Tag: Pricing

Step Up Your Game, Start Tracking Your Global Competition Using Incompetitor

by Intelligence Node

Tracking competition can be a fool’s errand if not done properly. By properly, we mean using modern technology to cover all the aspects that define your competitor’s product and their pricing methods. In that regard, companies usually target competition that is nearest to them in terms of local positioning. Direct competition, if you will. However, ever since the triple W entered the mainstream, the scope has been slowly shifting to all corners of the globe.

That means conducting global market research has become crucial to good business practice. By tracking your competitors worldwide, you are getting a complete picture of the current market trends and creating more opportunities for your business. Still, not every automated competitor tracking tool is capable of such feat. Luckily for you, our Incompetitor is and we’ll scribe a few lines in this post to present you how, as well as what you gain out of it. Enjoy, we know you will

A quick overview of how Incompetitor works

First, a few words about the general principle behind Incompetitor. It covers over one billion products (numerically speaking, that translates to 1,000,000,000) that come from over 130,000 brands across 800,000 e-commerce websites. Our attributes similarity feature is plugged into our comprehensive database of attributes and a technology overlay that deliver near and exact match results. Based on this proprietary data clustering and normalization method, all the products we track are then mapped and split into 1100+ retail categories.

incompetitor subcategories

Top-ranked subcategories per Incompetitor

Thanks to this robust categorization, we provide detailed market benchmarking with 95%+ accuracy levels. Combined together with what we just mentioned, all of this produces more than one petabyte (PB) of data (equivalent to quadrillion that has 15 zeros) a month. That means one million gigabytes (GB) of data, if that’s easier to count, every 30 days. That’s sorting more that 30,000 GB of text and image data every day. A massive volume of information, indeed, but don’t worry – because we are a Big Data lab focusing on retail, this is a walk in the park for us as we know exactly what to do with it and turn it into something meaningful.

Those would be the main presentation points for Incompetitor. For a more detailed insight into the inner schemes of our competitor tracking tool, check out this in-depth post about data tracking technology behind it.

Now, on the focal point of this post – the global side of competitor tracking.

Worldwide coverage

The key word here is worldwide. Ever since the Internet broke through, businesses quickly realized the increasing value of the online aspect and soon added it to their portfolio to expand their operations. However, some didn’t realize it quickly enough and to this day, still struggle to understand the intrigues of online business.

Nowadays, your business has rivals in every part of the world, vying for the same pool of customers. That also means different sensibilities with the most important one – language. Covering a certain number of products is one thing, but understanding everything about it is a whole different story. In that regard, Intelligence Node (IN) can proudly say that we are the world’s first retail analytics platform that has a built-in multi-lingual feature. The purpose of this feature (or fonctionnalité, as said in France) is one of the utmost importance – it provides our customers with a single view of their global presence and overall market intelligence. What does this multilingualism means? It means that Incompetitor, which supports 29 languages, enables online businesses to benchmark competitors across markets irrespective of the catalog display language.

It that sounds a bit too vague for your taste, look at it this way. Out of the billion products that we track, there’s bound to be some of them in a different language, right? Sure, the price is a uniform code and the most prominent feature, for the most part, but that’s not all – there are other marketing mix elements to consider that constitute the product as a whole. That is why our SaaS (software as a service) offering has several levels of data curating. This makes sure that all data is normalized across different online stores (including language translation, category, and attributes standardization). Once the software normalizes the data, it utilizes IN’s patented similarity server technology to match the products.

Ease of use

Incompetitor converts all of the data back into English for a uniform dashboard. The end result is a neatly organized treasure trove of actionable insights for you to leverage. Our sophisticated machine learning algorithms are configured in a way to recognize patterns not only in the text-based information (the usual stuff – product name, description, availability, etc) but in images as well, where we apply deep learning to identify, extract and match. What you get is a truly global coverage of all your competitors, both in volume and in understanding.

trending products

An example of trending products in Indian currency

The plug-n-play approach of our competition tracking tool allows each user to slice and dice data in the way they see fit. It’s easy to set up and tailor it to your requirements. We also offer Open API frameworks and data delivery into native systems as available options for consuming the data. Either which way you want insights, you get them.

Conclusion

When it comes to the tracking of global proportions, we can safely say that Incompetitor passes with flying colors. Having real-time market intelligence is one of the most important aspects of doing business online. Our tool is an excellent way to tap new geographical markets and effortlessly map the competition while reducing the spending of your money, time and resources to a minimum. When you automate competitor benchmarking on such a scale, you can focus on your global sales and marketing efforts and enjoy all the benefits of competitive price intelligence on a worldwide level.

 

How Incompetitor Can Save You Time Spent On Manually Tracking Competitor Products

by Intelligence Node

Introduction

In the world of ecommerce, there is so much going on that it’s hard to keep track of everything. You should be aware of what your competition offers while catering to the increasingly demanding customers. Often guided by pricing as their primary decision-making criteria, your customers can perform comparisons between your online store and others in an instant. Hence, being aware of your competition’s products and when to adjust your pricing is a vital process for e-commerce business.

In that regard, you have two options:

  1. monitor competitors’ prices manually
  2. monitor through automated competitor tracking software.

If your business is one of the (still) many that opt for manual tracking of its competition, then this post is for you, as well as those that still have doubts about the exploits of modern technology in ecommerce. We’ll show you ways how Intelligence Node’s very own tool can benefit your business in a plethora of ways. Behold the Incompetitor, a majestic wonder of technology, the crown jewel in the tiara of ecommerce, one to rule them all.

incompetitor

Behold – the Incompetitor

Well, not really, we’re exaggerating a bit but it’s a mighty fine tool that is a real lifesaver when it comes to saving time. Here is how.

  1. It can track more than a billion products

The importance of time in ecommerce cannot be underlined enough. This is especially evident when you have to keep an eye one a few competitors and their offerings. Imagine you need to track different competitors’ prices on 100 of your products. Imagine doing that manually. Do you know how many work hours is that? We know – way too much. There are not enough cells in Excel to cover that. Well, there are but you get the point. That method of work is not sustainable nor deemed fit for an aspiring ecommerce store.

