Automated Price Checks: Use Your Staff’s Time Smarter
Chain reactions usually begin with a minor change and lead to drastic transformations. Ecommerce is the kind of environment where changes are happening almost on a daily basis. One of those changes happened around price monitoring. Not so long ago we’ve thought that manual price checks are the best that we can get. But, that turned out to be just the first domino that led to automated price checks.
Manual price check was an extremely daunting and time-consuming task. It would take up almost all your staff’s time. After it’s done, your employees have neither the will nor the desire to start working on other equally important tasks. And yet, there are so many other things waiting to be done, right? Regardless of the industry branch, smarter working is always welcomed.
Automated price checks can be a game-changer and help you to use your staff’s time smarter.
You’ll agree that there’s no better learning than through your own experience.
So let’s take a little time travel and see how the Price2Spy’s journey through automated price checks looked like.
1. Price2Spy’s journey through automated price checks
Price2Spy has launched 9 years ago and back then there were only 2 similar tools on the market. You can say that we were one of the pioneers. But, let’s give you some background.
The company first owned the largest online store (called TakoLako) in Serbia where we’re based. Sales were going rather well until the global financial crisis struck in 2008. The crisis affected the whole world, including our country, and the already low customer loyalty decreased even more.
Something had to be done, so we started checking our competitor prices manually. Needless to say, it was a very tiring and tedious work that was taking more and more resources. We saw no way out of it until we figured out that we can create software that will do the hard work for us.
The idea of Price2Spy was born and we invested our development resources into an automated price monitoring solution. All we had to do from this point is to gather all the product pages from our competitor stores and assign them to the corresponding product. This process is now well known as product matching.
In the beginning, it was performed completely manually. We were our only client for the first 6 months! At this point, we saw the need of automating this process as well.
Our company started seeing an increase in turnover. We were earning more money – there was an increase in revenue of 32%! Moreover, we started saving precious time that we used to improve our sales and marketing.
Once we saw the benefits of automated price monitoring, we decided to offer Price2Spy to the world. Both manufacturers and online retailers who are looking to become more competitive. Since then, we have invested continuously in new features like Repricing and Automatch that allowed our users to automate the entire process. Now, we have more than 680 clients from all over the world, coming from over 60 different countries and 25 different industries.
We understand our client’s needs since we have experience in eCommerce ourselves. Believe it or not, since we listen to our clients, almost 80% of all our features actually came as ideas from our clients!
As you can see, automated price checks were indeed our game-changer.
With our help, it can be yours’ too. 🙂
Let’s discuss what benefits would it bring you.
2. Work on your product/service
When you don’t have to waste time on repetitive tasks, you can focus on other important business aspects. One of them is improving the product/service that you’re offering. You’ll have more time to brainstorm new ideas and to test them. Have your customers been asking you constantly for some additional help? Maybe you can take into consideration some of the most often requests and create a new feature? That’s a very detailed task, but innovations are always beneficial!
Make some time to investigate your competitors’ actions. What is their approach? Do they have something important in their strategy that you’ve missed? Since your team won’t be so overwhelmed with tasks, they can also take part.
3. Improve your marketing and sales
As you already know, it’s crucial to target the right audience. Go over your findings once more – maybe some new market opportunity emerged. You can devote some time to developing a strategy for entering a new market.
The product that you’re offering can be the best, but if you don’t promote it, how the world will know? If you don’t have a blog, then why not create one? Besides general topics related to your industry, there are other options as well. Again, many useful ideas can come from your clients. Now that you have more time, talk to them more frequently. Find out about their struggles, likes, and dislikes. Is there something about your product that they would change? Or maybe there is a feature that they find difficult to use? Those could be all great blog posts! Moreover, the content would be completely unique, since your competitors won’t have these insights!
The sales and support team will be able to dedicate more quality time to customers. That is also an option for improvements. As you could see in our example, many widget ideas were created after our clients gave suggestions. That would be impossible without automated price checks.
Automated price checks takeaways
In this article, we’ve had a look at the automated price checks. We also tried to give you some insights into where you could spend your staff’s time more wisely. If you’re still having second thoughts about automated price checks, we invite you to try out Price2Spy’s 30-day free trial!
What method have you used to monitor your competitors’ pricing? Let us know by leaving a comment below!
