Choosing the right price tracking software can be a challenging task – both for online shops and for brands. That’s why in this article we will present you with a list of the most important functionalities which a price monitoring tool should have and a list of the top price tracking software.
Online shops which want to understand their price competitiveness on the market, check their competitors and market dynamics and save time with price automation (dynamic pricing)
Brands that want to see their price positioning, price range in which their products are sold, availability of their products in the market as well as data about their competitors’ products
KEY FUNCTIONALITIES OF THE PRICE TRACKING TOOL
What is relevant when looking for price monitoring & repricing software?
Clear market overview – price monitoring tool should enable you not only to check your position on the market but also to identify the most relevant competitors. In the Dealavo tool, you can see your position on the market in regard to every single product and see how many other online shops offer it. You can also easily see which products you have in common with each of the competitors.
All data integrated into one place – thanks to having the data from all the platforms in one panel, you can understand the situation with one glimpse only.
Data displayed in charts – there is no easier way to see a trend than looking at a chart. Charts should include information about different competitors’ prices in a specified time range
Dynamic Pricing – to react quickly, it is recommended to implement dynamic pricing based on customizable conditions. Some shops use different rules depending on the channel or country – with professional price monitoring software it shouldn’t be a problem.
E-mail alerts – to be always up to date with relevant changes in the market, you should make sure you can receive e-mail notifications every time there is an important price increase/decrease in the market, or when there is an opportunity to increase your price, etc. For example, in the Dealavo tool, you can choose when exactly you want to receive such an e-mail (e.g. when the prices decrease more than 15%).
Different variants tracking – it is important to take into account different packages of the products. Each variant should be treated as a separate SKU (e.g. 50 ml bottle vs. 100 ml bottle)
API integration – to implement data from the tool to your system, API integration is crucial – especially if you monitor hundreds or thousands of products.
Data available in csv – for data analysis, it can be important to have data in csv format as well.
Availability information – it happens that your competitors offer products at very low prices, but then it turns out that they are not available. It can even happen that even though there are several listed offers, you are the only shop that actually has the product. That’s why it is crucial to have availability information in the price monitoring tool.
Frequency of the updates – to react fast, you need frequent updates. Some shops offer promotions only at certain times – e.g. during the “night sales”. If you monitor prices only at 8 am, it is possible that you don’t register such actions.
TOP PRICE MONITORING TOOLS
In the table below, you can see some of the most popular price monitoring software. We have compared their most important features, reports which they offer and customer service possibilities. The table has been created based on information published on those companies’ websites.
Key functionalities
Dealavo
Prisync
Price2Spy
Intelligence Node
Wiser
Competera
Skuuudle
Competitors price monitoring
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Product availability information (online and offline)
Yes (online and, if possible, offline)
Yes (online)
Yes (online)
Yes (online)
n/a
n/a
n/a
Dynamic Pricing / Repricing
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
No/soon
Yes
n/a
Banner monitoring
Yes
No
No
n/a
n/a
n/a
Predictive pricing module
No
No
No
Yes
n/a
Yes
n/a
Customized reports
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
n/a
n/a
n/a
Competitor’s Assortment Report
Yes
n/a
n/a
Yes
n/a
n/a
In the premium plan
Visibility reports for brands
Yes
Yes, paid extra
No
n/a
n/a
n/a
n/a
Data presentation
Web-based
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
On-premise
No
No
n/a
n/a
n/a
No
n/a
API
Yes
Yes, paid extra
Yes, in the Premium and Enterprise plans
Yes
No
Yes
n/a
csv
Yes
Yes
Yes
n/a
Yes
Yes
n/a
Charts
Yes
Yes
Yes
n/a
Yes
n/a
n/a
Customizable view (e.g. change of column names)
Yes
n/a
Yes
Yes
Yes
n/a
In the premium plans
Presets – saved filtering
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
n/a
n/a
E-mail alerts
Yes
Yes
Yes
n/a
n/a
n/a
n/a
Data quality
Product matching
Based on EAN codes, product names or URLs; Automatch with advanced algorithms and then double-checked by the Qualiity Assurance team and editable by the client (clients can delete matches which they don’t agree with)
Based on EAN codes, product names or URLs
3 options: 1. Manual URL matching made by client 2. Manual URL matching made by Price2Spy – paid extra 3. Automatch – paid extra
Based on EAN codes, product names or URLs
Based on EAN codes
Based on EAN codes, product names; Automatch with advanced algorithms and editable by the client (clients can delete matches which they don’t agree with)
Based EAN. Other in premium plans
Websites covered
Marketplaces, price comparison websites and online shops
Online shops
Online shops
Online shops
Online shops
Online shops
Online shops, marketplaces, others
Product variants distinction
Yes
Yes. in the Premium and Platinum plans
Yes
Yes
n/a
Yes
In the premium plan
Frequency of updates
Up to every 15 minutes
4 times a day
1 time per day in the Basic plan and up to 8 per day in the Premium and Enterprise plans
There is a lot of price monitoring tools out there, on the Internet. However, not every software is worth your attention. Let us introduce you to our top choices of price monitoring software.
