The eCommerce market’s pricing and marketing strategies constantly change to fit the times and trends. On average, a person looking to purchase a product online will visit at least 3 websites before spending their money. Researching products as a customer is currently more effortless than ever, with most shops accessible through a few clicks on Google. So, why not make the most of all the publicly available data on the internet to make sure your business stands out from the crowd? Price intelligence is a relatively new way to keep tabs on your competitors without the hassle of manual monitoring.
What is price intelligence?
Price intelligence refers to processes including automated price data collection for monitoring and analysis purposes. This includes crawling and scraping, competitor price monitoring, and dynamic repricing. Price intelligence services offer businesses the ability to know where they stand amongst their competitors with product matching, price change alerts, and suggested price values.
Read more on price monitoring here: Price Monitoring, Explained
Why does price intelligence matter?
Significant factors to benefit from price monitoring include:
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- Automatic and frequent recollection of prices to keep on top of competitive markets
- Data is converted into a convenient, easy-to-read and interactive format
- Dynamic repricing options allow automatic repricing based on competitor activity
- Set new marketing campaigns, e.g. discounts, to stand out to potential customers
- Saved time and effort of manual price research
- Gives you guidelines to follow when marketing a retail business
Online retailers
Example: You own an eshop that sells iPhones online to customers in Cyprus. As many other shops also sell iPhones, your shop uses price intelligence to monitor your competitors’ product prices and make better business decisions, e.g. clarify your position in the market, have better value prices than everyone else, and dynamic repricing
Manufacturers
Price intelligence is not only used for tracking competitors but B2B as well. Manufacturers may benefit from the service by keeping track of material suppliers’ price changes with little-to-no manual effort.
Example: You have a car manufacturing business and want to monitor the prices of the parts you buy from suppliers. You use a price intelligence system that scrapes price data from all of your suppliers’ websites on a regular basis. This service allows you to have a ready-made regulated report of material prices from as many sources as needed. As a result, you can proceed to make budget or supplier adjustments as you see fit.
So, will you use Price Intelligence?
To sum it up, price intelligence includes ways for online retailers to collect pricing data from the web through web crawling and scraping for monitoring purposes. Smart price monitoring matters because it provides a modern solution to the time-consuming act of manual monitoring. Retailers benefit from the service with top-speed results, frequent automatically created reports and the possibility of dynamic repricing. Ultimately, businesses benefit from the smoothing of their workflow to focus on strategising and improving their campaigns. Furthermore, manufacturers may also benefit from using price intelligence to monitor the price data of material suppliers efficiently.
If you own a business in a competitive market with constantly changing prices, price intelligence may be right for you.
Explore Soft Surge’s online price monitoring service to get started on upgrading your business strategies.
