Effective Competitor Price Monitoring Strategies & Approaches

The company’s pricing policy is one of the key factors affecting the success of any business. Analysis of the competitors’ price change dynamics is just important. It is one of the key marketing tasks, which allow you to successfully conduct business in the market and get the maximum number of customers.

Importance of Price Monitoring

According to the latest research, pricing is an important factor for 81% of US shoppers when choosing a store and making a purchase decision. At the same time, 85% of people who buy mobile devices compare the prices of various sellers. Nowadays, there are online services that help to monitor the performance of competitors by entering information about a product group. As a result, you receive a report reflecting price dynamics of competing companies. Thanks to this information, you can offer the most competitive price in the market and win customers with ease.

What Can Price Monitoring Do for You?

Competitor price monitoring is one of the key business tasks. This allows the online store and offline retailers to generate the most compelling customer deals and remain competitive. In addition, price monitoring allows the business to maintain a flexible and dynamic pricing policy that reacts to the slightest changes in trends and customer needs in the market.

Here are some of the situations when it is important to perform price monitoring:

  • Business planning – At this stage, it is necessary to study the prices of your competitors in order to form the cost of your own product, as well as to determine its competitive advantages. Besides that, it is worthwhile to develop a concept and strategy for product promotion and predict customer demand;
  • Marketing research – Based on the information received, a SWOT analysis is carried out, which identifies the strengths and weaknesses of your business. It is also a good way to find the most effective levers to influence the situation. Further, a long-term plan to stay ahead of competitors is developed, and a general strategy for further development is determined;
  • Conducting planned marketing activities – You need to launch promotions and campaigns in a timely manner. The right timing for discounts and sales can significantly increase a company’s revenues. And this is where competitive price monitoring and market analysis come to the rescue.

Marketers advise monitoring prices and analyzing competitors’ performance at least once a quarter. This should become part of a well-functioning system for the successful management of your business.

Competitor Price Monitoring with Specialized Software

There are not so many ways to analyze prices of your competitors. You can either use specialized software or do manual data collection. If you do not have a unique product or service, it is rather difficult to collect all the information manually. Therefore, it is better to use specialized services and parsers for monitoring prices for the target items. But if you have a highly specialized service or a unique product, then manual data processing may suit you well.

There are quite a lot of price monitoring software solutions that allow you to track the prices of both your competitors and the market average. These programs will allow you to always be aware of the average market prices for goods and flexibly rebuild your policy. But you should be able to find a dedicated program that meets your needs.

How to Choose Price Monitoring Software?

It can be quite difficult to choose a service from a multitude of available offers. However, even if you do not know anything about price monitoring realities, it is not a problem at all. There are a couple of basic tips for choosing a service that will work well for you, so you will know what exactly to pay attention to make the right decision:

  • Functionality – Most of the services offer a free test period. So feel free to register an account and go to your personal account to explore the functionality of the service. You will not spend too much time on this but will be able distinguish a service that is convenient for you;
  • Features – After evaluating the service functionality, think about what else you may need in your work. Different tariffs may have different capabilities, but the price can also vary significantly. Here, you have to make a choice in favor of a service packed with the most important features for you;
  • Integration possibilities – You can use some services not only for price monitoring but also for integrating new prices you need into the product catalog of your online store. You just have to choose a solution that has such a function;
  • Optimization – If you want to optimize not only your market prices but also the entire accounting and analytics system at once, then you should choose services that immediately contain modules for integration into My Warehouse, Google BigQuery, etc.

Manual Competitor Price Monitoring

If you have a few competitors for monitoring, for example, 2-3 sites or 1-2 positions on marketplaces, manual monitoring will suit you well. And if you have a unique product or a highly specialized service, manual data processing will be extremely beneficial for you since it allows for setting a clear idea, goals, prices, and positioning. What is more, you will get 100% accurate information with manual competitor price monitoring.

Final Say!

For a successful operation of any business, it is necessary to constantly monitor the market situation, flexibly adapting to the changes in competitors’ prices. Using online parsers allows you to save the time required to regularly monitor prices, promotions, and product availability on competitors’ websites. With their help, you can set up an automatic change in the cost of goods on your site, taking into account the selected pricing strategy. Thus, you can survive in a highly competitive niche and get new customers regularly.