The Ultimate Guide to Using Price Intelligence Solutions for Your Business

Contents

Price Intelligence: What is it?

How do Price Intelligence Solutions work?

The Benefits of Price Intelligence for Your Business

How can Brands and Retailers implement Price Intelligence?

Examples of Successful Pricing Strategies with Price Intelligence

What are the Trends in Price Intelligence?

Price Intelligence Solutions FAQs

Price Intelligence: What is it?

As the term already suggests, price intelligence is an approach that deals with the use of intelligence (data mining techniques) for the extraction, analysis, and optimisation of prices. Unlike other methodologies, this one provides companies with accurate pricing information in real time.

The truth is that traditional pricing methods do not work in today’s volatile online environment anymore, which is characterised by changing sales channels, customer behaviours, and economic conditions. In order to tackle these challenges retailers and brands need to implement competitive pricing solutions. These powerful tools can help you track and analyse prices across your industry, allowing you to make informed decisions about your pricing strategy. By implementing price intelligence in your business, you can gain a competitive edge, improve your profitability, and better serve your customers.

How do Price Intelligence Tools work?

Working with intelligent data solutions can seem complex at the beginning, but we have gathered some key information on how these price intelligence solutions work, using as an example our own Netrivals solution:

Before making the tools work for you, you should…

1. Choose the products and connect them with the platform: How can a SaaS (Software as a Service) work without knowing which products to search for? The answer: It just cannot. This is why as a user you need to provide the system with all the products you wish to monitor on the web. Either you add them manually or automatically thanks to the synchronisation of your e-commerce with the software. In just one click you can connect solutions like Netrivals with all kinds of CMS providers and make it easier to change prices in the future dynamically.
2. Define your main competitors and the platforms you want to monitor: Before actually working with a price intelligence tool you need to define how you are going to employ it. Maybe you just want to focus on monitoring sellers on Amazon and know your position in the market or maybe you want to take a step further and gather data from all your competitors on each marketplace to optimise your pricing strategy with dynamic pricing. No matter which features you choose, you need to know who and where to look for.

Once the software has everything it needs to start working, here is how it functions:

1. Data collection: Scraping the web is a constant process that occurs daily from time intervals ranging from 5 minutes to several hours, depending on the products. This process generates a massive volume of requests, resulting in the storage of petabytes of data from all over the world. The software automatically creates connections between each of your products when it discovers a competitor’s product with an identical EAN code. In addition, if it is impossible to find an EAN, the solution can also search for titles, images, and references (Smart Suggestions) on e-commerce pages, marketplaces, and even comparison websites.
2. Data mining: After all the data has been collected, the software converts it into knowledge, or in other words, it presents the results in form of figures, percentages, and colour codes so that the users can easily see them at a glance whether their prices are lower, higher, or the same as those of their rivals. However, the data collected does not only consist of pricing data. Below you will find a list of all types of data that our systems are able to scan:

The Benefits of Price Intelligence Solutions for Your Business

Now you know how the software works, but how can the collected data benefit your job and e-commerce business? 

In short: Price intelligence solutions make your work as a professional in the sales, marketing, or pricing department more efficient by giving you: 

• More time and money to invest in your business growth (No more manual monitoring!)
• Precise and real-time pricing information (No more clumsiness!)
• Better pricing strategies thanks to extensive data (No more random guesses!)
• Higher chances of owning the Buy Box (No more invisibility on sales channels!)
• Increased revenue and competitiveness (No more loss of profit!)
• Better overview of your customers’ opinions (No more wrong values!)

Overall, with the help of price intelligence, you can enhance your pricing strategy, become more competitive, and boost conversions by analysing the market and gathering pertinent data from your rivals. In case you are still not convinced about the importance of price intelligence for your business, we have also gathered a list of the top 7 reasons to use price intelligence software, which you can access here.

How can Brands and Retailers implement Price Intelligence?

Price intelligence is often used as a very broad term which is why it is important to understand its different solutions and implementations for brands and retailers selling online.

First and foremost, it is important to understand that retailers do not have the same needs as brands, and vice versa: 

Retailers usually focus more on monitoring how other retailers are pricing the same products on different platforms. This means using price intelligence solutions like:

Brands, on the other hand, tend to focus more on how online retailers are pricing their products, if their products are out of stock, and how other brands are pricing similar items. 

