Price Comparison for Online Retailers – Basics, Benefits, Use Cases, and More!

The life of a pricing/marketing manager in a retail setting can be stressful. Being on the constant lookout for competitor moves is time consuming and exhausting. This also makes the manual price comparison process expensive—both mentally and monetarily. 

Yet, for many retailers, price comparison is the key step in understanding the market you are competing in. Knowing where you stand in the competitive landscape can help you understand how your customers perceive you. Do they come to you for lower prices or for something else perhaps?

Price comparison – the other side of the story

Before we continue with the talk about price comparison among retailers, we should also briefly mention the other side of price comparison.

You see, customers do it too—and extensively. With a plethora of price comparison websites available, best deals are not hidden anymore. Matter of fact, they are more visible than ever. 

At least 60% of the online shoppers in the US report comparing prices and trying to find the best deal before making a purchase. This number is likely only to increase.

We won’t go in-depth about price comparison on the customer side of things. However, there is one major takeaway here.

There is (almost) no online seller who enjoys competing on price. However, this is for better or worse, becoming a reality.

This is why, at the very least, online retailers should be aware if their competitors are doing it.

Price comparison for online retailers

Let’s get back to the retailers’ side of the price comparison story.

Although it may seem obvious, let’s first define what price comparison for online retailers is.

Price comparison for online retailers is the process of monitoring and comparing competitor product prices (and availability) on their websites. 

Here are the core benefits of price comparison:

• Competitive benchmarking 
• Compare assortment overlap 
• Reveal competitors’ strategies 
• Troubleshoot your promotions 
• Iterate on and improve your pricing strategy 

Competitive benchmarking

By competitive benchmarking we primarily mean knowing where you stand among your competitors in terms of overall pricing levels, frequency of changes, and quickness of reaction. 

Knowing this will make it easier for you to (re)evaluate your core value proposition. By doing so, you will also get to understand your customers’ motivations better. 

You will know how exactly to market to them and be able to acquire more customers more efficiently. 

Compare assortment overlap

When comparing prices online, you will also notice that some of your competitors don’t have in stock certain items you are selling and vice versa. 

Having the exact (ideally real-time) list of overlapping items in your and your competitors inventory can come in handy in various situations.

Here are some of the common situations you may encounter when comparing product assortments:

• Find products only you have in stock.
• Find products you don’t have in stock.
• Find products only some of your competitors have.
• Find products that quickly go out of stock.

In reality the situations you encounter will likely be more nuanced. However, it’s important to know where you stand in terms of stock, so that you can optimize your prices to their fullest potential.

Reveal competitors’ strategies

When online retailers perform price comparison regularly, they may notice some trends in their competitors’ pricing approach. 
Here are some questions a regularly performed price comparison may answer retailers:

• When do your competitors start with promotions and when do they end them?
• Who initiates price drop chain reactions and who follows?
• How do your competitors approach pricing for different product categories?
• What is the average price range for each product category across competitor websites?

Knowing answers to these questions will help you anticipate your competitors’ moves better. Also, it may give you inspiration to try something new with your own pricing strategies. 

On top of that, knowing your competitors’ pricing strategies can help you refine your own customer retention strategy. In essence, this is done by knowing your competitors’ offers and tailoring yours based on that info so that you exceed your customers’ expectations.

Troubleshoot your promotions

Price comparison in the world of online retail helps with promotion evaluation, as well.

The usual way online retailers evaluate their promotional offers is by looking at the sales volume numbers, conversion rates, average order values (AOV), return on investment, and potentially customer feedback.

In the case of things not going the way online retailers want them to, price comparison can be useful.

Comparing prices lets you know if your prices were not aligned with the general market trends. 

This means two things primarily: you were either too expensive, or believe it or not, too cheap. 

Sometimes, low prices, even during a promotional period, can be a bad sign for the customer. As opposed to premium pricing, low prices signal issues with the product and an overall lower quality level.

Another thing could be the timing. Frequent price comparisons lets online retailers know if they have started their promotional prices too early or too late compared to their competitors.

Iterate on and improve your pricing strategy

Iteration and improvements are the drivers behind successful pricing strategies. 

Price comparison helps online retailers by providing more data that in turn helps notice competitors’ patterns, utilize more price testing methods, deduct brand positioning more precisely, and helps gauge customer behavior. 

These are all crucial factors online retailers need to take into account when coming up with new pricing strategies. 

Automating price comparison for online retailers

The price comparison process described above seems simple. You visit your competitors’ website, find equivalent products, write their price down (in an Excel spreadsheet, for example), and repeat the process for every competitor and product in your assortment.

Depending on the scale and frequency you are doing this on, this process can become time consuming and expensive quickly. 

Furthermore, if you are present in various locations you will have to discover your competitors’ prices for each region they are present in. This is usually done by using a VPN. Setting those up each and every time you want to check a price takes a long time. 

This is how automated price comparison tools help online retailers save time spent on manual price checks and comparison – such as Price2Spy. 

Besides monitoring prices at a much quicker rate, Price2Spy allows you to have real-time oversight over market changes. It also automatically highlights all the outliers and even helps you automate your repricing process. 

Automated vs manual price comparison

To conclude – price comparison in itself is a process that brings invaluable competitor pricing data to online retailers. 

It helps orient the brand among the competitors and either differentiate your pricing strategy or follow the steps of others.

The bottom-line benefit of price comparison for online retailers is the ability to make data-driven pricing decisions.

When it comes to whether someone should automate it, or do it manually, depends on how many products and competitors they are dealing with. Also, it depends on the desired frequency. 

Our advice is that when comparing prices of more than 500 products and/or at more than 5 competitor websites, you should opt for an automated tool, with the assumption that you are comparing prices once per day.