Is Monitoring Product Availability Equally Important As Price Monitoring?

During 10 years in business, Price2Spy has always advocated a comprehensive approach in price monitoring. This means that we often draw customers’ attention to the fact that the product price is not the only reason for their success or failure. The price factor certainly plays an important role, but monitoring product availability can often be equally important.

In this post, we will explain how to adjust your pricing strategy to product availability. Monitoring competitors’ product availability will allow you to make smarter pricing decisions.

Let’s see how!

What Options Do You Have?

Your pricing strategy won’t depend only on the competitors’ prices. Another aspect that you need to take into consideration is product availability. Of course, there are two possible scenarios – that a competitor does or doesn’t have a certain product in stock.

What your approach in these cases should be?

If the competitor does not have the product in stock, that gives you an opportunity for a price raise. Yet, this doesn’t mean that you can raise the price as much as you wish. If the price is way too high, customers will most likely wait with the purchase until the item becomes available somewhere else as well. On the other hand, if you set the price too low, it means that you haven’t seized the market opportunity.

So, how should you know what is the right price?

Well, Price2Spy’s Repricing mechanism will give you the answer you’ve been looking for. In the case of product availability monitoring, we advise you to take a look at something we call Clever raise. Clever raise suggests that there is room for a price increase since your price is the lowest on the market. Therefore, your product is too underpriced compared to your next cheaper competitor. Price2Spy will help you with defining what should be the right price in your case.

However, if you do not have the item in stock, but your competitor does, that means you should add it to your stock as well. For such cases, Price2Spy offers Stock/Assortment opportunities. Stock/Assortment opportunity will show you what products are offered by your competitors but are missing in your store.

Can Brands and Retailers Benefit From Monitoring Product Availability?

Yes, of course! Brands can monitor retailer product availability so they can alert them to replenish their stock. This way a Brand can check with the Retailer how come they ran out of stock, and whether it’s the time for the new order.

As for Retail businesses – there are other important insights that can come out as well – for example, what is the reason behind your competitor running out of stock?

If a competitor ran out of stock, could it be that they sold it very quickly? Have there been promotions? We talked more about this in the blog post Tracking competitor’s promotions/stock patterns – have they negotiated a better deal than you did?

Another important factor is for how long will competitors remain out of stock? This tells you how agile they are in refilling their stock.

We understand that all of this is easier said than done.

That’s why we developed the Stock Change Dynamics widget. This widget will show you which products have had a stock change during a certain period. With this widget, you’ll be able to see which products ran out of stock, which of the items were not available, but got into stock, and which products haven’t gone under any availability change.

Custom Treatment Of Product Availability

Over the years we had all sorts of requirements. Sometimes, clients ask us, for example, for custom treatment of the product availability.

What does that mean?

Sometimes, clients request that although the product is available on the website, we differentiate the availability in relation to the Delivery date. For example, if the delivery time is one day, we’ll consider that product as available. But, if the delivery time is one week, we’ll consider that product unavailable.

This is a common case in industries such as Home décor and Furnishing. In those cases, the brand usually doesn’t show if the item is or out of stock, but instead shows delivery dates.

Is Product Availability Equally Important As Price Monitoring?

After everything we said, we hope that you have a pretty clear answer to this question. Product availability is as important as price monitoring. As you can see, these two metrics can’t be analyzed separately. Your pricing strategy should be also defined depending on product availability. It’s not enough to only price monitor your competition since their prices will depend on the fact if they have particular items in stock or not.

Since this a time-consuming task, we would suggest you try out what Price2Spy has to offer. We offer you a 30 days free trial period so you’ll have enough time to test our services.

How important product availability is to you? Have you already used some online tools as help? We would love to hear more about it!