Competitive Inventory Tracking: A Hidden Profit Booster

Being one step further from your competition requires you to always be on your toes, by knowing what they are up to now and next. When you know your competitors’ potentials, weaknesses, and actions, you can better forecast how they’ll invest and what will be their next steps. By keeping this precious intelligence in your pocket, positioning your business towards competition will be much more effectual and help you to gain a seamless competitive advantage. That’s why we are keeping to create competitor focused articles addressing different areas of ecommerce. Now, we thought it is time to expand our insights by defining how to outsmart the competition by adopting competitive competitor inventory tracking.

Benefit from your competition by using knowledge of their steps to stay one step ahead. Maybe now, you are asking yourself how to do it and gather the competitors’ inventory information. You’re lucky as you landed on this blog. In this article, you will find out how easy it can be managing your competitors’ competitive inventory tracking in real time and what kind of decisions that you can take to steal from your competitors.

Let’s get started!

1- Detect stock-out products of competitors and improve your margins.

Competitor inventory tracking is undoubtedly straightforward through pricing software. You can track your competitors’ inventory as out of stock or in stock. You can see a quick preview of inventory information from competitors through Prisync.

Let me explain the dashboard quickly. You can see three different e-commerce retailers selling these lovely egg cups. Under the stock column, there are three small boxes. The one which is not filled means this product is out-of-stock and there is no product remaining from that retailer which is addressing houseoffraser.co.uk. You can continuously filter the products by selecting “Out-of-stock” option and see instantly which retailers are out-of-stock and get the real-time data from the market.

Believe me, that’s all! Isn’t it pretty easy? Right?

Now let’s go through with what kind of actions that you can take to improve your business.

If you want to purchase a product online and can’t find many options, you perceive the product more valuable. Therefore, the willingness to pay more for that product increases significantly. That’s the psychology of consumer!

Let’s mix the science with marketing. If an online shopper is searching for these egg cups for her mum’s birthday and detect that it is out of stock on one of your competitors. Are you guessing who’s next?

Yes! You’ll be the next door for that online shopper.

What if you detect that your competitor’s product is out of stock in advance? There are plenty of options. So, if you can detect the stock-out product of your competitor, the chance of selling it will increase immediately. With the confidence of that intelligence, you can set higher prices which help you to fatten your profit margin.

2- Detect stock-out products of competitors and steal from your competitors.

Besides of increasing your profit margins, you can also steal from your competitors and grow your customer base with the help of competitor inventory tracking.

Realizing the stock-out product means a great opportunity to attract new customers. The logic is same as the case on above. If an online shopper is not able to find a product from your competitor then the chance of putting her hands in the pocket for your product will extremely increase. So, focusing on that product and investing your marketing budget specifically for that product will be a smart move.

So, next question is; what kind of actions that you can take?

Boosting the potential product in paid channels like Google AdWords, Facebook will make it visible and prominent in where your audience exists.

• A well-focused campaign with targeted landing pages, you can make sure that each visitor is likely to be interested in the products you are selling. Moreover, as the product is available just in your online store, convincing them to purchase your product is inevitable.
• You can create remarketing campaigns for visitors who have checked that product page. So that, you can remember them you’re the only seller of the product.
• Send emails to the audience who has left that specific product on the cart.
• You can run social media ad campaigns to attract more users to the product page. When they compare your product with competitors’, they’ll realize you are the only one in the market.

Also, by getting the advantage from that opportunity, your business will have a great perception in customers’ mind. Whenever they are ready to make online shopping, your ecommerce store will be one of the first places to visit. In brief, you’ll achieve to build a customer loyalty.

3- A healthier competitor analysis with Competitor Inventory Tracking

Competitor inventory tracking has also other benefits in terms of market and competitor analysis. The information of stock-out product will be a great indicator of the best performing products of competitors. It would be a wise assumption if you detect the stock-out product from the competitor and mark it as a key competition product.

So, you’ve detected the best-performing products from the competition. Next step should be analyzing the marketing moves of that product.

• You can start with monitoring the social media campaigns made specifically for that product. Which platform are they using? Are they using image-oriented strategy? Influencers? Instagram or Facebook shop?
• Track both organic and paid keywords, try to understand how to beat them on search engines.
• Monitor the contents made by competitors.
• Detect the promotion seasons made by your competitor on that product. Try to be competitive during the same season.
• Analyze the price history of the product. Learn price positioning among all players in the market. Are they setting the lowest price? Average? Highest? Are there any specific times of making huge discounts? Prisync provides a comprehensive price history in order to help e-commerce retailers to understand market and competition situation.

Not only you are able to make a better strategic decision, you can also have a better understanding of your customers.

Inventory tracking has a great impact on ecommerce success and provides competitive advantages for smart online retailers especially when a competitor runs out of stock on the key in-demand products that consumers would happily pay a premium for. That’s why we’ve tried to give quick smart tips to be more competitive in ecommerce by adopting competitor inventory tracking. Please do not hesitate to reach us if you have any idea about that topic.