Price Monitoring and E-commerce Data for Brands and E-shops with Dynamic Pricing Feature. Source: dealavo.com
Dealavo certainly distinguishes itself from other pricing monitoring software providers. Not only is it for its twofold structure—for brands and e-shops—but also the results that have been achieved so far are impressive: almost 700k product offers! What’s more, Dealavo includes diverse features, which altogether amount to the best possible outcomes. From price and promotion tracking, through banner monitoring and competitor’s assessment report, to useful integrations—this is Dealavo in a nutshell. In other words, technological excellence has been the reason for which the software has been exceeding the wildest expectations of its users.
Pricing plans are available only upon request. However, a free trial is offered.
Competitor Price Tracking & Monitoring with Prisync. Source: g2.com
PriSync is a very handy application thanks to which in-house automation is possible. Both the dashboard and report within the tool are intuitive and easy-to-use. Although the software may be costly and it doesn’t work for all possible websites, Pri Sync’s effectiveness compensates for it. If your main goal is to increase sales growth and profit margins, you will certainly accomplish it while seeing your rivals in one UI. Having added your products and competitors, you will maximise profit and sales numbers.
Pricing includes a Professional package ($99 a month); a Premium package ($199 a month), and a Platinum package ($399 a month).
PriceGrid provides businesses an edge with competitive price analysis and monitoring. Source: pricegrid.com
As a long-existing app, PriceGrid ensures that companies have access to the state-of-the-art pricing analysis technology. Their strategy is based on simplifying, monitoring, analysing, and competing. With the supportive and knowledgeable helpdesk, this software’s only drawback is perhaps a lack of free trial. Among the PriceGrid’s most distinctive feature is researching prices in seconds.
Zilliant connects strategy to execution and transforms how you use data to price and sell. Source: zilliant.com
Deploying commercial strategies and using data more intelligently are at the core of Zilliant’s service. The app’s solution set consists of several platforms: Zilliant IQ, Price IQ, Price Manager, Sales, Deal Manager, IQ, Cart IQ, Sales Planner. This original structure provides more complex and operative insight into pricing modelling. Even though it is supported in many languages (German, English, French, Italian, Spanish), Zilliant’s con can be the fact that it may get confusing at times.
Price2Spy is a price monitoring, comparison, and repricing tool. Source: g2.com
As a retail pricing application, Price2Spy relies on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Consequently, it helps various professionals to break down pricing analysis and attain desirable results. Aptly called, the software is designed to monitor any website—even when it seems impossible at the first sight. One of the main Price2Spy’s pros is the fact that the software provides you with demos, tutorials, and online support. However, some reports from the app may be tougher to comprehend.
Pricing includes a Basic Plan ($119.95 a month); a Premium Plan ($299.95 a month), and an Enterprise plan (customised).
This software’s focus is on increasing your revenue—something with which executives struggle a lot! Generally, Model N operates on a platform for business reinvention, accentuating Sales, Marketing, Channel, Finance, and Legal issues. Solutions are adjusted to industries—ranging from pharma to high tech. Front-office and back-office are thus smoothly connected and form one entity, being one of the greatest advantages of the Model N. Sometimes, due to the complexity of the tool, users may get confused.
