The following is a sponsored post for Karsa Monitor.
As you probably know, competitive price monitoring is vital for i-retailers nowadays. It is quite hard to be successful in e-commerce without being familiar with your competitors behaviour. I am saying “behaviour” on purpose, because you need to know more than just your competitors product prices, the issues are more complex than that.
So what do you need to be aware of and what should you avoid with making the product prices correct? I consulted with specialists in this field, who designes the competitive price monitoring tool Karsa Monitor.
Web data scraping
When deciding which downloader to use, you should be careful whether the software is capable of capturing the data you need.
There are 3 important points to take heed of:
- Paging is important for automated gathering of an overview about newly added products and new categories in the competitor´s product line.
- Ajax pages are common and for most downloaders it is an insurmountable obstacle
- Execution of "Free actions" such as the changing of sizes, colors or any other product variations. You should be able to capture data even if there is a potentially different pricing between them.
If the downloader can do all of this, you can monitor 20+ of your competitors or capture data from the price comparison websites.
The flexibility of the data capturing
It is one of important factors in successful monitoring. If you decide you want to detect a competitors´special offers or add a new product category to be monitored from another competitive shop, it is very convenient for you if you can do this right away. This change can take 5 minutes from your office and you can start gathering current data immediately. Otherwise you would have to contact your supplier and this change would take significantly more time and it would be of course, more expensive.
Product matching
It is useful to receive pure data, but without product matching it is not worth that much to you. What is important is an accurate product match. Your tool should also be able to match products without Part Numbers, which are not matched successfully even on the Google Shopping site.
There is several tools, which can be used for this purpose.
- Thesaurus lists (lists of synonyms)
- Stop words or ignored words
- Word breakers (separators)
- Mutually required expressions
- And other helpful algorithms. As a result, you should be able to match perfumes, kitchen appliances without PN, contact lens, clothes etc. with a high accuracy of matching.
Reports
Make sure, your tool includes a Reporting Module. It is very useful if the manager of the i-shop can view overall price differences and can react promptly. You don´t need any notification about price changes. What is important for you is to have a well arranged report, which contains not only your prices and your competitors prices, but also your purchase price and the item´s primary ID uploaded from your system. In this case, you can automatically transfer the data into your Information System.
Regularity
If you carry out price monitoring once a weak, it is better than nothing, but your competitors could change their prices, let´s say, 8 times during this time and launch several other activities upon which you couldn´t react. Therefore the perfect solution is if the data download is for free – included in the price of the tool, so you don´t have to pay any additional charges. Then, you can receive a report with the competitors data at any interval and gain a competitive advantage.
Special offers
It is definitely beneficial for you to have in advance, information about the special offers of your competitors. You would not have to put the same product on sale at the same time as your key competitor and you would understand why the product was really easy to sell one day and no one was buying it the next.
Top products – Reviews
Similarly helpful information such as the special offers could be information about successful products, which are most often demanded by customers. How many positive customer reviews does the product have on Amazon? Shouldn´t we promote it better in our i-shop? These facts can radically help you in your decision making about which products to promote and your tool should be able to do this for you!
Stock levels
A helpful guideline in setting the right price in an i-shop can also be information about the stock levels of your competitors. If your competitive price monitoring tool is able to capture information about storage and you realize your key competitors don´t have a concrete solid product availability (especially at the pre-Christmas period), you have a unique opportunity to increase your product price and your profit margin.
Monitoring competitors is becoming more and more important for direct repricing as well as for gathering further marketing figures, which can be employed for maximising profits in internet shops.
This article was created with the help of the company Karsa Technologies, which develops software for direct competitors price monitoring Karsa Monitor.
The preceding has been a sponsored post. Find out more information about sponsored posts.
photo credit: Shutterstock/Vimos Varga
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8 Points How to Maximize Profits With Competitive Price Monitoring Software
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