Understanding
Price Intelligence

What is Price Intelligence?

Price intelligence is having a powerful knowledge of the prices in your current business market and the impact it has on your company. We gain this knowledge through key competitive intelligence data extracted from your competitors. This would be the data scraping of all pricing information of you and your chosen competitors. We apply this technique to many beneficial changes. It is most commonly used to optimize pricing strategies to give you a more competitive edge.

The Process of Price Intelligence

The process of price intelligence software takes a time-consuming process and automates the “heavy lifting”. The process goes like this-

1- Finding the products on your competitors’ websites.

2- Matching the products to find exact matches through both machine learning & human intelligence.

3- Extracting all the key data such as pricing information, promotional pricing data, delivery costs and stock availability.

4- Building and keeping your database up to date on a day to day basis while checking for accurate reliable information.

5- Sorting your data into various reports, visualizations and any bespoke ways you need to manipulate the analytics. Now, with your improved price intelligence insights, you can reap the benefits listed below.

 

Why Do You Need Price Intelligence?

Price Intelligence is fast becoming essential in this day and age. This is being utilised by a variety of different businesses to gain specific knowledge on a wide range of useful data. This is a very time-consuming process to collect without the price intelligence software automation ability getting utilised. The data gathered through the process of competitor price monitoring gives you a strong understanding of the market position of you and your competitors. Understanding the price sensitivity of products you want to be tracked. The Pricing history, the behaviour and the price fluctuation of your direct competition are all insights you can have in one place.

The demand for price intelligence is on the rise. The competitive nature of having a good pricing strategy is fundamental to getting ahead in business. Some big ecommerce sites such as Amazon are scraping and amending prices every ten minutes! This helps them implement their pricing strategy of being the cheapest possible retailer.

Why Pricing Strategy Matters?

Often overlooked regarding getting the most out of your price intelligence. Your pricing strategy does not have to be the cheapest to stay competitive. A good pricing strategy is all about optimising and picking what is best suited for you. Consider your personal goals, the audience your targeting, and your competitive intelligence. With the training we provide, we can help you better understand and furthermore utilise this to achieve a stronger market position. You will notice trends and niches in your market, which are profitable for you to act upon.

What are the benefits of Price Intelligence?

1- Save money, time and resources

2- Supports profitable growth

3- Analysis and optimize your product range

4- Achieve a more competitive edge

5- Optimise your pricing strategy

6- Track and make the most of marketplace trends

7- Better inventory management

8- Better customer loyalty

9- Optimise your PPC spend based on your price position and your competitors stock availability

10- Product Feed Optimisation

11- Improve your Google shopping strategy

12- Benchmark & manipulate the data you need in line with achieving your business aims & objectives

13- Optimise your promotional pricing strategies 

5 Top Tips For Getting The Most Out of Pricing Intelligence Software

Be proactive by using the Data you have in front of you and react to changes as quick as possible!  

Gain a full understanding of the price intelligence capabilities. Take advantage of the training/demonstrations included with the service.

Optimise & implement the right pricing strategy for you, don’t rely solely on the pricing information. Consider all factors.

Make sure the software is integrable with all your current business systems. For example, we have an API (Application Program Interface). This allows you to integrate our data into your own ‘back end’ systems, e.g. ecommerce website, order processing, or your stock control systems. You can also export data in excel or other standard formats, e.g. CSV.

Free up time by making use of all the automation available. Automation can be implemented through data collection or, better yet, using the repricing engine.

The Reports & Tools

There are many types of price intelligence reports & tools within the Insitetrack solution. These are all uniquely beneficial to helping you get the most out of your price intelligence journey! 

The standard system is just the starting point of what Insitetrack can offer. We understand that each business can have bespoke needs and different ways they need to manipulate the price intelligence data.

Here’s an example- their own unique cost effectiveness analysis of each product over a 12-week period. In this time frame, they need to know exactly how much profit per item.

We can calculate and implement into your system this by simply using data already in the system. Here, it would be your total profit on each product over this set period, divided by your stock availability within the current timeframe.

With this data implemented in an easy-to-read format, here are a few ways this can directly benefit them-

1- Saving time working this out in-house

2- Restocking & even supplier renegotiations

3- Identifying key value products over this time period

4- Data needed for quarterly reviews

Here are a handful of tools and reports and a brief explanation on what to expect on a standard system.

Insitetrack Dashboard & What To Expect

Competitor Prices History

Set up in a chart format. This shows the total number of competitor prices you are tracking together with the percentage of prices that are lower than your prices over a set time period. This is very insightful to see how competitive you are price wise and also a simple way to monitor the impact of your price changes.

