Table of Contents:
What is a Competitor Price Monitoring Solution
Working with Competitive Pricing Data
Modernizing Your Pricing Strategy
Analyzing Competitor Prices
Set Pricing Rules Based on Business Needs
Get Rule-based ‘Smart Price’ Recommendations
Why Intelligence Node?
Advantages of Intelligence Node’s Price Monitoring Solution
Evaluating Competitor-based Pricing Strategies
Price Monitoring for Your Brand Retail in the 21st century is more competitive, dynamic, and intelligent than ever before. In the past decade specifically, hyper-aware consumers have caught up with technological advancements in retail, mastering the ropes of today’s fast-paced and competition-fueled eCommerce landscape. These shoppers can navigate the digital shelf in minutes. In just a few clicks they can choose the best brands, discounts, deals, and delivery and payment options. However, as consumers master this digital retail environment, the onus lies on retailers to catch up. Brands must align themselves with modern consumer expectations– a feat that can only be accomplished with automated competitive price monitoring solutions.
Even the stalwarts of retail and age-old behemoth businesses are not immune to this rapid advancement in retail technology. As young, innovative brands take center stage in every industry and market, new products are constantly added to the extensive array of options between brands, stores, and products, available online. This phenomenon impacts retailers worldwide, as a customer needs to only click away to find an alternative better suited to their needs. So how do retailers keep up? In 2023, the answer is clear- technology, AI, and data-driven solutions.
What is a Competitor Price Monitoring Solution?
At its core, price optimization solutions in retail, such as competitive price monitoring, are analytical tools and strategic approaches to pricing that help retailers determine the optimal prices for their products in order to maximize profits. These solutions use data analytics and machine learning algorithms to analyze various factors in retail. Thus, to suggest the most effective pricing strategy, such solutions analyze demand, supply, competitor prices, and customer behavior.
By optimizing prices according to competitor activity, retailers can increase revenue, sales volume, and gain a competitive edge in the market. Backed by accurate competitor data, brands can take advantage of gaps in the market and act accordingly. Basis competitor activity, brands can offer time-bound discounts and promotions for specific products as competitor offerings go out of stock. Brands can also choose to adjust prices during high sales periods in real-time. These tools can even improve brand loyalty, as they enable businesses to get a closer understanding of their target market and create enriched customer experiences.
Working with Competitive Pricing Data
Competitive price monitoring solutions work by analyzing the prices of local and global competitors. Retailers use this data to constantly adjust product pricing to a comparable figure. This is done to prevent shoppers from clicking away while browsing options online. When utilized effectively, competitor pricing data allows businesses to make informed strategic decisions. This includes effectively and accurately keeping up with competitor discounts as well as the freedom to retain a higher price and preserve the perceived value of a product. It is important to consider production costs and customer demand when actioning competitive price monitoring data. This is especially important when working against established name brands and competing retail giants. Analyzing such hidden operational costs, among others, ensures a holistic view of the retail landscape you are operating in.
With Intelligence Node, the data and insights you receive can be utilized to inform any category of retail strategy. Our proprietary algorithms scrape the web for all similar and matching products available online, extracting the relevant data instantly. This dynamic and flexible approach to retail analytics enables brands to constantly detect market shifts ahead of time. Further, it does not require complex formulas or heavy involvement in the analytics and crawling process. It is entirely automated, making it easy to implement and understand.
Modernizing Your Pricing Strategy With Pre-set Rules
Rule-based repricing is a flexible competitive pricing strategy that enables retail businesses to make pricing adjustments in real-time to take advantage of gaps left by their competitors. With Intelligence Node, your business has the ability to automatically optimize pricing based on your pre-set pricing goals. Here’s how:
Step 1 – Analyze Competitor Pricing
Identify products that are overpriced, underpriced, and in line with the market.
Step 2 – Set Pricing Rules Based on Business Needs
Businesses can create rules at the website, category, brand, and SKU level. They can even be created across multiple complex parameters such as –
Price Type
: Choose whether to apply pricing changes to the current price or price including shipping or price+discount.Cost Margin
: Set the highest and the lowest percentage values beyond which you do not want to exceed your cost margins.Target Price
: Set rules for the desired target price, using parameters of other brands as a benchmark.Match Type
: Choose to filter products by exact/similar matches across competitor websites.Limits
: Set a maximum discount limit on your MSRP.Tolerance
: Opt to focus only on those competitor price differences that are within your specified tolerance levelsOverlay Rule
: Filter and apply rules to products that specifically have charm or psychological pricing.Time-bound Rules
: Choose the time period for applying pricing rules.