On the other hand, Incompetitor uses a proprietary Visibility Algorithm (module) that actually tracks product movements. With high levels of automation, you are able to track more than 1 billion products on the web divided into 1100+ retail categories, thanks to our proprietary data clustering and normalization approach. In essence, what you are doing is letting the software crawl the market for you and give you the most accurate data more than once every day. You can’t really beat tracking millions of products through automated solutions, can you?

  1. Real-time insights

Having real-time knowledge of constant price changes of your competitors is a real blessing today. The market changes in a blink of an eye, practically forcing you to adapt dynamic pricing strategy to adapt to fluctuating conditions. Being updated with any change is critical to stay afloat in the growing ecommerce sea. By using an automated tracking solution like Incompetitor, you are able to see real-time market developments and take specific decisions to benefit from them.

  1. It minimizes data accuracy check-ups

It’s one of life’s unwritten rules – the more you work, the more your chances of making a mistake grow. The principle is applicable to almost every work process ever, especially when it involves large quantities of price data. We love Excel, we really do, but that type of workflow is bound to create an error here and there that can make a significant – negative – impact on your decisions. Checking for errors takes time, particularly when you look at the big picture. Practically as a rule of thumb, track anything manually and you effectively increase the risk of making mistakes. So, why would you choose to do so in the first place?

Not that automated solutions are error-free, but compared to manual labor, they’re light years away. Case in point – opting for a proven competitor price tracking tool like Incompetitor guarantees you 95%+ accuracy levels. Not bad, eh?

  1. It helps with price optimization

Incompetitor can assist in the price optimization process by stripping down the competition to the denominators you choose. A thorough data analysis collects and reveals the competitor price tags so you can strategize how to improve your pricing strategy. Here at Intelligence Node, we like to say – what’s the point in offering discounts when all your competitors have run out of stock? Here’s a more visual look into how Incompetitor rakes up the assists in the price optimization department.

incompetitor rules

Incompetitor – creating custom rules for tracking

In the image above, you can see we have selected a category (Fashion), a store (Zalando), and a brand (Adidas). What Incompetitor does is show the actual price, as well as both minimal and maximal price of the product during its shelf life. On top of that, it shows the status of each product as underpriced, meaning you can optimize your prices to act on that. This is what the Smart Price column is for as it offers an estimation of the optimal price for the product.

Incompetitor works best with our other offering – Inoptimizer, an equally powerful tool that identifies store inefficiencies and thus optimizes prices with dynamic pricing rules through automated price adjustments, whilst also providing forecasts and optimization scenarios for future consideration. On its own, Incompetitor is a handy tool for price optimization assistance, which ultimately helps save time in this fast-paced and changing business environment.

Conclusion

Checking manually all your competitors is a bad decision on so many levels. First and foremost, it can cost you a lot of time and money. While it is true that the majority of the competition tracking process depends on the size of your catalog, a smart pricing analyst knows it cannot keep up with the growing number of competitors, as well as all of the changes in the e-commerce ecosystem by using manual methods of tracking. It’s obsolete and inefficient in the long run, considerably sizing your scope of work to the barely acceptable levels, if so.

Staying competitive on the market means benefiting from an automated competitor price tracking solution like Incompetitor. It provides a far larger, virtually limitless scope of operations with real-time information and top-notch levels of accuracy. Even more, it allows your workforce to concentrate on other important aspects of your business while you sit back, relax and rightfully reap what you’ve sown. You’ve earned it by being smart.

 

All About Incompetitor’s Accurate Data Tracking Technology

by Intelligence Node

Introduction

Market research has asserted itself as one of the primary ways of functioning for online businesses. In the grand scope of online retailing, there is so much competition that makes it hard to count a fraction of them, let alone all. It takes a lot of dedication and thoughtful planning to acquire the competitive advantage in a crowded market. Almost by default, market research is also one of the most difficult aspects of running a modern business as there is so much to cover. At least, that the general perception.

Just like wearing sunglasses at night, that perception is plain wrong mainly due to the rapid advancements in technology. Today, we have automated tools that cover a great deal of business spectrum, most notably the competition. These tools make a business owner’s life much easier as they do much of the work and simplify the whole process by streamlining it. One such tool is Intelligence Node’s Incompetitor, a retail analytics software suite that lets you monitor the metrics that matter most to you. In this post, we’ll shed some light (no need for sunglasses yet) on how the tool actually works to give you a better insight into just how much helpful Incompetitor really is.

The process

The story goes like this: we track product movements through our own proprietary Visibility Algorithm. The fancy computer program crawls using competition SKU codes (unique URLs with product code) as one of the many attributes provided. These can be price, product description, color, material, style, pattern and everything the program can use to create matches. Then, based on our proprietary Exact & Similar Match Algorithm (we have a bunch of cool algorithms), we assign scores and define the products as either Exact match or a Similar match. That way, you can compare your products and monitor what products are performing well on competitor websites.

One key note to address here is that, unlike some tracking programs and services, we base our data on multiple points. What this means is that we are able to offer more refined, in-depth analysis and insights by showing actual competitor SKUs apart from selling trends, product launches and assortment gaps which are common stance when it comes to a competitor benchmarking product.

incompetitor

An example of top trending Fashion subcategories in Incompetitor

The volume

There are more than 1 billion products on the web in play here so you’ll understand when we say we have one of the largest global coverage (if not the largest, but we’ll give others the benefit of the doubt) you’ll find. Subsequently, all the products we track come from more than 130,000 brands and are mapped and divided into 1100+ retail categories, all based on our proprietary data clustering and normalization approach. This allows you to survey as much of your competitors as you like without worrying on whether you’ll miss something. There is enough Incompetitor for everyone to go around.

The accuracy

To have any use of such a wide scope of tracking, the data needs to be highly accurate to pay off in the end. Our robust categorization algorithm provides unmatched market benchmarking view with 95%+ accuracy levels. That’s it, no need to explain further. It’s not 100% perfect, but it’s really, really close.

