They say keep your friends close and your enemies closer, and if you're running an eCommerce store, then you'll need to keep this advice close to heart. Comparison shopping search engines such as Google Shopping have contributed to the rise in eCommerce merchants desperately trying to outmatch their rivals' prices, promotions, and catalogs.
Competitor monitoring may seem like a gargantuan task, but price optimization solutions can help not only lighten the load of manual price checking, but also help eCommerce professionals understand how customers may respond to pricing points, and how to set pricing levels that are right for their business.
If you've had enough of manually adjusting pricing and running manual alerts on competitor prices, I've put together a list of four leading competitor monitoring solutions that can help you automate and optimize your pricing strategy.
Competera is a pricing platform for eCommerce retailers which helps to accurately adjust product prices to boost sales using competitor monitoring. Based on recommendations drawn from data such as competitor pricing, promotions, and stock availability, Competera assesses how changes in prices for one SKU can affect the sale of others, and optimizes prices based on what's beneficial for both company profit and customer expectations. Competera also seamlessly integrates with popular eCommerce platforms Shopify and Magento.
Key competitor monitoring features:
Market position visualizations
Promotions monitoring
MAP (minimum advertised price) monitoring
Competitor analysis
Brand monitoring
Manual and automatic web-store synchronization.
One reviewer says: "Two months ago my daily problem was the huge scope of goods in the assortment of our store. The number of products didn't allow for us to correct all the prices manually, and the process became more and more tedious. Also, competitors started to change price in increasing frequency. We integrated Competera solutions and began to receive our competitors insights. We achieved our business goal - the customers' perception of our price positioning was changed as we like and in line with our expected business performances".
Pricing: Competera prices begin at $114.00 per month on a subscription basis.
Incompetitor is a retail analytics platform for eCommerce websites which helps users make smarter pricing decisions through competitor monitoring. With real-time analysis into competitor pricing, promotions, and catalog strategies, Incompetitor users are able to assess market trends and benchmark themselves against competitors. Incompetitor's price monitoring algorithm helps organizations set optimal price parameters, track trends, and buyer behavior .
Key competitor monitoring features:
Data mining
Competitor mapping
Trend tracking and analysis
Real time analytics
Interactive data visualization
Automated competitor benchmarking.
One reviewer says: "Even with over 2,000 brick-and- mortar stores in Indonesia, it wasn't easy to step into the e-commerce world. However, having incompetitor on hand meant that this transition was considerably smoothed over for us. Using incompetitor has made category mapping easy; it is easy for us to understand the best price to sell our products. incompetitor has helped us with three valuable pieces of data telling us the optimum selling price, the right selection of products, and understand our competition. Multilingual mapping breaks language barriers, and helps pull information internally with descriptions, and externally as well, with global brands."
Pricing: Pricing information can be obtained directly from Incompetitor.
Prisync is a competitor price tracking solution which automatically tracks competitor pricing and stock levels. Prisync's data is updated four times a day, and is also displayed in a user dashboard for quick analysis. The competitor monitoring app also offers reporting at a brand and category level for a variety of eCommerce managers.
Key competitor monitoring features:
Daily price change emails
Report exports
API
Global market coverage
Track unlimited number of competitors.
One reviewer says: "I discovered Prisync about 18 months ago and we have been using it to track our competitors ever since. They offer a very simple clear interface that's easy to set up and navigate. They will also automate product input for you and even have an API that links to our own internal database, allowing us to make quick decisions on product margins. A great all round service!"
Pricing: Prisync has 3 different pricing plans depending on how many SKUs are being tracked per account, and each pricing plan varies how many features it offers. All Prisync plans offer a 'no-strings' plan, with cancellation available at any time.
Professional : Covers 100 products for $49 per month
Premium : Covers 1000 products for $119 per month
Platinum : Covers 5000 products for $209 per month.
Price2Spy is a price tracking solution which offers pricing data acquisition, reporting, and competitor monitoring for eCommerce professionals. Price2Spy's competitor monitoring features include price comparison, historical data, and price and stock change data. Users can choose from daily emails to instant alerts when competitor prices change, and when your competitors alter their prices within a certain parameter, Price2Spy can automatically update your pricing information with no manual intervention.
Key competitor monitoring features:
Historical price charts
Pricing dashboard
Automated price check
Price matrix report
Pattern analysis
Product matching.
One reviewer says: "Before we used Price2Spy "Competitor price monitoring" tool, gathering intel on competitors was a mere time consuming experience with little result. Since we've started to use the software, immediately the results came up: who's leading the price war, who's lagging, what strategies are used, how (dis)honest are certain competitors… It gave us the insights we were missing and helped us control our strategy."
Pricing: Price2Spy offer a basic or premium plan, with tiered options in each plan. Price2Spy recommend starting with smaller pricing plans, and upgrading once the number of monitored URLs increases. Price2Spy compare the features for each pricing plan in this handy table.
Basic plan
Small : $19.95 per month
Medium: $49.95 per month
Large: $99.95 per month
XL: $249.95 per month
50K: $499.95 per month
Premium plan
Small: $39.95 per month
Medium: $99.95 per month
Large: $249.95 per month
XL: $499.95 per month
50K : $999.95 per month.
Check out our full catalog of price optimization software which can help you understand how your customers might respond to different pricing offers
For more detailed advice on how to choose price optimization software, read this handy article: How to Choose Pricing Optimization Software to Boost Your Profit Margins .
Bandita Awasthi