Competitor Price Monitoring for Retail Growth

Competitor price monitoring is a necessity for retailers looking to thrive in today’s competitive landscape. By gaining complete visibility into competitor’s pricing and promotional data, retailers can make data-driven decisions to optimize your own pricing and promotions.

Reliable competitive intelligence data, which monitors price, promotion, assortment, and availability at the desired frequency, is the key to unlocking this valuable information.

What is Competitor Price Monitoring?

By tracking and analyzing the prices of comparable products and categories offered by competitors, retailers can gain a deep understanding of market dynamics and competitive positioning. Competitive price monitoring reveals how other stores are pricing their offerings and how those prices fluctuate over time, enabling retailers to adjust their own pricing strategies to remain competitive.

High-quality competitive pricing data enables you to…

• Identify pricing gaps: Discover opportunities to adjust prices to match or exceed competitors.
• Optimize promotions: Determine the effectiveness of promotional strategies and identify areas for improvement.
• Monitor market trends: Stay informed about industry-wide price changes and consumer preferences.
• Enhance pricing decision-making: Make data-driven decisions to maximize sales and profitability.

By leveraging competitive price monitoring as a strategic tool, you’ll gain a competitive edge, improve customer satisfaction, and drive business growth.

What is Price Intelligence?

Price intelligence is a strategic tool that provides retailers with real-time insights. It’s broader than competitor price monitoring.

Not only does price intelligence monitor competitor prices, but it also includes gathering and analyzing a wide range of pricing-related data, market trends, and other relevant information.

The process of price intelligence is to provide a complete understanding of the entire pricing landscape… beyond just competitor prices.

What is Price Optimization?

Retail price optimization is the process of setting and adjusting product prices to maximize sales and profitability.

It involves using data-driven insights and advanced analytics to determine the optimal price point for each product based on various factors like pricing, costs, elasticity, and assortment.

This adaptive approach ensures that prices are set in alignment with your strategy. Using the right price optimization solution will help you increase sales, improve profitability, enhance customer experience, and outperform competitors.

Price. Price. Price.

All of this to say… price matters in retail.

Let’s recap:

• Competitor price monitoring is a subset of price intelligence
• Price intelligence takes into account a wider array of data and insights to inform pricing strategies
• Price optimization develops optimized pricing strategies 
• Retailers need reliable price and promotion data to understand the market and make informed pricing decisions

Collection & Analysis of Competitor Pricing Data

Now, it’s time to get started with your competitive price monitoring & intelligence strategy. 

You might think about visiting your competitors’ websites and building a spreadsheet with product details and prices… but that would be laborious. I know it’s not uncommon for retailers to comp shop by sending employees into competitor stores to check out what promotions are running and take notes on pricing, but that’s not scalable.

The best way to collect and analyze pricing data starts with competitive intelligence.

A credible retail competitive intelligence provider has a proven data collection method so that you’re receiving the data frequently, reliably, and you trust its accuracy.

Once the data is collected, then your intelligence provider should match products so that you can easily compare exact, equivalent, and similar products across the competitive market.

Like data collection, product matching shouldn’t be a manual process.

Once the product matches are available, you can analyze the pricing/promotion data to make more informed decisions for your growth strategies.

Pricing Data In Action

In today’s world, prices change often. Some retailers change them quickly and often (like Amazon). To understand the pricing landscape and effectively compete, you need the pricing intelligence component so that you can confidently set the right price.

First, retailers should define their key value items (KVIs) and competitors. Is your pricing effected by a a traditional retailer, pureplay ecommerce site, or omnichannel/national retailer?

Documenting that will help you monitor the prices and promotions specific items, locations and competitors closely. Take your data and analyze it to find strategic ways to compete on pricing against your biggest rivals. 

Let’s say you want to be positioned as the price leader to increase loyalty and sales, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll drop your prices… Instead, to standout, you have to offer a strong price-value to promote and drive the purchase decision. 

I recently looked at some data for a specific retail vertical and noticed that one retailer’s prices were regularly 20% lower than the competitive set. The advice there is to actually raise certain items prices to match the market.

To capture pricing data or discover your competition, look for a retail-specific competitive intelligence platform. (Talk to us if you’re looking for a scalable, reliable process.)

5 Benefits of Price Intelligence

(1) Monitor Competitor Price Strategies 📉

Track prices and promotions across the competitive landscape.

Imagine having the visibility of the highest priced retailers, the lowest priced retailers, and exactly where you fit. 

(2) Gain Efficiency & Drive Innovation 💡

Focus on your strategy by leveraging a price intelligence / competitive intelligence solution.

No more manual collecting, auditing or cleansing your data to get a picture of the market. Your provider should stitch a real time picture for you.

(3) Improve Your Assortment Strategy 📍

Identify assortment gaps by comparing your catalog to competitor catalogs.

With reliable data, you can notice if a category or item is regularly discounted and draw a conclusion that that category or item may be growing sales for your competitor. 

(4) Build Customer Loyalty 📣

Develop your pricing strategy around price perception.

If your prices are too high, some shoppers may avoid your store altogether. If your prices are too low, some shoppers might consider your selection low quality. The sweet spot is building loyalty so that shopper has a strong perception of your prices.

(5) Strengthen Your Pricing Strategy 💰

Use all of the data, product matching, and analytics from a retail pricing intelligence solution to drive sales.

Monitor and analyze the competitive landscape so that you can optimize your prices instead of copying and pasting your strategy year after year.

Does Everyone Love a Bargain?

Shoppers are price sensitive and notice price changes. 

More than 263 million American consumers shop online—some 80% of the population—and you can expect this number to climb to 291.2 million by 2025. Even so, don’t ignore in-store shopping. Customers expect a seamless online to in-store buying experience. For example, some 70% of shoppers factor in the availability of physical stores when buying.

This means the omnichannel experience is a critical component to success.

Nurture all shoppers throughout the buying journey to boost value perception. Every retailer needs consistent pricing, promotions, and availability between your online storefront and physical brick-and-mortar shelves.

Set Up Your Own Competitor Price Tracking

Get reliable, accurate pricing intelligence to stay a step ahead of your competition. Tell us what competitors, SKUs, and zip codes you’d like to monitor and we’ll show you how competitive pricing data will help your business grow.