If you’ve chosen to be in ecommerce, no matter what your role is, you will face a huge amount of work. In a world where customers have great abilities to compare and find the best product in terms of price and also as %60 of online shoppers name pricing as their main shopping decision criteria, becoming aware of competitors’ prices is a crucial workload for ecommerce companies. Most ecommerce owners still manually track competitor prices. Let’s learn why manual tracking is not an ecommerce best practice.
You can monitor competitors’ prices manually or by acquiring competitor tracking software. According to our experience, in the case of tracking competitors’ prices manually, you will face a lot of problems. In this article, you can see the reasons for stopping following them manually and how you can benefit from using automated competitor price tracking software.
1-Eliminate The Risk of Doing Mistakes
Using Excel is the most common type of work tool for all types of businesses and is applicable for almost every work process. But not best for storing and monitoring competitors’ prices. As there are thousands of price data flowing around you, it won’t be a surprise to miss some of the data while transferring from competitors’ online stores to your data source. In a nutshell, when you track anything manually, you increase the risk of making mistakes.
By using a proper and proven competitor price tracking tool, you will eliminate the risk of making mistakes.
2-Never Miss a Price Change
You can’t imagine how price wars are fierce in online competition. For many ecommerce sectors, specifically in electronics, home & decoration, construction, sports and music, prices are considered as a competitive advantage and they are highly dynamic. Moreover, think about the promotions, discounts and also special prices applied on special days (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Valentine’s Day, the list goes on…). With such price dynamism, it is not possible to update the data daily by doing it manually.
So, it is a must to have a competitor price tracker to monitor the overall market. By setting up alerts, you can accelerate your response to the changes and adjust your own prices dynamically in a profitable way.
3-Time is Crucial
We should believe in the importance of time and try to spend it in the best way that enables us to become more productive. Think about you have more than 500 products in your online store. Can you imagine how many work hours do you need to track different competitors’ prices on 500 products? This type of workflow is not sustainable and is doomed to lose. Moreover, there may be areas need to be improved in your business. Consider using your employees’ productivity and brain force for these areas and let the robots crawl the market and give you the most accurate data more than once every day. A routine job done manually isn’t going to be preferred in the future.
4-Minimize The Costs
The correlation is so simple; if you want to track 1000 URLs every day in a manual way, you have to give a minimum amount of jr. salary for an in-house employee and believe me it will be the only thing that your employee can deal with between working hours. But the competitor price tracking software is much more effective and economical. Don’t hesitate to compare the average salary of jr. position vs. pricing plans of competitor price tracking software.
5-Make More Accurate Forecasts
By using competitive intelligence software, you can deeply focus on data analysis. By saving tons of valuable time and resources it is easy to know the product life stage of your product, whether is market going to have higher or lower prices, regular price changes occurring every season of the year, and opportunities to launch discounts or promotions. With all this information, you can make more accurate decisions for the future of your business.
pricing strategies
