Wednesday, November 18, 2015

How Price Monitoring Can Benefit Your Online Store

Competitor price monitoring can help you react quickly to shifts in pricing and prevent losses. It can help you drive more sales to your online store since you are able to avoid overpricing products. But a few online store owners are taking advantage of price monitoring. What they don’t know is that they may be selling their products too cheaply and getting a narrower margin that their market allows. So if you just set up an online store, the first thing you need to consider is to track competitor prices. Here’s why.

Take advantage of opportunities

Some of the most successful online stores are using competitor price monitoring to spot opportunities
and take advantage of them to boost sales. When you collect the data and analyze it, you’ll be able to identify certain trends and get points across your market which you didn’t know existed. Tracking competitor prices also allows you to know exactly where your business is positioned and make measures to move a step ahead.

Take the right action to maximize margin

The process of price monitoring gives you data you can rely on to make very important decisions that influence the success of your online store. You can act knowing that you have credible data to support your decisions. In fact, it reduces the risks your business is taking because you are relying on information that is credible to try and maximize margins and expand your offers.

Monitor markets

How else would you know what’s going on in your industry if you don’t monitor your competitors? You need to be alerted on the trends as they happen. Sometimes this information is no longer useful if it is not known immediately. You’ll need a service that can monitor competitor pricing, products and perceptions online round the clock so you don’t miss out on anything.

Spend less time watching your competitors

When you have a system that tracks competitor prices all through, you don’t need to spend time watching their websites manually. It’s impossible to go through hundreds of product pages looking for promotions and discounts offered by your competitors. You can get it done within a few minutes and spend the rest of your time devising a pricing strategy that will work for your business.

Maximize profit margins

Most online stores that fail to reach the desired level of success failed to come up with a suitable pricing strategy. You need tangible information to develop a pricing model that works for your industry and brand. If you go so high, you risk becoming uncommunicative and losing out on customers who simply can’t afford your product or service. On the other hand, if you go too low to the extent that you become unprofitable, your online store can face serious losses that lead to closure. To avoid all these, monitor competitor prices round the clock and always know what’s happening in your industry. Get reports on latest price changes and trends so you know exactly what your competitor is doing and react accordingly.

David Hart, has scraped over thousands of websites providing our clients from North America and Europe with data in formats as per their requirement, providing web scraping, business intelligence information, competitive price intelligence, retail business outlet locations, product catalogs, etc.