Pricing Position

This chart will show you, on an individual competitor level, the percentage of prices that are higher, lower or equal to those measured against your chosen competitors. Very useful for benchmarking and monitoring the competitors that you believe are your most direct competition. 

Today’s Data

Today’s data is the first thing you will take notice of when you log into the system. This summarizes how you are competing in your respective markets. With this in mind, quickly identify key changes and any trends that need looking into. By clicking on any of the tabs, it will redirect you to more in-depth information that you require. 

More in Depth Reports

The Details Report

 The details report shows the Our ID that is matched with the Retailer ID and also the price that the retailer is selling that product at. This is very useful for identifying the prices of your competitors based on a specific product. For example, optimizing your best products to have the best competitive price. Take it the extra mile by integrating stock availability, delivery information and maximising your profit margin.

The Price Changes Report

This report is beneficial to see what prices have changed on a day-to-day basis. This coupled with sales today is great for assessing how/have these changes might affect your competitiveness. You need to stay aware of whose changing prices, what products have had price changes and also by how much, including changes in delivery pricing. 

The Lowest Prices Report

The Price Variance Report

This report shows the price difference between the chosen products you have picked against your competitors. You can see the profit margin in both a currency and a percentage format. With adjustable filters, you can efficiently find groups of products that you feel you can compete better with and, of course, what competitors you can gain an edge on. 

The Crosstab Report

The Marketplace Report

This report is built to see how you competitively match up with your competitors prices on big ecommerce marketplaces such as google, amazon and eBay. In addition to seeing your pricing information, you will also see your ranking position which can have a significant impact on your sales. This can also used for adjusting your bid pricing in google shopping. 

The Competitor Summary Report

The competitor summary summarizes the number of matches and prices for each of the competitors you are tracking in the system. It’s a useful report that allows you to track the number of matches and prices and how these metrics have changed. The key metrics in this report include, the number of matches to your product, the number of daily prices captured, the number of prices captured as a percentage of total prices, the number of prices that are lower than your price and also the numbers of prices lower than your price as a percentage of total prices.

The Auto Price Manage System

APM-  The Auto Price Manage system is a key feature in the Insitetrack solution. With a set of pre-defined business rules our clients have provided. We take into account your competitors pricing information and provide you with automated recommended price changes.

Here is three basic examples of how this can be utilised–

1- When you should raise a price to increase profits.

2- When you should lower your price to ensure you are in a more competitive position of said products.

3- Benchmarking a group of products to achieve a specific profit margin.

This process works alongside the data captured daily to ensure accuracy while saving you time implementing your current pricing strategy.

Here is a couple examples of a type of business rule that the APM can work with relating to what the client wants to achieve-

• Match any competitor price lower than my price providing my margin is greater than 10%.

• Match the lowest price (minus £1.00) of any “Nike Football Boots” , providing the product is in stock and our margin is greater than 11.5%.

The APM system is capable of handling much more complex business rules depending on your needs. For example you could implement many different rules for different brands, categories, specific products and so on.

How to Integrate The APM System  

Implementing the recommended price changes can be done manually through the integration ability of Insitetrack where you can download the data into a format which is ready to integrate into your business systems. There is also an auto approve system that approves price changes into your own Approved Price Changes grid. This is an optional feature and doesn’t have to be implemented on your system, although this can be time saving and very efficient as it will run on a rule you have provided. For example, you could set a rule to auto approve every product that keeps their Margin above 30% after the APM change.

 Why Choose Insitetrack?

We understand that retailing is not a trivial task. Whether you are a retailer or a brand. It is extremely daunting to keep up with all the factors that can affect your competitive nature. The direct impact of your competitors, managing stock effectively, logistics, the advancements in technology, repricing with confidence to just name a few of the challenges. We aim to take some of the pressure off your shoulders by giving you clear visibility in your markets. We want to give you everything you need to price your products more efficiently. Giving you great analysis and recommendations on how you can go the extra mile!

We’re not just selling you a system. First of before we set you up on the system, we want to ensure we tailor it to your specific needs. From your business objectives, to the goals you’ve set yourselves, to what is the most important pricing information you need visibility for. We consider all these factors to ensure you get the most out of your bespoke system. Don’t hesitate to ask us for something more. We’re here to help you!

The automation ability needs to be taken advantage of. We want to do as much “heavy lifting” as possible for you. As saving time while becoming more competitive is a win-win! There is so much more automation to utilise than just the data collection and analysis. Why not set up email alerts with us to make your life a little easier. Last but not least, use the APM feature and reprice at optimal price points with the “best fit” business rules for you!