Solutions for Distributors: How to keep up in current market conditions
Pricing is one of the most important key factors to sales and income success – no doubt. The difficulties, however, lie in current market conditions. Luckily, the technological era provides us with hundreds of thousands of articles, solutions or services in any part of the world, any time. Especially, retailers and brands/manufacturers are quite lucky to find solutions for their business challenges. What about another keystone of the market – distributors? Most of the articles, solutions and services focus on retailers’ and manufacturers’ problems. However, distributors also suffer in the current market conditions and pricing process as much as retailers and manufacturers do.
Today, we are going to pin-point the distributor’s place in the cross-fire and talk about the important factors of pricing from their perspective.
Delicate market positioning usually means that distributors are expected to protect market value of the brands they are representing, while at the same time, they should stimulate retail sites to increase their turnover. It seems hard to manage everything without failing, isn’t it?
How to get through this successfully?
Under these circumstances, it is impossible to remain with the manual ways for sure. The only solution is to start price fixing. This brings us to a thin line, because in most countries price fixing is against the law. However, we’re not talking about raw price fixing here: instead – we’re talking of gathering pricing data, its profound analysis and as a result – establishing appropriate business relationships with various market players, based on how fair they play the market game. It brings us to the importance of using a price monitoring tool.
Based on our experience, below we listed price monitoring practices most preferred by distributors:
- Identifying your main online retailers, see their differences in assortment and market positioning,
- Be aware of when your retailers run out of stock, which means that maybe you can promote these products more actively if you still sell them,
- Be informed when your retailers change your product price – understand their pricing strategies,
- Analyze and understand which retailer (and exactly when!) started a pricing chain-reaction,
- Compare your prices to prices of similar models offered by competitor brands,
- Indicate Targeted price / MAP / MSRP pricing violations, which will be easy to spot and document
- Please note that if you already use a tool which suits your needs, always make sure that you are able to obtain necessary data from it. If not it is time to start using a different one!
Great results will come for those who want to start using a pricing software. The point is you really need to be careful with the choice of a tool. The most important thing is the tool’s reliability. In order to make proper business decisions, you must make sure that you are able to obtain right pricing data. (Distributors, here you can find detailed information on our price monitoring tool Price2Spy, we take great pride in our reliability and quality of the service we offer: https://www.price2spy.com/en/solutions/distributors.html )
Hopefully, this article will help you to stand out in the rat race. Still, do not forget that being successful doesn’t come on its own, beside investing into good price monitoring service you need to invest your time and effort in order to be successful.