The outcome

Now that we have explained the inner machinations behind our little wonder of technology, all that is left is to highlight the practical points of Incompetitor. Naturally, with an all-encompassing solution that covers millions of products automatically, there’s bound to be lots of benefits too.

incompetitor example

All of the data is real-time which means you can react instantly. For instance, let’s say you are tracking Adidas’ Trefoil t-shirt, featuring the company’s iconic logo. Other tracking parameters or attributes would be color, gender, sleeve length (short, obviously), type of fabric and neck, pattern – you get the point. As you can see in the screenshot above, this particular t-shirt is out of stock. Incompetitor then sends you a real-time alert so you can capitalize on the opportunity and optimize visibility of your exact or similar products. The result – you effectively identified a brand-level gap in competition’s catalog, just like that.

 

The same goes for whenever the competition launches a new item or a whole product line. You get a real-time notification on your dashboard, complete with product description and link to the product. In a nutshell, Incompetitor identifies competitor products that are an exact match to yours or as close as they can get. Through an advanced search of product attributes, you will be able to check real-time prices and discounts for products that are similar to yours. This allows you to discover each and every hottest selling item on your competitor’s online marketplace.

 

You will also receive a detailed overview of the historic price fluctuations to further study the product’s history and thus help you put together a comprehensive competitive analysis by understanding how competitors perform. In turn, this will yield actionable insights that will help you formulate pricing strategies so you can adequately respond to market conditions and grow your brand’s presence. It’s a scenario where everybody wins. Well, everybody except your competitors but that’s the point, right?

Conclusion

To sum things up – Incompetitor, as the name suggests, is a competitor tracking tool that helps online businesses spot opportunities and market trends to keep them one step ahead. It delivers fast and timely competitor insights concerning pricing, promotion, and catalog movement. Virtual real-time product and price tracking means you can react swiftly to rising opportunities quicker than anyone else.

With one of the world’s largest databanks containing more than a billion of products at its disposal, Incompetitor simplifies retail data analytics thanks to data visualization options that add a whole new level of interactiveness. That way, users are able to strip the competitor’s offerings down to the whatever denominators they want, be the usual ones like the price range or the product specifics like the color (or a combination of them), materials and so on. What you end up with are invaluable insights into your competition that can help you keep on top, where you belong.

 

Manually Tracking Competitor Pricing Vs Automated Solutions

by Intelligence Node

Obviously, you should track your competition’s pricing. There is no question about that. With all the competition that’s constantly growing, consumers have their veritable pick of the litter. In essence, they are spoilt for choice and can easily find the best deals on the required products in just a few taps or clicks. So, in order to keep up with the savvy customers and competitors, businesses turns to price tracking. It allows them to be increasingly competitive and focal in their efforts while achieving greater profitability through the use of data.

In principle, there are two ways price tracking is done:

  • Manual tracking
  • Automated tracking

In a true gladiatorial nature, this post will pit the methods against each other and evaluate what’s the best option for today’s retailers. Minus Russell Crowe, of course.

Round 1 – manual tracking

As every pricing manager who ever dabbled in manual price tracking knows, it is essential to make an analytics based on the huge data acquired. Usually, there is a team involved that covers various aspects of competitor’s pricing by using Excel spreadsheets to keep all of the information in one place. The information itself is detailed as it can be and, as there’s a lot to go through by doing it manually, it takes time.

Ultimately, the enormous usage of both time and resources severely limits the scope and effectiveness of manual price tracking. Here is an example of how that works (or not, depending on your perspective).

Let’s say you have 100 products in your online store. It’s a nice, round number (why would we ever want to complicate this?) and in reality, it’s really not a big amount of products, but bear with us. Previously, you have identified five key competitors (also not a big amount) whose prices you wish to track. Now consider this – competitors change their prices all the time so if you choose to check them on a daily basis, that’s tracking a minimum of 500 references a day. Mind you, this is without taking into account more than one price per product, something which is a common feature depending on the product’s attributes. It’s a lot of time to be spending on only a select few of your competitors, not the mention the workforce needed to pull it off.

Rest assured – manual tracking works, but only up to a certain degree, most notably for very small businesses who don’t have a lot of offerings. Unfortunately, in today’s rapidly evolving ecommerce market and advanced technology, it’s far from being enough. Even if the amount of products offered in your catalog is tiny, the competition isn’t and that is your primary concern. Hey, it’s not like the competition doesn’t already know things about you, right?

Round 2 – automated tracking

Posing as a challenger in this bout, automated tracking solutions have a lot going on for them. Whereas manual efforts to gather competitive intelligence prove to be non-scalable and ineffective after a certain point, automated solutions don’t have that problem. They effectively reduce the amount of time your team has to spend manually tracking the prices of your competition. In turn, they have more time to focus on other important aspects of the business.

So, automated price tracking solutions are real time-savers. What else?

Every day, online businesses are operating in a growingly competitive environment that demands a proactive response to market fluctuations. It is impossible to deliver in such fashion without basing your decisions on readily-available real-time data. Your customers are checking prices on a daily basis and it’s easy for them to compare them. With the dynamic pricing on the rise, the ability to effectively and quickly react to shifts in the market presents a significant and highly sought for competitive advantage. Real-time data equals real-time pricing, which means your business will stay at the forefront. Tracking millions of products on the web is impossible through manual methods, but fairly easy with automated solutions like Incompetitor who help base your pricing strategies on a regular basis.

incompetitor software

Incompetitor retail analytics software

The accuracy of automated solutions is another advantage over the manual process as it allows for simple pricing updates. Things like price drops and promotions can easily be missed with manual tracking, which is not the case with automated price monitoring. This also minimizes the ever-present human error factor which has the power to significantly distort the accuracy of your data.

An automated price tracking solution allows a better overview of your market. It helps you perform an in-depth market research with no limit to the offerings you want to track. Additionally, it can also help you identify new competitors, along with the ones you are already keeping tabs on.

And finally, we dare say it – it’s much cheaper, especially for businesses who cover a wide spectrum of the competitor landscape by ramping up the manual labor in order to cover as much as they can.

Final round

Due to the nature of the business environment, online businesses today need every technological advantage they can get their hands on, in order to successfully track competitors’ pricing. On its own, technology is making it necessary and possible, even imperative to be more competitive by having real-time insights. This turns automated solutions as clear victors in this case. The return of investment by using an automated price tracking tool is fast, easy and, as evidenced, benefits you in many ways. While manual tracking gets the job done, for the most part, on a very small scale, it’s being overrun by the modern exploits of technology. Plain and simple, the scope of work is bigger, better and faster, as well as more accurate.