Below you can find the most relevant solutions for brands:

Did you know that…

Among all other pricing solutions, Netrivals is the only price intelligence platform able to offer all features listed above?

As you can see in both images, online sellers can really cover all pricing challenges on all types of sales platforms (direct web, marketplaces, and marketing channels), and this is thanks to big data storage and sophisticated software systems.

Lastly, here are some essential tips for both retailers and brands:

• Plan ahead, and you will be rewarded: Let’s imagine you want to prepare your Black Friday campaign. You want to make sure you beat all your competitors by offering the best prices on Amazon and Google Shopping, for instance. First, you need some weeks to track the prices of your competition and see how consumers have been perceiving your products. Then you need another week or two to define your pricing strategy and rules thanks to solutions like dynamic pricing and only then you can start to adjust your prices. Therefore, the earlier you start using price intelligence, the earlier you achieve your targets.

• Set realistic targets: A 2018 study on the financial consequences of optimistic entrepreneurs showed that those who overestimated their business success were doomed to fail. This could also apply to any business strategy you might develop: Do not expect to become a market leader overnight, but rather set realistic targets you want to accomplish with your price intelligence solutions.

Examples of Successful Pricing Strategies with Price Intelligence

After carefully examining how price intelligence can benefit businesses, here are two success stories from retailers that chose Lengow’s pricing solutions, Netrivals:

Sobrico

Since its launch in 2014, Sobrico has established itself as one of the top players in the French DIY market. With more than 40,000 products in its catalogue, this online store faced the challenge of maintaining all the prices and ensuring competitive pricing at all times. 

For this reason, Sobrico chose Netrivals as its go-to pricing solution which helped it achieve:

• 50K products distributed on marketplaces & marketing channels
• Be present in 20+ channels
• 20 hours saved per month thanks to automation provided by the platform

Perfumerías Julia

With over 70 stores all over Andorra and Spain, this family-owned beauty company has grown into a market leader known for the best products with the highest customer service. However, the company was losing too much time searching for pricing data manually. Therefore, it needed a pricing solution that solved that but also helped with the growth of its customer base. Netrivals was able to help it:

• Take better decisions thanks to the benchmarking and monitoring tools available in the platform
• Increase its CVR by more than 50%

What are the Trends in Price Intelligence?

Here are some of the latest trends in price intelligence (Last Update: December 2022): 

Dynamic Pricing

This pricing strategy, and one of many Netrivals’ features, consists of adapting prices to dynamic market conditions, allowing retailers to always optimise their prices in real-time and become more competitive. As shown above on the worldwide Google searches of the last 5 years, “dynamic pricing” has never been more popular, especially one week before Black Friday (13-19.11.2022), which indicates the sellers’ interest in using such an approach to offer the best prices during that period. 

Marketplaces and price image

Today it is usual for buyers to discover various pricing for the same goods across several marketplaces. Guess which product this consumer will buy if they notice that yours is being marketed for a lot more on a marketplace than those of your competitors? Exactly: not yours. It’s possible that your product costs two times cheaper on another marketplace, but it’s also possible that this customer has no idea.

Therefore, brands and retailers should gain more control over their products’ price image, which is known as the perception of your products’ pricing when comparing them to your competition. The solution? The use of price monitoring tools.

Inflation

According to Tim Ouimet, co-founder of Engage3, a company that provides dynamic pricing services, retailers tend to change prices more regularly during high inflation in order to protect their margins. High inflation demands price adjustments for each product and client category as well as market awareness, both of which can only be achieved with the aid of competitive pricing monitoring software. Especially when it comes to the protection of margins we recommend you use dynamic pricing.

Amazon Buy Box

Around 83% of all purchases made on Amazon happen through the Buy Box, which is visible on the right side of a product page with the options Add to Basket and Buy now.

In case you are selling your goods on Amazon too you know how hard it is to gain that Buy Box and how rewarding it would be to have it for each of your products. The good news is that thanks to dynamic pricing you can increase your chances of gaining it. Now that Amazon has compromised to introduce a second Buy Box for each product in Europe by the end of June 2023, it could help future retailers and brands to position themselves even better.

Price Intelligence Solutions FAQs