In today’s world, it is common for people to review and compare services and products online before making a purchase. User experience greatly helps businesses to retain their existing customers for as long as possible. Since price is the driving factor, it is crucial for brands to monitor prices and pricing data to keep up with the ever-changing market.
Some companies carry out price monitoring manually; however, this can be quite challenging. Many web scraping solutions are now available to help companies gather public pricing data and perform price monitoring for their customers in an effortless manner.
This post is all about price monitoring and how automated price monitoring solutions can prove to be advantageous for your business. So, let’s get started.
Price Monitoring
Price monitoring, also called competitive price monitoring or price intelligence, is the practice of tracking and analyzing internal and external elements of prices to help you optimize your pricing strategy. Monitoring the pricing history gives businesses a deeper understanding of the market and helps them make data-driven decisions in the future.
In addition, this process obtains competitors’ information to give businesses an idea of their market positioning. The primary purpose of price monitoring is to keep up with the ever-changing market, optimize pricing strategies, preserve margins, and boost profits.
Benefits of Conducting Price Monitoring
Price monitoring can benefit a business in so many ways. Here are some of the main benefits of conducting price monitoring:
Increased Market Awareness
Consumers are always finding the best deals, and so many online shopping options have made them quite savvy. They like to spend time checking out their options and comparing products with each other until they end up picking the right one for them.
With price monitoring, brands can optimize the prices of their products to stay competitive based on the season, demand, production cost, and other factors. It tracks all the data points to help retailers boost profits and sales at the right time.
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Better Reaction Time
Nowadays, businesses continuously update their prices to stay competitive. Keeping fixed prices for too long can lead to loss if brands aren’t keeping up with the current situation of the market.
Some businesses change their prices many times throughout the day. This practice is called dynamic pricing, which focuses on using a flexible price for your products to keep up with market trends at any time.
It is especially helpful when trying to monitor market fluctuations and recommend prices depending on current conditions. Price monitoring software enables businesses to stay competitive and function in real-time without narrowing their profit margins.
Improved Sales
It is important to offer an appealing price if you want to boost your sales and for your customer to choose you over other sellers. Price monitoring makes it happen – timely comparisons and analysis of prices, discounts, and offers of your competitors.
This process also guides you through sales and marketing strategies. The objective of price monitoring is to ensure prices almost always meet the major business objectives, like being competitive, protecting a margin, building a reputation, etc.
Margin Protection
Tracking competitors can give businesses an estimate of how they should price their products. In addition, it gives them a reference to how they want to position their brand and products in the market for the same kind of products.
Price monitoring helps businesses study their product assortment to see where their inventory is with competitors and find out opportunities to widen their inventory. Essentially, it enables businesses to measure their prices against their competitors and get a basic understanding of their margins.
More Customer Satisfaction
Apart from other factors, customer satisfaction is also based on pricing and promotions. Optimizing prices with price monitoring can be a win-win situation for increasing sales and creating happy customers.
Being content with their purchase will make customers more excited to return to shop with you again. The process also helps businesses provide personalized and relevant promotions, which as a result, increases customer satisfaction.
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Price Monitoring: Self-made vs. Pre-made Solutions
Nowadays, many companies use tools to get help with price monitoring since these software solutions can be very effective at detecting changes in prices. These tools include a price tracker, price monitor extension, and web scraper.
While some developers prefer building their own solution, many opt for a ready-made tool to get help with price monitoring. For instance, some businesses prefer DIY web scraping tools, as fixing issues and customization are pretty easy. However, this process can be time-consuming and demands certain skills. They also need to pay for some resources like proxies, servers, etc.
In contrast, choosing an already-built API can be beneficial in its own way. Most web scraping APIs include a quality proxy pool, a dedicated team of developers, and customer support. Amazon scraper API from Oxylabs, for example, scrapes and parses many Amazon page types and gathers real-time product data.
Also, Amazon Scraper API offers 24/7 support to answer questions in a timely manner. But there is still a need to have some basic coding knowledge to understand the documentation and work with commercial scraping solutions.
All in all, DIY solutions work best if you are not short on time. However, there is still a need to pay for resources. On the other hand, pre-made solutions are great for those who don’t have enough time and any budget restrictions.
Final Words
Price monitoring is useful for businesses to understand their competitors’ strategies and make their services/products more desirable. Today, many high-quality automated price monitoring tools have come into use to help companies keep up with the changing industries and stay ahead of the competition.