Price Monitoring: A Guide For eCommerce Business

One thing is constant in eCommerce – fierce competition. Even the seemingly unique businesses will sooner or later face new competitors. In those situations, the price might be the only thing differentiating one business from another.

Winning customers based solely on price may not a nice situation to be in. However, it can be remedied and you can drastically increase your chances to come out on top.

When it comes to customers, price is one of the most influential purchasing factors.

Nowadays, an option that fits the customers’ budget is usually only a few clicks away.

So, how to outsmart the competition and define the right price? A part of an answer to this question lies in price monitoring. 

Many eCommerce businesses are already using price monitoring excessively. But, there are also those to whom this term is still foreign. 

Let’s explain what you’re missing out on if price monitoring is still not a part of your business strategy. 

How to get started with price monitoring

Companies that have had the opportunity to try price monitoring have witnessed the huge contribution of this process. In fact, it turned out to be so important that many companies consider it the secret ingredient of their success!

Trying to keep track of all price changes manually can be a Sisyphean task. This is where an automated solution for price monitoring comes in. Tracking prices automatically will save you resources and ensure that you can keep up with competitors’ price changes. That way your market position won’t be endangered. 

Great news! But, you must be wondering where to start.

To get started with the price monitoring process, you need to define your business objectives and your main competitors.

Unfortunately, you can not just track each and every competitor out there. You might think that it’s useful, but in fact, it’s not. Not all competitors are equally important to you, or maybe you are not even targeting the same market. Therefore, your resources would be put to better use if you focus on the main competitors only.

Main competitors are the ones who are most likely to pull the customers away from you. With that in mind, proceed with a detailed competitor investigation, so that you don’t become overwhelmed with unnecessary data. 

Besides investigating the competitors, you can also track products. However, the same rule applies here as well. Define which products are the most important – those might be the price-sensitive ones or your best-selling ones. Also, identifying different product variations or capturing more product details can be your focus points as well.

The right price monitoring tool will then help you by performing the product matching.

Once these steps of market research are covered, you can proceed with choosing the right price monitoring tool for your business needs. 

Preparation is the key to success – no tool, regardless of how good it is, can help you if you don’t know what are you looking for in the first place. 

Understand your business needs

First things first. Check out if this type of SaaS is of any use to your business by selecting purposes from the following list that would provide a solution to your business needs:

• Competitive analysis – price monitoring software tracks competitors’ prices and provides data for you to optimize pricing strategies and achieve the desired market positioning.
• Market research – powerful tools can accurately gather data on market trends, price fluctuations, and consumer behavior and provide insightful reports and dashboards for your analysis.
• Dynamic pricing – many price monitoring tools offer the dynamic pricing feature to optimize prices based on market conditions and competitor pricing in real time.
• Promotional effectiveness – if the tool offers historical data reports you can evaluate the impact of promotional campaigns by tracking price changes over time.

Now, you must set specific objectives. We already mentioned competitor identification and product selection but what about the geographical scope and monitoring frequency? It’s important to decide how often you need to collect pricing data depending on your needs before starting tool research as not every tool provides high-frequency opportunities if you need it. Also, make sure to search for a tool that can monitor prices in specific countries or globally if that is your business market.

Prioritizing the competitors

What if your targeted market is overcrowded with the competition or you are targeting a few different markets? You might think that there are too many competitors and you would be right. So, what should be your approach? In the sea of competitors, how to detect the most important ones?

We already mentioned that competitors who are offering similar products as you are the ones who can pull the customers away from your ecommerce website. If you combine this factor with website traffic and revenue, you’ll have your answer. 

Now that you know who are you tracking, you need to know the product URLs on each competitor’s website respectively. Product URLs are not only needed for price monitoring but for stock availability as well. That is another bonus of price monitoring – you’ll know when a competitor runs out of stock so you can make changes to your pricing strategy.

With an automated solution, the given results will be more accurate and real-time. 

Price monitoring tool – what to look for?

Once all the previous steps are fulfilled, everything is ready for full automation. With an automated price monitoring solution days of daunting work are over. Price monitoring tools are based on complex price scraping technologies. The more versatile they are, the better.

These tools take over the price monitoring process and automate it. This saves a significant amount of time and effort spent. Furthermore, price monitoring tools drastically reduce the chance of human error. This means, your employees or colleagues can carry on with other tasks which might be neglected.

How will you benefit from using a price monitoring tool?

• Update your prices – you’ll know when is the right time to increase or decrease the prices without endangering your market position
• Reports – Price2Spy will ensure to provide you with all the necessary reports. You’ll be able to see all the market fluctuation that concerns you. Which competitors are changing the prices and when? Have they run out of stock? Are they running any promotions? Is someone violating the MAP? With Price2Spy’s help, the answers to all these questions will be in your hands.
• Ensure that you always have enough stock compared to your competitors
• Plan and align your pricing strategy with competitors’ actions

How accurate is price monitoring?

This is maybe the most important question that you might ask when searching for the right price monitoring tool. With prices changing so quickly, you’ll admit that there’s not much point in checking the prices monthly. Therefore, frequency is one of the most important features in a price monitoring tool. 

For instance, Price2Spy offers you up to 8 price checks per day! Of course, not all our clients need to check prices that frequently, but for those who do, this is a game-changer.  

Try Price2Spy for free

Price monitoring has become a complete necessity for every eCommerce business. If you’re just starting your business, or are already an eCommerce professional, investing in a price monitoring tool is always a smart move. It will provide you with a great headstart and a solid ground on which you can build your business. 

We know that you’re not so willing to easily invest your money into something new. Therefore, Price2Spy allows a 30-day free trial period! You’ll have 30 days to check out all our features and see by yourself why we are the first choice of more than 600 clients worldwide!