PROS Soultions – an intelligent and integrated selling platform that transforms your sales processes to streamline and expedite the implementation of essential quoting functions. Source: g2.com
Answering the market’s needs, PROS uses AI-fueled pricing tools so that each interaction can be utilised. Among its two most useful functions are optimising prices for sales teams and executives and accentuating the so-called price governance. Additionally, a lot of industries are supported, resulting in an efficient use of universal life-time pricing mechanisms. Pricing, Sales as well as eCommerce teams will find here something for themselves! Be aware, though, of sporadic issues with system outages that have been reported.
Pricing plans are available only upon request.
You can find one of the Smart Price Optimisation and Management tutorialshere.
Omnia Dynamic Solutions gives power to your pricing team with a flexible rule system. Source: g2.com
This tool is mainly for retailers. Omnia’s approach to Dynamic Pricing lets you choose the strategy, pick products, mix everything with elasticity data—and then very easily update all the prices. It is certainly an all-in-one solution, ensuring that data collection, price calculations, and price updates are in one place. Sometimes, the formulas may be slightly difficult to understand, but it is all compensated by the specialised expertise in retail pricing, which is offered by the tool. You have it guaranteed that the software will unload you with a vast amount of workload!
Pricing plans are available only upon request.
You can find one of the Smart Price Optimisation and Management tutorialshere.
tgndata is a Premium, all-inclusive Data Provider and Price Intelligence SaaS for Large Enterprises, trusted by top-tier firms like in the Retail Industry and Brands. Source: g2.com
As one of the premium and high-calibre SaaS used by Fortune 2000 firms, tgndata offers an all-inclusive complete package based on 3 pillars: online competition, real-time monitoring, and the amount of resellers. All data analysed is immediately transferred to the internal system, operating on invaluable insights. You then get a solid historical perspective on which you can base your future strategies. Finally, you can easily automate monitoring via various advertising channels: newsletters, brochures, or e-flyers. If anything, the software lacks comparisons regarding products with similar/identical specifications (since not only prices are relevant).
Wiser Solutions is the global leader in Commerce Execution SaaS products. Source: g2.com
Wiser Solutions is specialised in Commerce Execution SaaS. Who can benefit from its solutions? Naturally—retailers, brands, or distributors. All of this to make better and more efficient decisions regarding market awareness and price management. So far, over 500 brands have equipped themselves with Wiser Solutions, indicating better data as one of the most important benefits. Multichannel visibility will certainly help your business. Sadly, however, team members’ accounts need to receive a prior approval and can’t be set up automatically.
Pricing plans are available only upon request.
You can find one of the Wiser Solutions tutorialshere.
Competera platform provides a full stack of pricing software, so you just have to choose the right one. Source: g2.com
This is another tool that deploys both Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies. Any stock keeping unit (SKU) is supported, being a suitable solution for online / brick-and-mortar / multibrand / and so on… businesses. What distinguishes Competera from its competitors is an amalgam of competitive data and handy enginess, no matter what a company’s specific goals are. What’s more, Competera offers multiple products readily available to use, such as Competitive Data and Pricing Automation. Regarding its disadvantages, it is often said that the software lacks more in-depth statistics on the delivered data.
Pricing plans are available only upon request.
You can find one of the Competera Pricing Solutions tutorialshere.
Leveraging AI-powered technology, Feedvisor’s managed services team will provide agency-like marketing and business services. Source: g2.com
Feedvisor can provide optimization when it comes to the most popular sellers, such as Amazon or Walmart. Among its features are 3P Storefront Launch and Management, Advertising and Marketing Strategy and Management, Content Listing Optimisation, Reputation Management, and Marketplace Cleaning. More generally, AI technology is smoothly combined with Amazon expertise. Worth noting, the languages supported are German, English, Hebrew, and French. The only concern is about the fact that margins are not that accurate all the time and may be higher than in reality. However, a free trial is provided.
BlackCurve ‘Tracker’ allows you to track your competitors daily with Google Shopping price monitoring. Source: g2.com
Black Curve’s focus is on e-commerce businesses that seek to get to know their competitors. Google Shopping Price Monitoring is often employed by Black Curve, followed by a Google Ads campaign based on a market position. Then, Dynamic Price Technology should be employed, and finally, data may be integrated! That is to show how simple the whole process by Black Curve is. In addition to these factors, eCommerce Matters Podcast is run by the brand. However, the admin panel is sometimes said to have a minor malfunction.
