Analyze, monitor and match – the credo of modern e-commerce
- 18 March 2020
The situation in e-commerce is changing very quickly, especially now, during the latest online shopping boom. In most industries, weekly reports on e.g. prices or product availability can only be used as a historical background for decisions made. Everything is happening here and now, all around the world, hence the reaction time has been shortened dramatically.
If you want to keep up with the ever-changing market, you have a powerful ally – automated e-commerce monitoring systems. Starting from the collection of data on prices, product availability, the width and depth of promotions conducted by resellers, through participation in the virtual shelf, monitoring the opinions and cross-sell potential of a given product. All this information can be yours.
I know that I know everything
The use of automated price, availability and promotion monitoring gives you a lot of possibilities. You will learn about the price situation of your products, new products in the competitors’ offers, the need to de-categorize a product or the width and depth of promotional campaigns run by your clients. You will also receive recommendations for optimal prices for new products in a given segment. Increasing turnover or increasing profitability are not the only benefits you can count on. In the long run you will verify when and what your client’s pricing strategy was successful, and then, with proof in hand, you will be able to recommend it to others.
The scope of monitoring is now only a matter of the right strategy and the teams using the tool in your company. Price monitoring can be used by both the sales department as well as pricing and revenue management, and, for example, banner monitoring will be of particular interest to the marketing department.
Time is money
The system that will perform specific actions for us, especially those tedious and repetitive, is an obvious saving of time. Instead of going through hundreds of pages and manually copying data to Excel, you can use the time gained for other tasks, such as building customer relationships. Machine data collection opens the way to automated decision making. Of course, not all of them, because the machine will never replace the experience and knowledge of a Brand / Product / Revenue Manager, but the simpler and more repetitive ones can be delegated to appropriate systems.
Our client, a known global manufacturer of home appliances, has implemented the Dealavo platform in a team looking after one of their brands. This team quickly began to achieve clearly better results than teams dealing with other brands because all tasks related to collecting data and creating reports (moving data to Excel) were performed automatically in a much shorter time and with much greater accuracy. According to customer calculations, the team’s efficiency increased by 87%.
Competition monitoring
It is very rare that we are in a comfortable “monopolist” position on the market in a given category. With dozens or hundreds of brands, in various combinations for each reseller, even maintaining the level of sales can be a challenge. Observing and analyzing the activities of other entities is simply a necessity because they are certainly watching you. Increasing the income of your products and a huge saving of time spent on collecting data is in itself a value that cannot be overestimated, but how much more efficiently you use your resources depends only on whether you are one step ahead of the competition.
So many options – what to choose?
Of course, just because you can monitor almost anything on the Internet doesn’t mean you have to. It is worth starting by defining key areas of your market activity and problems, “road blockers”, which take you a lot of time and money. On this basis, we will help you choose the best solution in terms of e-commerce monitoring. Then you only need to use the collected data to optimize not only the prices and ultimately the profitability of the category, but also stocking and distribution, and even marketing activities.