Stay Cheaper Than Competitors

The case study that we’re going to go over is that of a UK nationwide retailer of tools and construction equipment. They’re currently employing over 500 full-time employees and have 6 category managers.

They’re selling around 5000 different products, but aren’t tracking competitors’ prices for each of them. What they’ve done instead is that they’ve identified around 3500 most important products and matched them to those of their competitors.

This means that when it came to the total number of different websites Price2Spy had to monitor, the number grew to around 40. Not every competitor website had every product out of those 3500 being monitored. However, the average amount of websites that one product could be found on was around 10. 

So, what did the UK retailer do in order to remain the cheapest on the market? They’ve used Price2Spy’s two well-known repricing rules:

• Clever drop – our client wants to be 1% cheaper than the next cheapest competitor that has the product in stock (and yes, Price2Spy can also monitor stock availability). As this race to the bottom can’t go on forever, an additional rule was set in place. Namely, the price drops could occur only if the new price was still within the desired profit margin. 

• Clever raise – there are a couple of specific cases where our client wants to be 1% cheaper compared to the second cheapest competitor, who has the product in stock, and that s where Clever Raise comes in.

How does all of this look from our client’s perspective?

Every day, they log into their Price2Spy account and check the repricing suggestions offered by Price2Spy. Depending on what you want to accomplish – more speed or more control – the repricing process can be either manual or automated.

Our client chose the manual option and they directly oversee and approve or disapprove every single price change.

When it comes to Price2Spy’s repricing suggestions, they approve over 90% of them each day, and this means every day there are:

• From 50 to 100 products whose price is being dropped 
• From 30 to 60 products whose price is being raised

Our client uses the Magento store and it’s linked to their Price2Spy account. This means that even though they approve every price change manually in the Price2Spy interface, the changes, once approved, are performed automatically on their Magento store. This means they don’t have to spend time in two interfaces (Price2Spy and Magento), doing essentially the same thing.