Pricing includes a Tracker plan (£99 a month); a Challenger plan (£499 a month); a Commander plan (£999 a month).
You can find one of the Black Curve tutorialshere.
DataWeave is a SaaS-based digital commerce enablement platform providing digital shelf analytics and dynamic pricing solutions for global consumer brands and retailers. Source: g2.com
DataWeave is based on SaaS and centralised around digital commerce. Its primary goal is to accelerate sales growth. Among the software’s most unique capabilities are content quality, price competitiveness, benchmarking, promotion performance, rating and review analysis. Most importantly, the tool is language-agnostic, which greatly contributes to servicing international markets. Besides that, the interface is described as very user-friendly. However, some challenges also arise—such as a limited number of price updates circle.
Skuuudle can track prices, discounts, product images, availability, reviews and more. Source: g2.com
Thanks to the fact that Skuuudle cooperates with both smaller businesses and huge enterprises, the software delivers targeted pricing. What are the other features of the tool, though? It is based on 6 pillars: Data Collection, Product Matching, Quality Control, Easy-to-use Analytics, Cloud-based, First Class Support, which is supposed to help you stay ahead of competition. Skuuudle is a synonym of Pricing Intelligence. At times, however, multilisting issues (connected with, eg, eBay) may appear.
Pricing starts from £49 a month.
You can find one of the Black Curve tutorialshere.
Yieldigo tool helps to optimise prices, protect margins and enhance meeting the business objectives and bring predictability to their everyday pricing and promotional strategies. Source: g2.com
Yieldigo is exclusively based on a chosen pricing strategy and certain types of customer behaviour. Among its greatest aims are: process optimisation, protecting margins, improving the business objectives, and providing forecasts. Since the company was awarded several prizes, it is certainly one of the best vendors of its kind. Additionally, due to its Eastern European roots, the languages supported are also Czech, Russian, and Polish. In terms of disadvantages, more graphical outputs and exporting options could be provided.
PriceLab bots collect the data from millions websites and create comparisons, reports, and recommendations which are shown in the internet panel or sent by e-mail. Source: pricelab.co
PriceLab is a solution for both retailers and brands. For the former ones, competitive price monitoring, data analytics and reports, dynamic pricing, and consulting are among the most practical features of the software. Additionally, brands may make use of MAP & MRSP e-commerce monitoring, distribution channel monitoring, and data analytics and reports. In other words, PriceLab is price intelligence software designed mostly for online sellers. In terms of cons, users sometimes complain about the assumption of knowledge of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
Price Watch is a pricing optimization software that helps to compare, set the prices automatically and anticipate market trends. Source: g2.com
Price Watch focuses on maximizing the extractable data value from a company’s ecosystem to ensure the success of its digital transformation into a smart business. On the one hand, ecosystem connection & data management, data unification as well as data science & artificial intelligence are provided. On the other, market intelligence & knowledge, models & strategic directions, digital business solutions are given. It is sometimes reported, however, that the interface could be enhanced.
EDITED is Retail Decision Platform uses A.I. to optimize buying and merchandising decisions, ensuring you get your product and prices right every time. Source: g2.com
Another software fueled by Artifical Intelligence, employed by brands such as PUMA, Diesel, Tommy Hilfiger, Ann Taylor, and the Arcadia Group. Among the reasons why EDITED has been chosen so far that often are its comprehensive dataset, actionable insights, and smart automations. Additionally, everything can be analysed in one place: e-commerce, in-store stock, marketing, costs, returns. What annoys customers at times, though, is a need to form a new configuration each time when adding new competitors.
IntelliganceNode includes pricing & promotions, digital shelf analytics, assortment & availability, and brand protection solutions for retailers and brands. Source: g2.com
The tool has many distinctive divisions: pricing & promotions, assortment & availability, brand production solutions, and digital shelf analytics. Noteworthy is also IntelligenceNode’s accuracy, amounting to 99% when it comes to delivery of data intelligence. Importantly, numerous market leaders have decided to choose the platform: Prada, Lenovo, Nestle, or LIDL, accounting for over $600 billion in revenue internationally.
Pricing includes an Enterprise Plan (free trial); a Lite Plan ($1,000 a month); and a PRO plan (free trial); an API Access ($1,000).