Step 3 – Get Rule-based ‘Smart Price’ Recommendations
Intelligence Node’s algorithms refer to these pricing rules and pre-set thresholds to suggest ‘smart prices’ for your products. This enables you to make accurate data-driven dynamic pricing decisions in real-time.
Why Intelligence Node’s Competitive Price Monitoring Solution?
Intelligence Node’s pricing solutions are trusted by global fortune 500 retail businesses, and backed by advanced proprietary technology, AI algorithms, a sophisticated tech stack, and a patented similarity engine. These factors enable us to facilitate impactful, effective pricing strategies and offer incomparable benefits to our clients.
1. 10-second Refresh Rates
Real-time analytics entails a consistently updated view of the retail landscape. Intelligence Node offers a record-breaking 9-second refresh rate on all crucial data sets so your brand never falls behind. In an era where marketplaces such as Amazon change their pricing by the minute, these rapid refresh rates allow businesses to instantly take advantage of assortment and promotion gaps left by competitors instantly.
2. 99% Product Matching Accuracy
In order to provide your business with actionable and relevant data, retail analytics tools scrape the internet to find exact or similar products to generate comparisons and market insights. Intelligence Node’s patented similarity engine and proprietary AI algorithms use a three-pronged matching approach, guaranteeing the highest price accuracy rates in the industry, at 99%, and avoiding monetary consequences due to inaccurate data.
3. Global Coverage
Intelligence Node is both channel and language-agnostic, with 29 languages under our belt. Thus, we are able to operate borderless, analyzing data across industries on a global scale. These capabilities enable businesses worldwide to benefit from our solutions with ease, without fear of large volumes of data, or regional language discrepancies.
4. Massive Retail Dataset
With an unbeatable database of over 1.2 billion unique products, Intelligence Node allows businesses instant access to exhaustive and up-to-date product data across industries. This makes the process of matching and retrieving relevant pricing insights (among other categories of data) from competing brands quick, accurate, and simple for our clients.
5. ZIP-code Level Optimization
Aside from precise overviews, interactive dashboards, and holistic insights, Intelligence Node also offers ZIP-code level tracking and price optimization. With advanced ML algorithms, brands can adopt the capability to track local pricing data based on regional proximity, creating an accurate and complete view of global variability and performance, store by store across geographies.
6. Scalability with a Rapid ROI
All brands strive to differentiate from competitors in the industry. Intelligence Node’s market-tested solutions recognize the importance of custom, scalable solutions for each client. This enables businesses to match our data analytics capabilities to specific production costs, the volume of SKUs, areas of operation, points of concern, and more. Brands can exercise control and set their own pricing rules via open API and an intuitive interface. Further, with our unmatched accuracy and refresh rates, our clients enjoy quick turnover and rapid returns on investment.
7. Plug-n-Play APIs
Intelligence Node boasts an easy-to-use price optimization suite that can be smoothly and instantly integrated with your backend ERP or CRM systems for a seamless data flow. With the option of a SaaS portal for simplified file transfers, setup requires little to no integration, allowing you to lose no time and get to work on actionable insights within days.
Evaluating Competitor-based Pricing Strategies for eCommerce
Investing in AI price optimization solutions for your retail business is a big step forward in keeping your business competitive. However, the costs associated with it are a major consideration to many retailers, and can only be offset by sheer value and ROI. The very best automated pricing solutions are intuitive, reliable, fast, and require minimal human intervention. Such tools, such as Intelligence Node, are equipped to handle global-scale datasets with ease, and eliminate human error while saving your business time and money. Intelligence Node offers retailers state-of-the-art technology and incomparable benefits to boost profitability. This gives your brand a solution for all your pricing and strategic needs at a fraction of the cost of a consultant, data analytics team, or over-featured fulfillment platforms.
As a rule of thumb, below are a few factors of consideration to take note of while evaluating a software solution for your eCommerce business.
Price Monitoring for Your Brand Goals
For a closer look at the scope of world-class automated pricing solutions for your brand, book a demo today!
