Of course, e-commerce is a highly competitive industry. The established and emerging markets are so numerous (and their number is growing every day) that even the most diversified and seemingly unique online business will inevitably face serious competition sooner or later. And, most likely, this will happen sooner rather than later.
The only difference between companies may be the price. It has become so easy for consumers to find the best price and compare products and services that price has become one of the most important elements of online business in general. With just a few clicks, consumers can find alternatives that better suit their budget.
Where to start
Automation of price monitoring should start with defining the circle of your competitors, and then decide whose prices are most significant for monitoring purposes. Unfortunately, you will not be able to monitor everyone, every store. Although technology allows you to cope with this task, you will not be able to process millions of results. Therefore, it is necessary to choose those competitors who are most likely to attract customers with their prices and specific database by industry products. It is necessary to study your competitors as thoroughly as possible and find out which of them is worth taking a closer look at. This way, you will be able to take advantage of modern technology and not get lost in a huge array of data.
In addition to competitors, you can monitor each product, but the results of such monitoring will be even more numerous than in the case of competitors. Therefore, you will also have to narrow down the range of products for competitor price monitoring. This can be done by selecting the most popular and most price-sensitive ones.
It is important to select key brands or categories sault data n your market segment so that you can focus on those areas.
To answer these questions, you can do some market research (either your own or outsourced). Then you can run automated e-commerce price monitoring to see what even the most “dangerous” competitors are doing, and be sure that your best products (the most profitable or best-selling) are priced correctly.
How to Develop a Competitor Price Monitoring Strategy
Rank your competitors
You may feel like there are too many stores to compare on the market, and you’re right – there are too many. That’s why competitor ranking is crucial if you want automatic price monitoring to be effective.
To accurately identify the strongest markup and margin: key differences and how to calculate competitors among online stores, it is necessary to study:
- Web traffic volume
- Income received
- Whose products and services are most similar to yours
Getting this data will be easier than checking Google every couple of hours to make sure your prices are still in line with market rates. The focus should be on the sites with the most traffic and the highest revenues.
Select links to products
Once you’ve decided on the stores and products you’ll be monitoring, you’ll need a little more information, namely the URLs for each product on competing sites. This will allow you to track product availability, which is another benefit of automation. When competitors’ stocks are running low, you’ll know which products to promote especially aggressively so that shoppers interested in that product know where to find it when their usual store runs out.
iDatica products will free you from this time-consuming and endless work and do it for you; you will get more accurate results that will be available in real time.
Full automation of competitors’ price monitoring
The next step after identifying the stores and products you want to monitor is to fully automate them. With a price monitoring tool that visits each specified site and returns with the necessary information on prices and stock levels, you can accurately determine the pricing policy for your products and services.
This step can save you a lot of time and effort. Plus, you won’t have to hire someone to do this task, which will save you money and/or ensure that your employees can focus on their own tasks without having to worry about monitoring prices.
Accurately monitoring competitor prices for e-commerce will allow you to:
- Change prices to match the market situation
- Maintain sufficient inventory levels compared to competitors
- Receive reports on how your competitors are doing
- Track reviews
- Monitor competitors’ promotions
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Data update
One of the key features of any price monitoring tool is the frequency of data updates. For example, once a month is clearly not enough, and several times a day will most likely not provide a clear picture of what is happening.
iDatica will allow you to check prices every 24 hours. Updating information several times a day can lead to an excessive increase in the volume of data, which will not allow you to react to changing market conditions. Volatile commodities, such as gold or currencies, require updating data several times a day. For more standard commodities, daily monitoring is sufficient, with the ability to update during key periods, such as Black Friday or other sales.
A significant advantage of such a tool is flexibility: as new competitors appear and the threat from the old ones decreases, the system can be reconfigured in such a way as to replace existing links to products with new ones. This means that you will not lag behind the market and will not miss anything.
Conclusion
Using a price monitoring service like iDatica will allow you to stay ahead of your competitors and always be able to compete on price if you want or need to. You will also be able to pinpoint the products and services that sell well and give them a special place in your product line.