you can understand the weak points of your competitors and forge ahead with the pricing strategies that will put you at the forefront of your customers. You can also look at past pricing trends and tweak your pricing strategies to ensure you enjoy higher profits.
Remain competitive in all marketplaces
Imagine setting prices for your products at different marketplaces manually. The uphill task is the most impractical one when it comes to setting prices. With a price monitoring solution in place, you can be competitive with minimal effort in different marketplaces. As you get insights about the marketplaces and what your competitors are doing in each marketplace, you can use that data to set your product prices with utmost ease and minimal effort. Even if new sellers are added, you can still stay ahead with incredible insights at your fingertips.
Precision and unmatched accuracy of data
A software solution for monitoring prices is recommended because of how easy, quick, and reliable it is. Such tools always offer the best accuracy to ensure your decisions are not just shots in the dark. Imagine developing a pricing strategy based on inaccurate and obsolete data. You will not only lose customers but you will lose revenue and profits. It is a complete waste of labor and money. A competitor price monitoring software will ensure the data it pulls out is accurate so that every decision you make is based on data that is reliable.
Understand customer preferences
A price intelligence software lets you understand the target customer preferences. You can understand which price point they are most willing to buy. You also receive information about the competitors’ price cuts during holidays, the start of the seasons, and when the competitors increased their prices. This wealth of knowledge enables you to make strategic choices of increasing, maintaining, and decreasing the prices at the perfect time. You can better understand customers and make pricing decisions that will make them happy thereby improving your bottom line.
Lower labor costs and save time
A system that monitors competitor pricing substantially lowers labor costs and saves hours daily. Is it even possible to curate all pricing details of all your direct competitors manually? Probably not. Even if it is, by the time you can do something about it, the pricing data will become outdated. A monitoring system is automated and once set up, there is little that you need to do apart from acting on the insights you receive. The constant flow of information means you are spending more time on things that have an impact on your business’s bottom line.
Improve brand image
Pricing matters when it comes to your brand image. If you consistently offer products that are priced low then your customers can assume your products are of low quality. A price monitoring software solution ensures you get the timing right of pricing your products according to a range of factors. For example, during sales, your customers will be expecting discounts. You can offer them at that time because you will be selling a higher volume of products. At other times, you can sell at higher prices when the product is out-of-stock elsewhere. This way, you can always align your brand goals with your pricing decisions and ensure you are not losing out.
Conclusion
Your success with competitor price monitoring depends entirely on two things; the clarity of your goals and the software you choose. You must be clear about your internal business goals and what you wish to accomplish. That is the first step to effective monitoring and implementation of a pricing strategy. Next, you must carefully choose a monitoring system that offers pricing intelligence and monitoring capabilities. A software tool that can be easily customizable and scalable should be your priority especially if you are a small or medium business. Intelligence Node is one such software solution.
Intelligence Node’s price monitoring system is a robust software solution for retailers who want to remain ahead with smart decision-making. It provides unmatched product matching accuracy, plug and play facility, and better insights into price trends giving you all the information you need to price your products for maximum benefits. The flexible price update feature enables the retailer to get updates on a minute basis, hourly basis, or any other basis of their choice. Whether you want to monitor data on a local scale or a global level, the software can handle it all.