Conclusion

For an e-commerce store that is looking to keep a close eye on its competition’s pricing, there are many benefits to using automated pricing solutions. They provide real-time insights into how its competitors are doing business and allow for the making of the right decision in the right moment. Obtaining detailed and accurate data on the prices of competitors makes the most of your pricing policy and increases the profit margins, allowing you to stay competitive in the long run.

How To Provide Better Pricing Than Your Competition Without Jeopardizing Your Brand

by Intelligence Node

Regardless of the industry, a business operates in, even if it’s relatively new or small, a careful research will reveal two or more competitors. Their existence immediately changes the playing field. In a concentrated effort to gain that one step ahead, businesses adopt numerous competitive strategies to increase their competitive advantage. That’s all fine and dandy, but how exactly do you cope with your competition? The most usual suspect in the case of intense competition is the price war.

This post will focus on all of the points of that endeavor, like what causes it, how to avoid it and how to set better prices without hurting your brand in the long run. All in favor of your business growing, say aye.

What can you do?

From a strategic point of view, the best way to come out on top of a price war is to never start it in the first place. If that doesn’t make sense at first, allow us to explain.

If or when your competitors opt to cut down prices in order to expand their customer pool, don’t resort to the same measure. Instead, approach the situation with a different, opposite way by differentiating your product to attain customer’s value of it. Here’s why.

Customer segregation

Essentially, every market is divided into three segments or classes of customers:

  • upper class
  • middle class
  • lower class

Each class has different paying capabilities and perceptions. This is very important because battling through pricing with your competition is a race away from the finish line. Competing solely on pricing basis is an effective recipe for being at the very bottom of the competitive ladder. What you are doing is serving the lowest segment of the market by default when you lower your prices as a reaction to your competitor’s discounting move. We’ve talked before about the dangers of underpricing – it’s hard to pull off as there is very little room for profit margins.

The bottom line here is the more you lower your prices, the more appealing your offering becomes to the lower-class target market (the majority of the market) and less appealing to the middle and upper-class. If your ideal target market is the lower-class, that is perfectly fine and good luck to you, but allow us to ask you this – why settle for the overcrowded bottom of the market when there is plenty of room at the top?

Re-target your audience

In the eyes of the customers, the price is often an indication of quality and more often than not, the quality is perceived as lower when the price is lower. In case your costs don’t allow you to lower them in order to maintain satisfactory profitable levels with lower prices, then your best bet is to re-target your audience. This will position your goods to a wider appeal in a specific market segment.

This is when focus on comparative value comes into the picture. Creating perceived value can ease your customers into the higher price than your competition, and quite possibly convince them that your higher-priced offerings are worth it. Your business might choose to embrace a psychological approach in order to fulfill that notion.

Product differentiation

Let’s consider Dan Ariely’s example of the The Economist magazine’s subscription plans. Ariely, a behavioral economics expert and a highly successful author on the subject, notice that the magazine offered three subscription plans:

  • the web subscription – $59.00
  • the print subscription – $125.00
  • both – $125.00

Ariely conducted a study with 100 students. 16 chose the web option and 84 of them chose the combo package. Nobody chose the middle option. At this point, you might have concluded that, as web + print subscription package costs the same, the middle option is useless. Ariely removed it and presented the two remaining options to a different batch of students, 100 again (who doesn’t love round numbers?). The results showed that the least popular option (the web subscription) became the most popular, with 68% students choosing it.

The narrative of the story is that the middle option was far from useless as it helped make a choice. In relation to our situation, customers have a hard time comparing different competitive products, which makes them highly susceptible to other influences. If the options are similarly priced, it becomes much easier to choose on perceived value.

Another way to get an advantage over your competition is to opt for competitive pricing. By taking into consideration what your competitors are charging for their products, you can either raise or lower your own prices in accordance with theirs. Naturally, you need to know when to adjust your pricing and how often to do it. Or, you can choose the dynamic pricing where a price is never firmly set. Instead, it changes constantly to suit the ever-fluctuating market conditions. There are various possibilities for your business to provide better pricing than your competition. However, only an in-depth evaluation of your business goals and your competition can reveal what price best works for your product.

How to know when and what?

It’s easy to say “price your goods smart” but what does that actually mean? Of course everybody wants to have a smart pricing that best reflects the customer’s willingness to pay in current market conditions. Nevertheless, it sounds and looks way harder that it is. There is a whole bunch of competitors vying for the same market share you are. With so many different products on display, it can be tough, almost impossible to stay ahead.

With the fairly recent expansion of big data analytics, you can make more accurate and faster price adjustments through pricing intelligence software. Through gathering and analyzing data about a particular customer or a group of them, a business can predict what price tag the customer deems acceptable to pay and adjust it accordingly. These software tools like Incompetitor and Inoptimizer provide high levels of automation, saving you time and precious resources that can be better used elsewhere. In addition, because the market fluctuates all the time, you have the option to create customized pricing rules which adapt to certain market trends and shifts.

price intelligence software

An example of Intelligence Node’s price intelligence software

Conclusion

If you ever find yourself thinking what are you going to do about the competition, remember that there are always choices. Providing better pricing requires a dedicated effort to finding that ultimate pricing sweet spot. It’s a constant process as markets never stay put in one place, which is why you need to constantly keep an eye on both your prices and competition. That means researching and researching means tons of data. Luckily for you, there are analytical tools that amass that data and turn them into actionable insights which can help you track your competitor’s prices and help you optimize yours so you are always on the right path – growing your business.

Too Cheap, Too Expensive – It’s All About Beating The Competition To It

by Intelligence Node

As every business is unique, there are variances in pricing the products and services in every company. Not all of them incorporate strategies that aim to sell the highest possible amount (or all of it) of what they are selling, just so it could act as an indicator of company’s market performance or success. Rather, the usual approach is setting the pricing to sell the optimal amount of products and services you offer, all the while gaining maximum profit per each sale.
How you use your pricing strategy to determine the price of your goods depends on a number of factors. These include the ever-present competition, the price elasticity of what you are selling and, most importantly, the perception of both your existing and potential customers towards your products and services. This, in turn, affects your sales. It stands to reason that finding the right pricing strategy while retaining satisfactory sales volume might require some trial and error. In this post, we’ll explain how you can avoid some of the hit-and-miss situations and stay one step ahead of your competition.