There are no tutorials for IntelligenceNode available.
7learnings uses advanced machine learning models to forecast demand for different price points with high accuracy. Source: g2.com
7 Learnings’s motto is employing predictive pricing while maximising profits. On average, businesses that have chosen the software let their profits and revenues increase up to 10%. Also, it will enable anybody to gain control by forecasting decisions when it comes to pricing. Importantly, integration is straightforward and seamless—the tool’s data scientists work with customers’ data. Speaking of drawbacks, 7 Learnings is said not to be that intuitive when used for the first time.
PriceLenz is a pricing optimization software that provides businesses with the actionable insight they need to make smarter pricing decisions to maximize revenue. Source: g2.com
PriceLenz’s success lies in informed decisions. The software’s crucial process is based on 5 straightforward factors: solution overview, informed strategic decision making, precise marketing, efficient selling, optimised e-commerce. If you would like to start selling both responsibly and efficiently, the software could be worth trying out. However, please be aware that the interface may not be as user-friendly.
PriceManager has actionable and meaningful online pricing data, competitive intelligence, Promotional and Assortment Intelligence and dynamic price recommendations. Source: g2.com
PriceManager provides solutions for retailers, manufacturers, and partners. The application’s mission is to help customers keep up with the competition. It can be accomplished by using integrated tools and state-of-the-art technological solutions, helping to keep an edge over the competitors. Some drawbacks of the software allegedly include issues with reporting. However, it’s only minor and surely will not prevent you from increasing your bottom line.
Pricing plans are available only upon request.
There are no tutorials for PriceManager available.
PricingHub uses an experimental methodology (AB Testing) to compute price elasticity and use it to calculate our price adjustment recommendations. Source: g2.com
This software distinguishes itself due to its experimental technology—AB Testing. It serves to achieve diverse business goals, employing price adjustment mechanisms. This, in turn, leads to over 100,000 price recommendations on a daily basis, working on automation of your pricing strategy. To sum up, PricingHub is result-oriented, data-driven, scalable, automatised, unbiased, and evolutive. As per disadvantages, its pricing policy has been said to be slightly overpriced.
Mi9 enables the world’s leading retailers to automate and optimize their entire Plan-to-Sell process. Source: g2.com
Mi9 Price & Markdown has been long considered the quickest kind of enterprise software for brands, retailers, and wholesalers. The tool is successful worldwide; this is perhaps due to the individual method Plan-to-Sell. One can manage executing, influencing, selling in-store and online in one place! Again, one of the drawbacks is the user interface.
Pricing plans are available only upon request.
There are no tutorials for PriceManager available.
Quicklizard’s AI-pricing optimization platform helps multichannel retailers automate and optimize their pricing and promotions. Source: g2.com
QuickLizard Pricing Optimisation covers the Pricing Excellence, which consists of 3 parts: Pricing Optimisation, Product Data Enrichment, Quicklizard Pricing Infrastructure. The whole process is run in 5 steps and encompasses 7 core capabilities: Integrations, Rule Based Pricing Optimisation, Open Platform Pricing Optimisation, AI/ML Pricing Optimisation, Multi Channels/Omni Channels, Hybrid Model, and Management Capabilities. This is a suitable solution for both retailers and brands. As per disadvantages, the calculation of attributes could be sequenced, according to users.
KeizenPrice combines your transaction-level data with data from KaizenDatalabsTM and runs our sophisticated machine learning algorithms. Source: g2.com
KaizenPrice provides actionable price recommendations. It is to ensure that strategic revenue is spent, a sales volume is measured, and deep pricing expertise is given. When it comes to this software, transactional-related data is combined with KaizenDatalabs measures, which leads to machine learning solutions. However, please be aware that the interface may not be too user-friendly.
A well thought-out pricing strategy is one of the most effective methods.
However, there is a large group of people who associate the “online store’s price optimization” with lowering them to the lowest possible level and thus attracting customers. That’s a common mistake, though.
Thanks to the effective monitoring of the market (prices and assortment of the competitors), online stores can easily identify which products are worth lowering the price for, but also – which are worth increasing it for. However, in today’s dynamic e-commerce market this is not possible without automated toolsthat support e-commerce monitoring.
What are the reasons for this?
