Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Why Competitor Price monitoring is Vital in Ecommerce

Do you understand your product’s market position? The eCommerce industry is very competitive and without proper understanding of the competition, your online business is likely to experience serious challenges. Competitor price monitoring gathers all the data you need about your competition. The information is collected in a centralized store and then it is prepared in form of a report that enables you to make critical business decisions that affect your bottom line. This data can be used to create an effective pricing system and to adjust your existing management systems.

Using this data, you can take notice of price movements that may affect how your product or service performs online. Research has shown that many consumers will buy products online based on their prices.
For this reason, price is a major determinant on how your brand will perform online. If you sell your products really expensive, people will prefer cheaper online retailers. If your products are too cheap, some buyers will assume the quality is really low. This is why data scraping is important. It helps you strike a balance and provide quality products at reasonable rates while being aware of what your competition is doing.

There are several ways your eCommerce business can benefit from competitor price monitoring. For starters, it allows you to view the number of products and ranges that your competition has to offer clients. If you offer a wider product range, you can use this as a selling point to attract more customers. You can structure your marketing strategy to emphasize on the fact that you have more products and ranges compared to your competitors.

Secondly, custom web scraping can help you know when your competitors change their pricing and even keep track of the competitors who are following certain pricing strategies. The scraping system can retrieve data that will help you understand your competitor’s pricing decisions so that you can come up with a pricing strategy that will contribute to your business success.

Every business that is selling products or services through the Internet can take advantage of web scraping to monitor competitor prices. This system gives business owners a better understanding of the market and how to tailor their own brand to best fulfill the needs of their target customers. Most companies that offer web scraping services are even able to tailor this solution to meet your specific needs. They utilize cloud computing systems which can handle any size of eCommerce business. Even multi sites with multiple languages can benefit from competitor price monitoring. The computer programs are able to collect data from sites with millions of products.

Competitor price tracking is a cheap, reliable and quick method of obtaining competitor data. Before these systems were introduced in the market, many businesses spent time and resources extracting competitor data manually. Furthermore, traditional means of obtaining competitor data could not work when your competition has millions of product pages. CPM can extract this data and provide a detailed report within a couple of days.