Pricing smart

As every pricing analyst and expert knows, each product and service has an optimal price range based on what a customer will usually pay. As there are factors such as supply and demand that directly influence it, the pricing strategy will shift accordingly. In that regard, companies often employ two pricing strategies:

  • discount pricing policy or underpricing
  • premium pricing policy or overpricing

Impact of a discount pricing policy – underpricing your goods

While discounting may sound like a tempting idea, especially in times when the going gets tough, it’s important to remember that it can also hurt your business, most notably your cash flow. Decreasing the price of your product means you need to increase your sales volume in order to achieve the same profit. And, as most managers know, that can be quite tricky.

Underpricing is best suited as a short-term solution which can have a long-term impact, manifesting either in increased or decreased profits. Having a discount pricing policy set as a long-term strategy is a risky business and hard to pull off, mainly because there is a very thin margin for profit. In that case, a business needs to develop a continuous stream of large volume sales so its strategy could pay off in the end. Problems with this pricing policy might also suggest there are other issues or weaknesses in your business that force you to lower your prices in the first place, not as a part of an ongoing business strategy.

Impact of a premium pricing policy – overpricing your goods

In contrast, increasing the price of your product could significantly lower your sales volume, albeit retain profit levels. Introducing a premium pricing strategy means you attain a “higher price and margin, lower volume” approach which has all the potential to gloriously backfire. At their core, customers are wired to look around for the cheapest deal in most cases. As much as they care about quality, it seems they care more about their wallet. In the end, you could end up with an overpriced product that could sit on the shelf and collect dust.

What to do?

As the two strategies can have opposing outcomes, it can be difficult to pinpoint what exactly best suits your business. However, there are some things to take into consideration when defining your pricing strategy. Most notably – your competition (the post title kinda gave this away).

In order to stay competitive in the market, you have to find that sweet spot that includes competitive pricing with profit margins. The retail market is highly competitive so you need to consider and try to ascertain three things to compete:

  1. Product differentiation – having a product that stands out in the market would allow you to employ a premium pricing strategy, thus not relying so much on sales volumes as long as you have the competitive edge.
  2. Customer value – the quality of your products and service, as well as the variation in the assortment, can sustain the “higher price, higher margin, lower volume” policy if you can readily meet your customers’ demands and expectations in terms of overall value.
  3. Price – this is the first indicator of your pricing policy and the one that gets the most attention.

Basing your pricing strategy on valuation (pricing research derived from actual sales history) can help you keep your listings aligned with market prices. To do so, your options are restricted to two methods:

  • Manual tracking
  • Automated solutions

When it comes to manual tracking, this is an option that provides nominally cheap(er) assessment of your competitor’s prices. Working in Excel is fine as you can focus on the competitors that matter to you the most on your own pace. However, the pace is the main issue at hand here. Prices are the most obvious form of competitive advantage and they are highly dynamic, thus it’s very easy to miss most of the changes. Time is vital and tracking large amounts of price data by yourself increases the chances of missing some of the data, thus jeopardizing the accuracy of your reports.

On the other hand, competitive intelligence software like Intelligence Node’s Incompetitor (product tracking) and Inoptimizer (price optimization) allows for a deeper focus on product and price data analysis through automation. It saves time and resources and offers analytical insights into market trends. Because the software does the majority of work for you, there is no problem with the scope of your competition tracking (usually, you can track millions of products without any hassle) so you can focus on those that compete both directly and indirectly with you. All in all, you can make more informed and accurate decisions in a timely manner, thus stay ahead of others.

Conclusion

Balancing between not harming the brand by lowering prices too much and not alienating customers with your higher prices can be tough. As some buyers will look for the best deal available, others are willing to pay more for a unique selection and better features and service. Finding that optimal middle ground requires researching your competition. Depending on your needs, that means utilizing either workforce or software to carry out the chore of keeping tabs on others. Be sure to cover all of your competitors with your analysis or you might miss on some of the opportunities and lose the competitive advantage you might have.

 

How Often Should You Adjust Your Pricing?

by Intelligence Node

Every business that seeks to achieve maximum levels of profitability needs to think carefully about its pricing. Specifically, it needs to think about how often to change its prices. Once you identify and set the best pricing strategy for your product or service, it can be quite tempting to hold on to it. We know how you reason and we empathize – you spent considerable time and effort to set it up, it works so why would you ever change it?

Well, you simply have to because every aspect of the market fluctuates. Your competitors, products, customer demand – everything. That being said, each aspect can have a direct influence on that ideal price you envision for your product. As with the majority of the price-related issues, there are certain pros and cons to adjusting prices on a frequent basis. Businesses need to consider both sides of the pricing equation before deciding on how often they intend to change their prices. The change can have a huge effect, both positive and negative, on you and your consumers so this is not something to take lightly. As always, we are on the job to make that decision as smooth as possible.

How often to adjust your pricing?

First, it’s important to know that there is no general rule of thumb when it comes to modifying your prices. This is because of the frequency of changes within the market. Just look at the data for Motorola Moto G Plus smartphone, an older model. In the first week of May, there have been five changes in pricing for it. In addition, the growth stage of your company can also play a role in the proceedings. For instance, a small business might want to adjust its pricing in order to increase its market share while a larger company with more experience doesn’t necessarily have to frequently adjust its pricing.

When is it okay to do it?

There are common reasons to both increase and decrease your price. When it comes to raising your prices, it’s okay to do it when…

  1. Your competition is charging more for less

If your competitors are cashing in on the virtually same product for slightly less of it, whether it’s the quantity or lower number of features or else, this is a signal that you can raise your prices. The key here is to accentuate the unique value your goods bring compared to competitor’s offering, especially if it’s a similar product at a higher price point. Customers are often willing to pay more but they need to know why your product is superior.

  1. Costs increase

When costs for the company increase, it’s rather normal to raise prices to offset the change in costs. This includes rising raw material, labor costs, changes in packaging and so on.

  1. Inflation happens

During inflation (or periods of it), companies need to raise prices to maintain profitability, particularly if the increase is significant. In such cases, it’s better to do it gradually and raise the price over time instead of making one quick and large increase.