If you don’t use such tools – you probably do this work “manually” by visiting e-commerce platforms and websites of competing stores and checking their prices there. Most likely, however, some of your competitors are already using price automation (repricing) tools, so they are able to react instantly after your change, and you won’t be aware of it (until the next time you visit their site).
The other reason is that the amount of data to analyze is incredible. Let’s take electronics market in the UK as an example – based on our analysis, there are on average almost 19 offers of a single product on Google Shopping available. Analysis of all of them for hundreds of products would be extremely time-consuming.
More and more online shops choose a solution for automatic price monitoring (sometimes referred to as price checker) to:
What should you take into consideration when choosing the e-commerce price tracking tool?
Why prices are more important in e-commerce than in traditional trade?
How to start tracking prices of your competitors?
What is the price checker (price tracking tool)?
The e-commerce price tracking tool is an online solution that allows online shops to check the prices at which their products are offered by competing e-shops. How does it work?
Imagine an online shop – buytv.com. The owner of the shop wants to check which of their products should be advertised because of their competitive price. They can do it easily with a price monitoring tool, which can verify which of their products are offered for the cheapest price on the selected websites (e.g. Amazon, Idealo, Google Shopping). The tool will also provide information about the lowest, average and highest price of every product.
In the above example we can see that the store buytv.com has the lowest price (first place in the ranking) for TV 03, for TV 01 its offer is the second cheapest (it is more expensive by EUR 4 than the minimum price in the market). On the other hand, for TV 04 as many as 16 out of 20 competitors sell this product cheaper.
Therefore, if the store Telewizory.pl wants to highlight on its website those products for which its offer is a bargain, it should think about promoting TV 03 or TV 01.
Tip: Analyzing your competitors’ prices can also serve as an argument for negotiations with a supplier. If you see that a lot of stores in the market offer a product at a much lower price than you, it may mean that you are getting worse terms than your competitors.
MARKET ANALYSIS
A price monitoring tool can do much more than just verify if your online shop has competitive prices. The system allows you to check:
which sellers offer a specific product,
on what channels (e.g. Amazon, Allegro, Google Shopping).
If buytv.com wants to use the Dealavo tool to check which retailers also sell the Sony TV sets, they can just click the product they are interested in (in the example below: TV Sony 1) to expand the list of all available offers on the selected websites (e.g. Amazon, Google Shopping). This way, they can easily check which online shops promote their offers in each of the channels and at what prices.
Looking at the example above, you can see that the price checker allows you to assess your online shop’s competitiveness not only from the perspective of the entire e-commerce market but also on individual sales channels. In the example, a competing seller (Retailer 1) applies a different price policy on Allegro than on Amazon. Their offering is more attractive on Allegro than on Amazon.
ANALYZE YOUR COMPETITORS
Online shop owners who use the price monitoring tool can also check which retailers have the most similar offering to theirs. They can also learn about the product categories in which they are more expensive and the categories in which their products are cheaper. This way, they can easily identify their biggest competitors.
Who is the biggest competitor of buytv.com?
You can check this in the Dealavo tool by opening the “Retailers” section and looking at the first positions on the list. This way, you will find the online shops that offer the biggest number of products from your offering. You can also easily see which products are offered by the buytv.com shop at prices lower or higher than the competition.
This, in turn, shows that buycheaptv.com is a cheaper competitor to buytv.com and has a very similar offering. In such a situation, if the analysed shop does not want to reduce their prices, they should focus on non-price aspects and promotion to attract more customers.
PRODUCT AVAILABILITY IN COMPETING STORES
The competitor price tracking tool can also provide the online shop with information about product availability in other shops. When using the Dealavo tool, you can choose to only display offers that are available or also include shops that do not have the product in stock at the moment.
Let’s assume that buytv.com is selling the latest Samsung TV for EUR 1000. If we compare the prices with the competition (without checking if the product is available in the shop), it turns out that the offer is ranked far below the TOP3 at Idealo. Some shops could choose to lose some of their margin and reduce the price to make their offering more competitive. However, this may actually be completely unnecessary, because, after the unavailable offers are filtered out, you can see that all the cheapest offers are no longer available.
Another useful module of the competitor price monitoring tool is the option of automatic pricing.
What is price automation / dynamic pricing at an online shop?
