Regular competitor monitoring is an essential factor of success in traditional and e-commerce. Is it necessary to find products similar to yours and track their price changes? Yes, even if you had to do it manually. But with software tools like the price tracker, you can do it quickly and without any effort that can lead to a loss of working time. The information you get is priceless as it allows you to easily maneuver through the highly dynamic waves of the market.
Price Tracker: A Universal Tool for All Market Participants
A price tracker is a generic term for software tools that collect and analyze prices for goods and services from different websites. Depending on the target group, they have distinct configurations, tasks, and results.
Difference Between a Price Comparison Website for Consumers and a Price Tracker for Businesses
The largest group that benefits from comparing prices for similar offers is consumers. With the help of price comparison websites, they easily find the best deal. This allows them not to overpay for a product that can be found at a cheaper price from another seller.
However, price trackers are aimed at other market participants and have slightly different technical solutions, capabilities, and applications. They solve several problems at once:
- Track competitors’ prices;
- Collect a database that can be used to develop a competitive pricing strategy;
- Classify and analyze the collected information;
- Issue recommendations for pricing a product or service;
- Forecast sales based on price changes at competitors;
- Generate reports on the history of price changes.
The specific set of features depends on the particular price tracker you use. The more intelligent functions it performs, the more effective your pricing policy will be.
Who Benefits from Using a Price Tracker
Competitor pricing tools can benefit e-commerce stores, marketplaces, manufacturers, retailers, and other market participants. Keeping their eyes on the changing pricing is a part of their daily routine.
Brands
A brand’s reputation is built over the years, but it can be undermined if the brand’s partners or retailers sell products at a low price. As soon as an advertisement with a lower price spreads across the Internet, this can contribute to lowering the price of other sellers. To prevent this from happening, special pricing strategies such as MSRP (Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price) and MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) are used. A price tracker helps brands monitor the activities of their cooperation networks to avoid violations of MSRP and MAP agreements.
Retailers
Price fluctuations in the market directly affect the behavior of consumers who flock to those companies that lower prices, announce sales, and take other customer-friendly actions to increase sales. Sometimes, the opposite price movement occurs, for example, when demand for a product increases, while its supply is suspended. In both cases, the retailer loses income if they do not adjust their pricing strategies to market fluctuations.
A price tracker effectively performs this task and signals changes in the situation in your market niche.
Marketplaces
For many sellers, placing their online store on a marketplace is the most effective way to become visible to buyers. But marketplaces are highly competitive platforms. To ensure buyers do not bypass your store, you need to carefully monitor the pricing policies of competitors. Price trackers perform the function of competitive intelligence, thereby allowing you to optimize prices by researching direct and indirect competitors.
Technical Side of Price Trackers
A price tracker automates the monitoring of competitors’ or partners’ websites to identify targeted products or services and their prices. To do this, it regularly scans their web pages and creates a database that contains the information you need:
- Product title;
- Product availability at the moment;
- Regular and discounted price;
- Product descriptions;
- Consumer ratings and reviews;
- Images;
- Other information that may be useful for business.
The scanning frequency is set by the software developer or user, depending on which software solution and tariff plan you choose.
Automatic Price Correction
You can use the competitor price comparison software for deep market analysis and automatic price correction. In this case, it will independently change prices on your website based on the collected information.
The algorithm of this operation is as follows:
- Upload product data for automatic price correction.
- Determine the list of competitive websites that your price tracker should scan.
- Set your dynamic pricing rules for repricing.
- Run this task.
Benefits of Using Price Trackers for Business
- Informed decision-making on changing pricing policy based on extensive empirical data;
- Saving working time on performing routine tasks of monitoring competitors’ prices;
- Expanding the coverage of competitive websites for price comparison and analysis;
- Creating an extensive database for analyzing the history of price movements and forecasting future sales;
- Increasing sales due to timely adjusting prices to market conditions.
Are There Any Disadvantages of Price Trackers?
Is a price tracker an ideal tool, or does it have some disadvantages? The answer to this question depends on which specific price tracker you use. Developers provide different features in their software and degrees of freedom for end users. Moreover, you will still have to assign an employee who will monitor the price tracker and adjust the settings. For example, this may be necessary when new competitors enter the market, when you scale your business, and in other cases.
The Bottom Line
A price tracker is one of the basic tools that business owners, manufacturers, marketers, and other market participants should use in their work. It is like an X-ray that allows you to see the market situation from the inside and suggest the necessary actions for timely price adjustments. It allows you to increase profits and predict future sales. All this directly affects your business success in the near and distant future.