Businesses might also consider lowering the prices when…

  1. The competition reduces its pricing

If one or more of your competitors significantly reduce their price, you may need to follow suit and do the same in order to remain competitive.

  1. You want a larger market share

If a part of your business strategy is increasing your market share, then you might want to decrease your prices to encourage customers to pony up the cash.

  1. Costs decrease

As costs regarding your product lower, you can opt to decrease the price as well. This might make your product and brand more competitive while improving the ever-valuable customer perception by rewarding loyalty.

  1. When you want to get rid of your inventory

Getting rid of your remaining inventory in favor of new versions of your product almost automatically means prices go down. Take hardware companies for example – every new smartphone model means the older one is cheaper. Or, if you are selling clothes, seasonal products like winter jackets and sweaters don’t have the same pull in April.

In any case, whether you want to raise or lower your price, the change must reflect your overall business strategy.

When is it okay to leave current prices?

There are also times when it’s best to stay put despite the market changes. This is strongly recommended in situations where shifts in the market don’t affect the greater part of revenue. Speaking strictly from a business standpoint, it’s always better to leave things as they are than rush or make a poorly planned change that diminishes your relationship with your customers or even worse, ruins your margins. This brings us to our next question…

How to know when the time is right for what action?

This is the trickiest part of the equation. Setting the price is a constant, ongoing process that requires tons of research. The math is simple – your company will make more informed decisions when backed up by research.

The past several years have seen a significant rise in technology use. It has effectively shifted the very core of price changes. Most notably, regarding our topic today, pricing optimization software helps businesses join all kinds of pricing data to form dynamic pricing methods that take into account a variety of factors like competitor actions, customer demand and more.

Think about it. There is a whole list of your products that require price optimization at a product level to stay ahead of the competition. The need to account costs, customer, and sales performance takes time and resources. With dynamic pricing, a company is able to adjust its prices on the fly in response to market demands. With the rise of big data analytics, price adjustments can be made much faster as time is of the essence. By collecting and analyzing data about a particular customer, a business can more accurately predict what price the customer is willing to pay and adjust it accordingly. Since automation is key here, you can also create customized dynamic pricing rules which can follow certain market fluctuations.

Conclusion

Your pricing strategy demands round-the-clock maintenance to keep your business growing. A new pricing strategy could perfectly align with the changes that have occurred since your last price update. It’s imperative that you research and analyze the market landscape on a regular basis and make price adjustments accordingly. The market doesn’t stay the same and neither should you. Bear in mind that prices should be adjusted only as often as your company’s objectives and goals dictate. Otherwise, you’re preaching to the choir and they’re not listening.

 

Your Competitors Already Know This About Your Pricing Strategy

by Intelligence Node

Keeping an eye on what your competition is doing is a great way for growing your business. Identifying who they are and what they are offering can prove invaluable to make your goods set apart from the rest. It will enable you to set prices competitively and utilize all the elements of the marketing mix to the fullest. If you know or learn a few secrets on the way, all the better but the bottom line stays the same – the more you know about your competition, the more your chances for success grow.

The key part here is that, just like customer loyalty, this is a two-way street. The same way you know various information about your competitors, so do they about you. They are out there, “preying” on your customers, just as you are theirs. At least, you should be, which is why this post will highlight what the “other side” already knows about your pricing in order for you to remain competitive.

  1. They know the prices you charge

Obviously, without breaking a sweat. Your competition is legally spying you, plain and simple. They are everywhere. A quick glance at your website provides the basic information they need. They are following you through your newsletter and getting regular updates about everything, including price-related issues. The prices you charge might not fully suit your competitors and vice-versa but they do offer a good glimpse into what your business considers under competitive pricing. However, the price tag alone doesn’t say much without deeper analysis as you leave a significant amount of data online, ready for scooping. And that means…

competitive pricing

Example of competitive pricings Image source: Website Magazine

  1. They know which of your products sell

Naturally, there are some products that sell better than others, making for certain product groups that generate the larger part of revenue. For that matter, calculating the demand for these products is essential as the result is a list of the products suitable for price benchmarking. This is a far too big of a game to leave anything as is. Through the magnifying glass, your competitors are tracking your goods that are most in-demand or being promoted, as well as your fast-selling products in order to optimize their own product site positioning. They can easily benchmark their prices versus yours and adapt their strategy if needed because they are constantly watching you and know the breadth and depth of your catalog.

  1. They tap into your social media

Social media is a powerful tool and a treasure trove of information if you know what to look for. We’ve already mentioned signing up to a newsletter and receiving information directly to inbox. Relevant social communities like Twitter and Facebook offer means to your competitors to stay in the loop regarding discounts, promotions, special offers and anything that gives a clue about your pricing. It’s a cheap and easy way to spy as all they need to do is follow and observe. Inconspicuous social presence on competitor’s social pages can also help identify how your customers react to prices by sifting through their comments, particularly the ones that are directly related to pricing.

  1. They go through the checkout process

Playing secret shopper (albeit, in an online form) is a good way for your competition to compare things such as price, products and customer service on the spot. It’s also great for your competitors to gather insights into the complete checkout process, including cart abandonment and what offerings customers receive at what prices. This form of “spying” can raise internal operations on a higher level by acknowledging both the good and bad side of the experience..

Beat them at their own game

To either side’s benefit, pricing is a tangible, observable source which can provide a lot of information about competitors offerings. Since they are fully aware of your products, know the prices and have a solid understanding how you set them, why not do the same?

Everything we’ve said so far about your competition can be said about you. In the global e-commerce market, there are literally millions of sellers that seek their fortunes online. As the market shows no signs of backing down in terms of growth, the competition builds up even more. Coming up with a competitive advantage is harder than ever so you might want to consider using competitive intelligence. Competitive intelligence (CI) consists of multiple layers regarding everything your competition and market represents. It’s one giant learning process about all the things that both directly and indirectly affect your business. But how does it affect your pricing in this case?

competitive intelligence

Using competitive intelligence software to stay competitive

Your competition leverages modern technology to stay on top of you. It’s that simple. This includes being proactive on the Internet and “following” you around, but more importantly, using advanced, yet accessible technology.

