The webinar information about price monitoring is prepared in the text form for those, who participated in the webinar itself, and for those, who didn’t but wanted to, in order to let them make use of the acquired knowledge and find complete answers related to the topic.
- How to make customers buy from you and not from your competitors?
- How to find all the online stores that sell the same what you sell?
- How will price comparison and price analysis help to raise an online store’s conversion rate, decrease a bounce rate, and consequently increase sales?
Everyone understands, that one needs to know his competitors, analyze them, and study prices in their online stores, but not everyone really does it in fact. The majority of online stores owners simply don’t really get what to do, what data should be collected for an analysis, and how to process its results. A lot of people try to build a new business, but don’t cover all the important details about the market and its participants. A lot of businessmen don’t pay enough attention to pricing, more so to pricing methods, relying just on a few market leaders and ignoring their direct competitors at the same time.
We will cover the next questions:
- Pricing as an important element of internet marketing.
- Analysis of competitors’ prices in online stores. How does it benefit you?
- How to find out who your real competitors are.
- Ways of price monitoring in online stores.
- Each method of analysis’s advantages and disadvantages.
- How do automated monitoring and analysis of prices in online stores work?
Having answered these questions, you’ll be able to understand how to turn a potential consuming clientele into real and loyal customers.
So, you created an online store, launched an advertising campaign, invested money in the website promotion, used different tools of internet marketing (launched emailing, started a blog, posted in social medias), and now, you are waiting for getting your online store to the top positions and tons of customers flowing in.
As the result, potential customers visit the store, view the product pages, but don’t buy anything or buy much less than expected.
What’s the Reason for the Low Purchases in Your Online Store?
What did you forget?
Maybe you ignored the fact, that customers’ judgement about your store is based on the price policy that will be fair, if you have competition based pricing.
Putting the company growth, income increase, and cutting expenses into priority, retailers sometimes undervalue the influence of a pricing strategy. Whereas competitive pricing is what shines with a friendly green light, not with an alarming red one.
What do you need to know about customers?
According to the statistics:
- more than 80% percent of customers compare prices online before buying anything;
- 60% of customers prefer stores with “a good price”.
Hence, a price is the main criterion for a customer to make a choice. That has to make you think about pricing in marketing.
WHAT’S A GOOD PRICE?
A good price in an online store is a synonym to “the best deal”. And we’re not talking about dropping prices as much as possible. The goal is to sell more than competitors and find out the optimal price by means of monitoring.
When a customer sees your offers he needs to understand the advantages, that put you in front of your competitors. To make the customer see “the best deal” you need to start an advertising campaign and work on it price intelligently.
How Does Price Monitoring Influence Success of Advertising and Increase Sales?
According to research data, approximately 33% of products are above market prices. The advertisement cost for these products is 34% of a budget, whereas they form only 7% of total sales.
What it says is that the success of your advertising depends largely on the relevance of your prices.
What Benefits Does Price Monitoring Have For Your Business?
- successful and profitable advertising campaigns;
- customers become loyal to your online store;
- effective pricing methods that make the profit increase;
- saves your time, money, and efforts.
Apart from that, price monitoring will let you find out what prices are too high or too low and products without a price.
How to Find Out Who Your Real Competitors Are?
Having decided to monitor competitors’ prices, we face another question: “Who are they and how to find them”?
As we said above, the majority chooses to monitor market leaders. Some may use only price comparison websites, but that’s just the top of an iceberg. There can be different competitors, according to different channels: SEO, contextual advertising, price comparison shopping engines. And you need to analyze all of them in order to get the most accurate information about your competitors. You won’t go far, if you monitor only the online stores that have assortments similar to yours. It simply won’t let you work on competitive pricing.
Is It Possible to Analyze Prices by Means of Manual Monitoring?
It seems to be extremely difficult and most often impossible because of volumes of work to be done. Again, be aware that any price comparison engine is most commonly used for shopping and not for collecting the data you actually need.
Practically manual monitoring appears to be ineffective and requires a lot of expenses. Let’s do a quick count. You will need a person assigned to do the job. The worker will monitor competitors’ prices in online store approximately 168 hours per month. He will get a corresponding payment regularly. And then, if he monitors, let’s say, 500 different products from 15 competitors he will have to process the data collected 7500 times! When changes on the market occur more than often, and when prices in online stores are not stable the information you’ll get by means of manual price monitoring will be out-of-date. The delay between the data you’ll have and reality will be around 5-10 days.
Your worker can use a price comparison shopping engine or a price comparison tool to monitor prices in your competitors’ online stores.
Mind that price comparison websites work for customers, not for online store owners. Competition based pricing is what makes the websites show you to potential clients.
PRICE COMPARISON SHOPPING ENGINES
A price comparison shopping engine is an advertising area for presenting your products. It looks more like an e-catalogue, where potential customers can view any assortments without actually visiting the page of the online store. For some reasons, online stores owners consider this to be the ideal solution for price tracking. So, let’s find out pros and cons of this method.