Automatic price management is a popular solution in tools for e-commerce price monitoring. It can be used to adjust your prices to the current conditions on the market and internal figures of your shop.
The purpose of dynamic pricing (repricing) is to streamline the pricing process. Simply put, price automation lets you respond:
quickly,
according to your pricing policy,
in a way that boosts your profits the most.
Some sellers are afraid of using this solution because they feel that they are somehow “losing control”. However, in most cases (the only exception being dynamic pricing based on prices suggested by artificial intelligence), price automation comes down to simply “substituting into the equation”, which has to be defined by the person responsible for pricing and implementing the system.
This means that it is actually the shop representative who decides how the products should be priced. You can, for instance, choose the following rule: “I want to sell at the highest possible price that keeps me ranked in the TOP3 at Idealo. The price, however, cannot be lower than the purchase price +5% margin”.
This means that price automation lets you be more consistent in the implementation of your pricing policy. The choice of the policy itself, however, is up to you.
Another important aspect is that the shop does not have to use full automation from the very beginning. You can start by using so-called semi-automation. In this case, the system only suggests the prices based on predefined rules, without making any changes directly in your shop. The prices must first be approved by a representative of the shop. This way, the owner has full control over every price change.
Let’s go back to the example with the buytv.com online shop. The price tracking system shows that among the offers on Google Shopping, the shop’s offer for the Sony 1 TV is ranked 5th. However, the difference between the shop and its competition is small. The offer of buytv.com is more expensive than the offer of the cheapest competitor by just EUR 2. If the pricing policy allows this, buytv.com could reduce the price by EUR 2 to be ranked first automatically and attract more customers to visit their website to make the purchase.
If the prices are managed manually, it is easy to miss such opportunities, but with repricing / dynamic pricing, such actions can be performed automatically.
There is one relevant question: Why is price management so important in e-commerce?
There are many factors that contribute to the success of an online shop:
good presentation of the offering,
shopping process that is easy for the customer (using the shopping cart, available payment options, etc.),
good positioning in a search engine, etc.
However, there is an increasing number of studies that show that price is thekey factor taken into account while making an online purchase. A lot more important than when shopping in physical stores. Why?
When customers shop in a physical store, they are also influenced by such factors as personal service, fragrance, music, etc. These elements do not even exist in online shopping. When the role of non-price aspects diminishes, price becomes more significant.
Even more importantly, however, checking the offering of competing stores in traditional commerce requires a lot more effort – you might, for example, have to go to another district. Online shopping is much easier. You can quickly check product offers in other stores (with just a few clicks) or on a growing number of price comparison websites, which make such price comparisons really easy. Some of them (e.g. Google Shopping) allow you to check the best offers without even entering any specific website. You can simply enter the name of the product you are looking for into the Google search engine and, at the top of the page, you will see a comparison of the best offers. In such a situation, it is more difficult to attract customers to your shop using non-price aspects because the price the consumer will have to pay for the product will be the most noticeable piece of information.
Also, consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the price level, their knowledge of prices is no longer limited to their city or even country. They can check how the product is priced by sellers on the other side of the globe (as evidenced by the rising popularity of AliExpress).
This means that online shops have to be aware of their price position because this is something most consumers take into consideration when choosing which shop to buy from. Does it mean that shops should compete only with price? Of course not. However, effective product price monitoring can identify the products (and product groups) that might benefit from advertising and that might let you attract customers who browse price comparison platforms to the website of your shop.
Price monitoring can also be used to check which products could be sold at a higher price without losing their competitive position. We wrote more about this in our article on multichannel selling and promotion. In the article, we also described which products from your assortment should be monitored this way.
If your shop has not yet carried out regular product price tracking in e-commerce, you could instantly determine your competitive ranking by downloading a free Shop Analysis report. The report will provide answers to the following questions:
How frequently do I offer products at prices higher/lower than the average price on the most important platforms?
How many retailers do I compete with?
Which products could earn me more money?
To receive the report, simply fill out the form on theShop Analysis page.
How to start tracking the prices of your competition?
How to start tracking product prices in e-commerce? The best idea is to talk to an expert, who will guide you through all the steps and advise you on which solution to pick depending on your business.
Leave your contact information in the form below to schedule a free consultation with a Dealavo expert and learn more.