For many businesses, it is still a standard practice to rely on a team of people performing manual searches of rival products and prices. This naturally implies that businesses need to invest valuable time and money that could be much better employed in improving other stages of their business operation. As we mentioned before, there are thousands (probably more) of your counterparts around the globe in your industry. Identifying them, especially the ones that are your direct competitors, and then identifying their pricing is a long and arduous process. Let’s not forget that prices are not set in stone which makes the task all the more difficult (as it weren’t difficult enough before). So, what can you do?

Instead of relying on manual price tracking, companies use fully automated competitor price tracking solutions. These software suites help e-commerce businesses track competitor prices automatically, instead of relying on resource-heavy manual operations. There are pricing intelligence tools such as Incompetitor and Inoptimizer that put real-time competitor pricing and positioning data at your disposal. These tools will make sure you are constantly in the loop and able to access the data and trends that will ultimately allow you to make vital pricing decisions. That way, you’ll be able to track your competition in real-time and utilize what you learn in order to keep your business one step ahead.

Competitive intelligence software provides an accurate assessment of how products and services are performing on the market. With the help of the data that your competitors are going to collect via competitive intelligence software, they can effectively boost their sales and conversion rates, know the real position in market without spending huge amounts of time, money and manpower.

Still, when you set roughly the same prices as your competitors, then you slowly lose any differentiating factors. The focus shifts to what you are offering and if you can offer more and/or better features at the same time, it’s a win-win scenario. If not, you need to find a key differentiating factor. This can be anything from the unique value your product brings (highlighting why customers should buy from you and not your competitors, practicality of it, etc.) to things like packaging, customer service and more. Catering to prospects through your product’s benefits and the problems it solves is a sure-fire way to turning them into buyers.

Conclusion

If there’s a silver lining in this story, it’s that you can never appreciate enough the importance of analyzing your competition. It can help you form pricing strategies that will capitalize on opportunities and reduce the impact of threats from competitors. They already know so much about your prices that it would be foolish, to say the least, not to use yourself what’s practically handed over to you. You only need the key to open that door and the key is competitive intelligence.

Everything you find out about your competitors is valuable, especially prices. They can tell you if there are any gaps in the market you can effectively exploit, indicate whether consumers are saturated in certain areas of the market so you can make assessments and much more. It’s all easier said than done which is why you need help, preferably in the form of pricing intelligence software than can track millions of products and produce real-time insights. Also, if there is any aspect of your goods you can improve, go for it as that just might be the key differentiator, along with the pricing intelligence tools, you need.

Pricing Benchmarks: Where Do You Stand?

by Intelligence Node

Let’s start off with the basic definition – what are pricing benchmarks? It’s the process of comparing your prices to the prices of the competition in a specific market segment. Why, one might ask, blissful in ignorance. The answer is very simple – because understanding your pricing and your position among your competition is of critical importance to a thriving business. This is especially pertinent to pricing managers and analysts who are trying to stay on pace with persistent fluctuations in the e-commerce ecosystem. Armed with this knowledge, a business is effectively positioning itself in the marketplace so that the target audience is thus willing to choose and pay for its products.

That is certainly not an easy feat to achieve. This post will explain the nuances of price benchmarks and provide a more detailed look into the inside machinations of the process.

When do you use pricing benchmarks?

The need for pricing benchmarks arises, for the most part, when a business opts for the competitive pricing strategy. Just by observing other businesses in terms of their popularity and the quality of their offerings, a business is able to utilize pricing benchmarks to set a price for their own products, all the while keeping in mind the market position as related to its competition.

Of course, using pricing benchmarks while balancing competitive pricing with profit margins is only one way to facilitate it into your business operations. A smart business will use it to analyze and identify both new and existing ways to improve its pricing methods, as well as implement processes that help scale and grow the brand’s presence.

How to use it?

Now we get to the interesting part. Clearly, price benchmarking is a rather valuable tool in determining prices to achieve greater value. It also enables to assess the competitiveness of market rivals, identify any performance gaps in their operations and accentuate their strengths and weaknesses. But while the language here is quite pleasing and exciting, how is the whole process actually achieved? We have two words for you – competitive intelligence.

general pricing benchmarks

The end goal of price benchmarking is to closely follow the pricing policy and strategy a business sets. From a competitive standpoint, it aims to be in line competitors in the industry, especially those considered to be leaders. This is a huge feat to accomplish and requires large amounts of time and effort to identify the actual pricing used by those competitors and the reasons why they use those prices. That being said, it’s clear that competitive intelligence is an enormous vast field of information that takes lots of time to convert it into usable insights. As time is short and precious in today’s fast-developing business market, competitive intelligence tools assert themselves as the best option by far. There are a few reasons why:

  1. Real-time data

As previously mentioned, rapid developments in the business world create quick changes that can make all the difference in the end. That is why real-time insights are so important – they provide a current view of the state of the market so that you are always aware of what your competition is doing, thus providing you a highly sought-for competitive advantage. Real-time data also effectively addresses the question of accuracy as it reflects actual prices across the marketplace with constant updates.

  1. Competitive market and competitor data

The data provided with competitive intelligence tools is highly relevant and detailed. When we say detailed, let’s just say that we are talking about millions of products on the web. That way, you are able to monitor competitor prices real time and, with a wide coverage like that, map and compare similar products in your competition to optimize your prices.

  1. Automation

What good would this data be if you had to manually set and sift through it? Very little, we say,  which is why high levels of automation are necessary for successful operations in these matters. Competitive intelligence tools can completely automate competitor benchmarking, allowing you to save time you can use for other matters.

intelligence node screengrab

An example of Intelligence Node’s competitive intelligence tool

Add in the myriad of other things like data comparability, easy integration, multilingual support (any decent software will cover as many languages as possible to allow price benchmarking across different markets irrespective of the catalog display language) and so on – you get a complete picture why competitive intelligence tools are not only a credible and valuable option but must-have today.

The benefits of pricing benchmarks

  1. Determine ideal pricing

Pricing benchmarks validate the pricing strategy and policy a business chooses, compared to market best practices and other pricing models. It also identifies all the reasons for the given price such as costs and other expenses incurred by the competition.