Advantages:
- free price monitoring of online stores;
- easy to use;
- a possibility to follow the necessary product link and see relevant offers.
Disadvantages:
- price comparison shopping engines don’t contain information about all of your competitors;
- high labor costs;
- requires too much of time;
- no comparative analysis of all competitors;
- doesn’t fit for every day monitoring;
- no real-time data, delays of 7-10 days.
Conclusion:
- the data from price comparison shopping engines is first and foremost for customers, by means of price comparison shopping engines they can proceed to your online store, which, thus, is a good way of attracting customers;
- it is almost impossible to build an effective price strategy by means of price comparison engines, since the analysis they provide is neither of a good quality nor complete.
PRICE COMPARISON TOOL
This is a price software developed to collect data from online stores pages. All the information is arranged in a table and ready to be processed for an analysis.
Advantages:
- usually one-time payment;
- developed specifically for your online store;
- unlimited updates;
- unlimited quantity of competitors and products that you can analyze.
Disadvantages:
- price tracking tool doesn’t provide you with any analysis of the data it collects, doesn’t compare prices;
- no technical support (it’s all on you, if something goes wrong);
- it takes a while to process the data collected;
- you do products and competitors comparisons by yourself;
- changes on competitors’ websites lead to extra expenses;
- data is delivered with a delay, which won’t provide you with effective competition based pricing.
Conclusion:
- the usage of such comparison tools should be combined with an internet marketer’s work;
- the time you’ll spend on data comparison and analysis will be long enough for your competitors to update their prices and assortments;
- this price monitoring tool is only effective, if the market is stable and any price changes and assortments updates occur quite rarely.
As you can see, manual price monitoring tool doesn’t really deliver the goods and doesn’t solve the main pricing problems in online stores in the environment of fast and constant changes. It doesn’t correspond to the main requirements of a good quality price analysis, which are:
- automated process;
- ease of use;
- effectiveness;
- prompt deliveries of data;
- accuracy.
Besides that, you also don’t get any guarantees about the quality of the data, you can’t know how complete the information is, you don’t get real-time data regarding prices in competitors’ online stores, whereas any delays significantly decrease the value of the information.
HOW DOES PRICE ANALYSIS SERVICE BENEFIT YOU?
Apart from the important role of pricing in marketing and the important data, here are some more benefits that price intelligence software gives you:
- it save your time;
- it saves your budget: you won’t need a worker or workers to track prices, to process data and analyze it;
- you get convenient notifications regarding data updates;
- all the data collected is available on your dashboard;
- the results of competitors’ price comparison are ready to be used as new effective solutions for your online store income increase;
- no human errors, the automation of the process takes care of the information’s quality;
- you can plan successful advertising campaigns, which means to distribute the budget of your online store effectively.
Price monitoring software replaces workers and restrains you from excessive use of time, money, and efforts. By means of a good price you can increase your income, sales, and attract new customers.
LET’S SEE THIS ALL IN NUMBERS
Price analysis service will let you:
- save 20-24 working hours monthly;
- distribute the budget properly, saving up to 34% of it;
- save 100% of the costs that you would spend on extra workers;
- stay secured from losing money because of manager’s mistakes, the information you’ll get will be 100% credible;
- significantly decrease the bounce rate in your online store;
- make customers buy twice or four times more.
HOW TO USE THE INFORMATION YOU GOT?
Of course, getting information is nothing itself, if you don’t use it. But we have answers for you ready:
- Plan more successful advertising campaigns. When you get acquainted with your competitors’ promotional activity you’ll get the opportunity to launch unique and profitable advertising campaigns for your online store. When you’re sure you have optimal prices you can run different promotions, offer certain deals and use discount cards in your online store.
- Offer your customers more by means of upselling and cross-selling to increase sales in your online stores.
- Price optimization will create the most beneficial for customers offers. You’ll get to know what product categories are interesting for your clients and build winning solutions for them.
- Effectively update prices in your online store, so that your customers can always get the most beneficial and the most interesting offers. Category managers can track and analyze competitors’ prices any time, which lets you react on changes immediately due to accurate and credible information.
- Sell more due to a correct price analysis. Establishing competitive pricing in your online store will increase your sales and conversion on the website.
- Expand the assortment in your online store, monitoring if there are any new products in your competitors’ assortments.
- Establish effective tactical solutions. For example, you can put some items on hold, if your competitor extremely lowers the price, and sell them, when the competitor’s items are out of stock.
ONE LOOK IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS
When you get all of the advantages the price monitoring service offers you can adjust all the processes in your online store accordingly, gain an effective increase of sales, income, and conversion. The valuable information collected by the price intelligence software will be a fundamental material for building a successful business.