Keeping tabs on the ongoing market price for products you sell, resell, or plan to purchase is an important business and consumer practice in today’s dynamic marketplace of fluctuating prices. With prices changing daily if not hourly based on supply availability, competitive moves, and demand bursts, tracking pricing is vital.
We outline best practices leveraging a variety of manual monitoring methods and modern ecommerce price monitoring automation software and data analytics to stay on top of the latest price points.
Why Continuous Price Monitoring Matters
Ongoing price monitoring provides retailers visibility into critical profitability and cost management. It enables consumers to make informed purchase timing decisions, and helps distribution partners assess channel price consistency issues.
With pricing so variable today, one needs dynamic ecommerce price monitoring instead of relying on periodic manual audits. Key use cases include:
Why Ongoing Pricing Visibility Creates Strategic Advantages
Pricing visibility helps individuals in different ways, including:
Competitor Pricing Parity Assurance
Continuous price monitoring of adjacent competitive offerings in the market allows retailers to ensure their everyday baseline prices offered to customers remain relatively aligned and consistent with prevailing rates rather than unintentionally undercutting and eroding profit margins due to a lack of environmental awareness.
Dynamic visibility also avoids losing otherwise viable deals simply due to a lack of short-term tactical intelligence on just how low competitors are promoting.
Empowering Timely Consumer Purchase Decisions
For value-focused shoppers, tracking daily as well as historical low price points seen for a given product across major authorized online and offline retailers helps identify opportune windows when temporally high demand for niche items drives steeper than usual markdowns and stacking discounts.
This understanding of price cycling lows allows consumers to make data-informed purchase timing decisions and confidently pull the trigger at cyclical deal peaks vs consistently waiting indefinitely for even lower pricing uncertainty.
Enabling Data-Driven Pricing Strategies
Longitudinal analysis of trailing multi-month category-specific pricing trend lines coupled with volatility-based metrics that quantify price fluctuation risk levels provides retailers with a vital time series database to engineer data-backed pricing strategies.
Granular price histories help surface seasonal effects and calendar anomaly events. Statistical forecasting and predictive models strengthen reliability and tail risks further.
Maintaining Reseller Channel Integrity
Suppliers with extensive authorized third-party reseller partnerships require consistent pricing visibility not just into their own direct sales channels but also importantly across their entire multi-channel distribution value chains.
Ongoing monitoring helps ensure advertised market prices comply with strategic rate cards, identifies divergent pricing that signals conflicts, and allows course corrections before brand integrity dilution.
Promotion Strategy Experimentation and Refinement
Dynamic visibility into transaction-level metrics like shopping cart abandonment rates in relation to introduction or changes made to various concurrent pricing promotions (BOGO, discounts, coupons) allows ecommerce brands to conduct rolling experiments to double down on the most incrementally profitable promotions after quantifying P&L impact in real-time.
Competitor Reaction Modeling and Game Planning
Retailers aim to infer likely strategic shifts in competitors’ pricing repositioning, product bundling, market prioritization, and discounting philosophy based on sudden anomalies spotted in their external price movements to preemptively adapt countermeasures, course correct sales team incentives, and update response game plans ahead of the next quarterly planning cycle for maximum advantage.
Supply Chain Risk Detection and Mitigation
Unexpected systemic price hikes in key imported manufacturing components spotted early via market alerts provide procurement teams advanced signals to make dynamic just-in-time inventory adjustments like accelerating orders for certain SKUs before operational disruption.
Alerting supply managers on leading indicators of stockout conditions before ripple effect shortages hit helps mitigate the financial impact.
The above use cases demonstrate that manual periodic price checks are insufficient today. Real-time price monitoring automation and analytics are essential for both operational competitiveness and strategic decision-making.
Approaches for Price Monitoring
Various approaches both manual and automated exist for monitoring prices:
● Manual Checking – Periodically surveying prices on marketplaces, store sites, and catalogs remains a standard method but lacks scalability and reliability. Humans miss detecting abrupt short term price swings.
● Price Tracking Browser Extensions – Extensions like the Camelizer display price histories and alerts when shopping online but have limited coverage beyond Amazon. Relying on APIs risks missing short term promotions.
● Scraping Software – Automated programs scrape prices round the clock from target sites providing historical data trails and visual charts but have setup complexity and access limitations.
● Dedicated Monitoring Services – Services like Pricefall provide managed monitoring across thousands of online and offline sellers but can impose stringent subscription terms.
● Integrated ERP Systems – Modern fully integrated ERP suites used by leading retailers such as Walmart incorporate real time pricing analytics, competitive intelligence and complex automatic pricing engines but have expensive licensing.
In terms of scalability, automation, fast detection of price changes, and competitive strategic enablement, paid monitoring services and integrated ERP systems provide the most robust capabilities for business use cases. However, for more casual consumer deal-hunting scenarios, free browser extensions offer a handy supplementary utility. Overall, aggravating market dynamics make dedicated price monitoring and responsive optimization essential.
Best Practices for Effective Monitoring
Follow these best practices to implement effective product price monitoring:
– Clearly identify business motivation driving monitoring need – strategy, operations, or purchase?
– Decide key metrics like frequency needs, depth of history, analysis needs etc.
– Select the optimal monitoring approach balancing sophistication, coverage, budget, and effort.
– Ensure comprehensive inclusion of all relevant alternate listings, sellers, and channels.
– Blend automated monitoring with contextual human insights wherever economically feasible.
– Capture both snapshot and historical tracking data for dual windows into price direction.
– Keep monitoring protocols highly consistent across SKUs and time periods for trend analysis.
– Proactively trigger strategic business decisions or tactical consumer actions based on alert findings.
– Monitor control groups of proxy “bellwether” items for advanced signal insights.
– Continuously iterate improving monitoring scope, tools, and analytics for maximal value over time.
FAQs
Now, let’s take a look at some common questions users ask about price monitoring:
Q1. What Is the Meaning of Price Monitoring?
Monitoring the price of a product refers to the process of keeping track of the price of a product or security to ensure that it doesn’t fall below a certain point.
Conclusion
With the exponential growth in data being created by omnichannel commerce, applying the above principles enables harnessing this valuable asset for strategic differentiation. Rather than being overwhelmed by proliferating pricing complexity, savvy businesses turn volatility into an advantage.