  1. Enter a new market with appropriate pricing

Entering a new market with price benchmarking ensures the operation is feasible in the first place. As it includes cost estimates of operating in specific locations, price benchmarking provides an overview of the financial viability of such undertaking.

  1. Helps with price optimization

Because the process reflects actual prices, it makes sure you are competitively priced at all time – not underpriced or overpriced (coupled with an intelligent competitor price software, you’ll be able to seize on the customer demand to fully optimize your revenue).

  1. Save time

The simplest facet of pricing benchmarks, the time-saving aspect cannot be underlined enough. It gives you more time for other important processes in your business operations, not to mention that with pricing benchmarks through pricing intelligence, there is no need for detailed research on your own to establish what customers are paying for.

Conclusion

Pricing benchmarks help determine what your audience is willing to pay for the products and services you offer, as well as monitor what your competitors within the industry are able to charge. For a business looking through a competitive lens, there is no better way to gradually adapt and improving their offerings. However, the process can take time which is why a company should consider choosing a software solution that basically does the work for you.

Competitive intelligence tools provide data about both the competition and the market, while simultaneously saving you money and time with minimum risk. Price benchmarking is an ongoing process as prices regularly change. In order to be successful, a business needs to reflect the shifts in consumer preferences with their own prices, which is all the more reason why competitive intelligence tools with real-time data are the way to go.

 

Lessons About Price Analysis You Need To Learn To Succeed

by Intelligence Node

It’s not really a secret to say that every business can benefit from an effective pricing strategy. However, in order to identify which strategy is right for a specific business or industry and set the right (some would say reasonable) price in a highly competitive market, you need to be able to utilize every resource at your disposal. That, for the most part, means performing a price analysis. This post will show what it can do for a business in order for it to succeed.

The basics

Basically, every purchase requires some form of effective cost assessment. What price analysis does is, in broad terms, evaluate product options without separate cost elements and proposed profit. This includes marketplace competition comparisons to ensure the best possible price. For instance, if there are three competitors competing for a specific market, a price analysis would include a detailed overview of the benefits of each competitor’s offering relative to the quoted prices.

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Elements of price analysis

It’s commonly accepted that the price analysis has four major elements:

  1. Analysis of existing price history
  2. Comparing competitive bids
  3. Comparison of published price list
  4. Using government prices for an item

We will break down each element further down so don’t go just yet.

  1. Analysis of existing price history

One of the most effective ways to analyze your prices is to compare the past quotations for the same product or service to determine the viability of the current quotation. The period for examination can be up to two years or as long as there is a price history (if there is any). Reflecting on the previous pricing is especially helpful when there are various suitable and similar options in a purchase decision. For instance, when the product or service is available on the open market and there are competitor alternatives similar in benefits, a price analysis will highlight the result the best (often lowest) price.

As we hinted a few lines before, in order for this method to work, a business has to have a prior price history. If it’s entering with a brand new product, it can draw on competitor offering, which is incidentally (or not) the next entry on the list.

  1. Comparing competitive bids

Using competitive pricing is often considered one of the best ways for validating price. In terms of comparing competitive bids to get that price, the results are equally rewarding. Just by simply asking different suppliers for their prices of the same product or service, you can determine if a specific price is fair and reasonable. However, things get a teensy-weensy more complicated than that because, in order to truly be competitive, total cost analysis must be included. As you already know, the lowest bid doesn’t necessarily mean the lowest cost.

The key here is the analysis of total cost of acquisition, meaning you have to account for all those costs that go into the making of your goods. The total cost of acquisition is the actual cost that must be compared with competing bids in order to make your price competitive and affordable.

  1. Comparison of published prices

Published price provide a starting point from which further price changes may or may not be made before setting on the final price that the customer will. At the retail level, published price may serve as the manufacturer’s suggest retail price or MSRP, as it’s known in it abbreviated form.

This method is best suitable for goods that are similar enough to products or services widely available to the general public. Subsequently, these goods have prices that appear in a published price list. However, when comparing these price lists, a business needs to consider standard industry discounts for their offerings. For example, offering standard discounts to customers buying above a particular amount or quantity volume.

    4.Using government prices for an item

In some circumstances, prices are regulated by law. When this occurs, there is usually a pronouncement in the form of periodic rulings, reviews, or similar actions issued or authorized by a governmental body that sets a price. These government-mandated prices include both minimum and maximum prices set for specified goods. Known as price controls, those set maximum prices are called price ceilings, while price controls that set minimum prices are called price floors.

An example of government prices would be rent controls on properties like the system of rent controls in New York in the United States, introduced to help maintain an adequate supply of affordable housing.

rent controls

Graphical representation of rent control

How to use price analysis

In order to show you how to correctly apply a price analysis in the pricing process, here is a practical example.

To determine the price of a product or service using price analysis, first, you need to do some research. This includes two versions:

  1. using pricing intelligence tools that do most of the work for you, once you set the necessary parameters and guidelines. The process is mostly automated and quickly covers hundreds of thousands of items similar to what you are trying to price.
  2. Alternatively, you can start by browsing the net for various shopping sites to get an idea of the market and published prices. While this is certainly cheaper variant, it’s also time-consuming and provides only superficial knowledge.

lap

An example of an analytics software

The DIY approach also includes directly contacting your supplier or manufacturer for a suggested retail price. A better option is seeking advice from industry professional to get a complete sense of what customers pay for the same item. This can help you identify if there have been any escalations in the price. Once you implement the insights you gained from your research, you can assess whether a specific product or service has a fair price and if necessary, make corrections.

Conclusion

It’s important to remember that price analysis is used by both businesses and consumers to evaluate the considered goods. While the business analysis can be fancier by using software tools for faster and wider comprehension, consumers have their own little calculations that ultimately decide whether they’ll pay for your goods or not.

That is why prices are important – they provide the key to understanding market behavior. In order for them to be most effective, you can and should utilize price analysis. It shows that the proposed price is reasonable in comparison with current or recent prices (if they exist) for the same or similar items. Price analysis also demonstrates that the prices are adjusted to reflect various changes in the market and economic conditions, as well as quantities that are a result of an adequate price competition.

If you found this useful and you’d like to learn how to take your pricing strategy to the next level, we invite you to download our free 20 secrets to designing the best pricing strategy eBook. Click below to take advantage of this opportunity.

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