5 Reasons Why Your Company Should Start Price Monitoring
E-commerce is a fast-growing industry projected to hit $5 trillion by 2022. And with every brand trying to make massive retail e-commerce sales, there is more need to pay attention to what is most important and ignore whatever will not benefit your brand.
Regardless of what product or service you sell or what industry you fall under, one of the things that will benefit your e-commerce business the most in today’s market, is price monitoring.
What is price monitoring?
We can define price monitoring as the process of gathering and analyzing both internal and external variables to optimize your products’ prices properly.
The internal factors used in such analysis include your products’ price history, the available stocks, production cost, and margin. In contrast, the external factors commonly used for this type of analysis include consumers’ behavior, seasonal trends, as well as the prices your competitors are selling at. Learn more about price monitoring by checking the Oxylabs website or reading this article below.
Importance of web scraping in price monitoring
Many people believe that product quality is key to business success, and they might be right. Still, we think it should be combined with a reasonable price monitoring strategy for the best result. Web scraping is a common method for successful price monitoring.
Web scraping is the general process of collecting useful public data from multiple websites. It is also sometimes called web crawling and involves specialized tools to extract data from various websites and other platforms. The other platforms where data can be extracted include public databases, social media channels, and critical marketplaces.
The aim of extracting such data is to initiate price monitoring by tracking competitors’ products on various websites and marketplaces, checking and retrieving prices of products, obtaining information on current best-selling goods and services and to know if a new competition has entered the market, and retrieving trends on competitors’ prices and consumers’ behavior.
5 reasons why every modern business should implement price monitoring
Companies can no longer sleep on important issues such as price monitoring because buyers always compare prices of the same products and services before making a purchasing decision. When your prices are too high compared to your competition, you risk losing customers and, consequently, sales. On the other hand, when your prices are too low, you risk making less profit and revenue.
The simple trick is to find a middle ground and build a pricing strategy that can adjust to the market conditions, which is basically what price monitoring does. Here are five reasons why every modern business needs to start price monitoring:
- To maximize profit
With demand, supply, and the internet itself all mounting pressures that influence how e-commerce works, it is often easy to lose focus and become uncertain about sales. Businesses get confused and wonder if they are doing it correctly or making the most out of each sale.
Price monitoring helps eradicate such doubt and restore confidence in the business model by knowing what is happening in the market and how others are selling. This will help you make a clear decision on how to fix prices.
2. To increase conversions
Online buyers will mostly buy from only those brands that win their trust and loyalty. And winning their trust usually involves connecting with customers emotionally, and this can only be achieved when you service their pain points.
Price monitoring exposes what these pain points are and how to position your brand to service them. Doing this automatically translates into higher conversions and more sales.
3. To make more sales
Selling is the fundamental goal of every business, but many businesses fail woefully because of a lack of proper knowledge about the buyers. Because buyers are not all the same (some high spenders, others low spenders and so on), it would be inefficient to sell to all buyers in the same manner.
Price monitoring allows you to know what type of buyers are consuming your products and services and how to sell to them, which is the simplest way to make more sales.
4. To roll with the times
A simple reason why many businesses fail is that they try to sell the right products at the wrong time. In comparison, e-commerce may always stay the same needs, and demands do not. They change according to the times, seasons, and trends. A wise brand knows what to sell at what times and at what prices to sell.
You might not know all these except you have a great price monitoring strategy going.
5. To build a better brand
Looking inwards alone will never make a brand successful. Businesses that must build and improve need to understand their customers, competitors and the type of market they easily dominate.
This helps you make the right decisions and adjustments necessary to build a better brand, and the data required for that can only be obtained through price monitoring.
Conclusion
As clearly seen above, if you are running an e-commerce business intending to grow and become successful, then there are several reasons why you should do price monitoring and no reason why you should not.
Price monitoring will not only help you serve your customers better, but it will help you do so at the right prices and at the right time.
