Online retailers

Online retailers

Fighting the ever-growing retail competition

Price2Spy helps you keep your competition behind while saving hours and hours of manual work!

Dynamic pricing for dynamic retail market:with so many different players on the market, and new ones popping out almost on a monthlybasis, it’s getting harder and harder to keep up.

 

Price2Spy will help you live with that pressure. Being a competitor price tracking / dynamic pricing software, Price2Spy will help you in the following way:

  • It will help you identify who your main competitors are, see the differences in assortment and market positioning;
  • It will automate the competitor price monitoring process for you, help you gather and store the pricing data and thus enable you to make well-informed pricing decisions.
  • It can help you monitor prices from location-sensitive stores;
  • Alert you when competitors change their product prices, or when they run out of stock;
  • Pricing intelligence – understand pricing strategies of your competitors – who wants to have the lowest price (no matter the cost), who’s using more subtle methods;
  • Suggest products with potential gains in turnover or profit; no overpricing, no underpricing;
  • Suggest potential gains coming from products missing in assortment
  • Dynamic pricing / Repricing  – automating price changes will become simple enough
  • Analyze and understand which site (and exactly when!) started the price drop chain-reaction;
  • Understand the pattern behind your competitors price changes (are they doing it automatically, or manually? Do they do it every day, or once a week?)
  • Identify competitors who have better deals with specific brands / manufacturers, so you renegotiate your own deals with same brands
  • Indicate MAP pricing violations, in a way that is easy to document and share with brands / manufacturers

Online retailers

The road to efficient pricing control

Price2Spy is not just about raw pricing data we collect for you. It’s much more than that – we aim to be an integral part of your organization when it comes to making important pricing decisions.

In order to do so, we need to carefully consider the following aspects:

  • Which sites to monitor?
    • Some of our clients go for the widest possible range (trying to monitor every single competitor on the market)
    • Others focus just on a couple of key competitors – known to be the market leaders
    • Hybrid scenarios are possible as well – broad monitoring for certain brands / staying focused on key competitors for others
    • Do we monitor just sites from a certain market / country, or do we go international?
    • Do we monitor individual competitor sites, or do we go for Marketplaces (Amazon / Ebay etc)? And how about monitoring prices on price-comparison sites (like GoogleShopping or Idealo.de)?
  • How many products to monitor?
    • Do we go for the whole product range? Yes, this is the ultimate solution, but potentially means big cost
    • Or, shall we stay focused on key products for each category / brand? The danger is – how will we know if new key products pop up?
  • Product matching – how will you match your products against your competitors?
    • Since it comes as a part of your account setup, this is a very important decision, which heavily depends on the quality of your data and your industry
    • In essence, the following methods can be considered
      • Automated (we call this Automatch)
        • applicable if your products have unique identifiers, which can be searched on competitor sites
        • cost effective in cases where many products (1000 and more) need to be monitored on not that many sites
      • Manual – always applicable
        • can be done by your team, or by us (as an additional one-off service)
        • advisable for a smaller number of products (less than 1000) to be monitored on a multitude of sites
      • Hybrid – a combination of Automated and Manual methods, applicable in practically any vertical
  • How often to perform price checks
    • In most cases once per day is good enough
    • In industries where price changes do not happen that often, once per week is also an option
    • However, there are extremely competitive industries with dynamic pricing in place, where several price checks per day are a must (Price2Spy can perform up to 8 price checks per day)
  • Splitting the load
    • In large organizations, different people / departments are in charge of different sets of products.
    • Therefore, we need to carefully analyze if the whole team will receive all pricing alerts and reports, or if we’re going to split the load
    • Splitting can be done per product category, brand, supplier, or country
  • Multi-currency
    • In certain cases our clients want to see the original prices, in currencies shown on individual sites
    • However, for comparison purposes it often makes sense to apply the exchange rate and show all prices in the same currency
    • Price2Spy supports both methods, it’s up to you to choose what suits you best
  • Detecting MAP (Minimal Advertising Price) violations
    • Price2Spy helps you detect and document any violation cases
    • Make sure your supplier knows who’s playing fair, and who’s not
  • Dynamic pricing / Repricing – closing the circle
    • Price2Spy will enable you to set up simple rules for identifying products
      • whose price can safely go down, in order to be more competitive (clever drop)
      • whose price is being far too cheap (clever raise)
      • If you wish to implement a repricing algorithm according to your own custom logic, please send us your detailed requirements, and we’ll offer you a custom repricing solution
    • Indirect and Direct repricing methods will help you centralize your pricing decisions, and drive them all from your Price2Spy account
    • With the above rule set in place, you can decide to automate repricing actions, thus turning Price2Spy into your dynamic pricing engine
  • Enterprise package – if you’d like the Price2Spy team to manage the full scope of pricing activities (from product matching to regular account maintenance operations), covering very custom requirements you may have – we strongly recommend going for the Price2Spy Enterprise package

Price2Spy in your day-to-day pricing operations

With so many available features, it can get hard to make the most of it. On the other hand, Price2Spy is built in a modular way, so users can define their own best way to use it.

Here are some main suggestions, based on experience of more than 600 clients:

  • Price tracking – use price change alert emails for quick insights. Make sure you react fast! However, if you’re dealing with 10 000s of SKUs this may get inefficient;
  • Define automated Price Matrix report, to be delivered in your mailbox at the time of your choice. Consider having full Price Matrix, or just the products with recent price changes;
  • Identify most important brands / categories / competitor sites. Based on this define various widgets (pricing dynamics, stock dynamics, price below mine, products violating MAP) to be placed on Pricing Dashboard. Saves a lot of time when analyzing recent price changes!
  • Define your own pricing strategy, so Price2Spy can advise potential turnover / profit gains;
  • Save time you spend on repricing – integrate Price2Spy with your own store, so, Price2Spy can indirectly or directly reprice your products
  • Dynamic repricing – automate repricing changes, according to configurable set of rules
  • Analyze historical price charts for key products in order to identify which competitor was the first to lower (or raise) the price;
  • Use Price Change Dynamics chart to identify key moments (for example, when your competitor got a better deal from the manufacturer, resulting in many products getting price cuts). Use this to re-negotiate pricing with your suppliers;
  • Use Price Matrix (segmented per brand or category) to quickly identify competitor positioned on lower / upper end of the market;
  • For larger stores, dealing with 1000s of SKUs or more – make use of Price2Spy API in order to integrate pricing data directly in your own software. Some of our clients have even gone one step further: based on purchase price / desired profit margin, and coupled with competitor pricing (data coming from Price2Spy) – they have setup automated price change rules.
  • Enterprise package – if you’d like Price2Spy team to manage full scope of pricing activities (from product matching, to regular account maintenance operations), covering very custom requirements you may have – we strongly recommend going for Price2Spy Enterprise package