An Intelligence Node study revealed that 94% of shoppers compare prices online before making a buying decision.. This trend signifies the importance of offering competitive prices in order to win the race to convert today’s informed buyer. And this is where a price intelligence software comes into the picture. It involves monitoring, tracking, and analyzing price trends to understand the market and make quick informed pricing decisions across various product categories efficiently. And since product prices change constantly – Amazon reviews prices of millions of its products every 2 minutes – you too need to keep a check on your prices in relation to the price trends in the market in real-time.
Price intelligence enables a proactive approach to changing your online prices across your product categories to always offer the best prices in the market using a dynamic pricing strategy.
There are 10 major reasons why all top brands and retailers today are using price intelligence software to stay ahead. You can reap these benefits for your business too:
Outperform Your Competitors using price intelligence software
Knowing where you stand as compared to your competition can help you improve your strategy even further. With the data you receive, you will have the opportunity to keep track of your competitors stock-outs, promotions, and assortment planning along with the prices.
This will also help you stay on top of product trends and in turn accordingly stock your inventory with trending products.
Track Trends In The Marketplace using Real-time Price Intelligence Software
Knowing the minimum and maximum prices of the products in the market will give you important insights about your price elasticity. You will also be able to spot greater opportunities as well as threats lurking in the market. If you intend to stay on top of the competition, staying abreast of the latest prices is extremely important. And a pricing intelligence software helps you do just that!
Refine Your Pricing Strategy using Competitive Price Intelligence Software
It so happens that sometimes you may be selling a product for a much lesser price bringing in lesser profits than what the market could actually offer you. This is where pricing intelligence software comes in. It identifies such products and you can then change those prices to still be lowest in the market but maximize your profit margins.
Improve Customer Satisfaction and Build Customer Loyalty
If you recall your most satisfying shopping experience it would most presumably be when you spent the least amount of money and purchased more. Customers are happy with buys that are easy on their wallet and will repurchase from the same seller if they have a good buying experience and feel like they have gotten value. And it is critical to target these repeat customers as one high value customer can be worth 12 times more than a low-value customer. With a price intelligence software, you can understand these loyal customers better by analyzing their shopping history and buying trends to offer them attractive, personalized deals that will keep them coming back.
Generate New Customers with AI Price Intelligence
72% of shoppers will stray from their favorite brand to get a better deal. This makes it critical to offer competitive prices by constantly evaluating and updating your prices to convert shoppers into buyers without compromising your margins. You will have the opportunity to settle on increasingly powerful and beneficial pricing choices, and in the meantime negotiate a better deal with your suppliers. And you can achieve this by being up-to-date on price trends.
Improve Product Search Performance
Having better prices and assortments won’t make the cut if you don’t rank high on search results and your customers can’t find you. For your product to sell, it needs to appear on top of search results and digital shelves. And for your products to perform better on search results, you need to ensure that all your bases are covered – from optimized description and images, keywords, and positive customer reviews to competitive prices and product availability.
Amazon utilizes a custom AI-based price intelligence platform to decide which products should appear in the buy box, and which products should show up on the first page. A smart AI-driven price intelligence software doesn’t just help you optimize prices but also offers insights on improving your listings through image analytics and SEO optimization to improve your SERP rankings and win the buy box.
Enhance Your Google Shopping Campaigns
If one of your main business goals is to optimize your Google shopping campaigns then using a pricing intelligence software becomes indispensable. This software automatically sends a customized feed to Google Shopping based on which products you are actually competing for. And the rest of the products are ignored by the tool. The software does this automatically on a daily basis.
Get Smart Data Using Descriptive & Predictive Analytics
Pricing intelligence software is the answer for retailers that need to stay up-to-date on their competitors’ moves without doing the heavy lifting of immense data collection and manual tracking of thousands of products across multiple competitors. A price intelligence software helps automate these everyday processes and shares important pricing analytics in the form of an interactive dashboard and custom alerts, saving you both time and effort and ensuring error free intelligence in real-time.
Inventory Management (Avoid Surplus and Out-of-stock conditions)
When prices of a particular product are being reduced in the market, you don’t want to be left with excess stock. Because then you will be forced to sell the excess at lower margins, even zero margins sometimes in order to liquidate your stock. But with pricing intelligence software, you can offer competitive prices by keeping track of your competitor’s price and inventory and be able to maximize stock turnover. Additionally, its predictive analytics can help optimize inventory levels in response to demand and help you maintain the right inventory levels based on historic data and market trends.
Boost Sales and Increase Your Market Share
As mentioned earlier, the price of a product is one of the main components that your customers check when they decide to buy a product. Hence, to boost your sales and to ensure that the customers choose you over your competitors, you need to offer a price that they just can’t refuse.
You can do this using the price monitoring feature offered by most pricing intelligence software. Stay up-to-date on what offers, discounts, rates, and deals your competitors are offering and which products are out of stock at your competitors. And use that data to offer the most competitive price in the market while also meeting your profit goals.
This way your competitors don’t stand a chance against you and you will end up with a higher market share. Smart pricing using pricing intelligence software will give you profitable results.
Final Thoughts
It’s a war of prices in the eCommerce business. On the off chance that you commit an error in pricing your products, you may need to endure a drop in sales and margins and in the long run lose your customers’ trust.
The right pricing intelligence software can help you improve your sales and margins and give you an edge over your competitors in an automated and easy-to-integrate way. For the competitive eCommerce retailer, now is the time to invest in price intelligence software so you can grow using a profitable pricing strategy and make your business future-proof.
About the Author :
Intelligence Node is a real-time retail price intelligence platform that empowers retailers and brands to grow profitability and margins using AI and ML data-driven competitive insights.
