Competitive Price Intelligence Errors in Products With Many Variants

How do we consider a product a ‘match’ against a competitor’s product?

It is one of the hardest challenges to provide accurate price comparisons. The detail needed at a product variant level depends on competitor clients in different marketplaces, types of product offerings, and direct and indirect competitors. Product matching without considering a variant level match in some marketplaces may be adequate. However, in most cases, the detailed product data needed to ‘match’ is much more complex.

Variants are the options (or choices) available while purchasing a product. They comprise generic attributes such as size, color, material, quantity/case pack, or specific attributes such as Amp, Wattage, Voltage, and Resistance for electrical tools, features or add-ons for software packages, ingredients for food products, etc. Sellers must explore variants affecting market pricing, and tweak competitive reports to achieve better pricing insights into competitor and market behavior.

Variants typically have a dynamic relationship with product prices, i.e. product prices can differ per variant – color, size, functionality, features, components, material, pattern, etc.

Here’s an example of a product price that varies with color –

When a Competitive Price Intelligence is run for a product with two variants, it is essential to accumulate the enriched set of product attributes. Variant level matching is a major challenge for exact product matching.

Depending on the product type and requirement, variants may have to be matched against a single or multiple attributes such as size, color, quantity, material, etc.

In the below example, the requirement is to match two black leather shoes. The competitor sells black leather and suede shoe. Here, we do not need to consider size or other attributes.

Client Product

Competitor Variant Product

To ensure the right variant is matched for each SKU, GrowByData’s proprietary price intelligence software marks such cases for review. With a mix of Artificial Intelligence, Human Intelligence, and quality check processes, we correctly match at a product variant level. Only with this, do we generate accurate SKU-level pricing data. This is the level of high-quality competitive pricing data you need to run your Price Intelligence software correctly and do Dynamic Pricing.

Without this level of precision, your repricer will not work. GrowByData Product intelligence software will give you competitors’ prices, however, they may be incorrect as they may not have matched the exact SKU that you sell. Thus, you will be making pricing changes based on wrong competitive data and thus not seeing the conversion that you expect. We have heard pricing managers get frustrated and not trust dynamic pricing due to this. There is a right solution to getting competitive prices without the issues. With our approach, our pricing analyst customers are getting accurate competitive eCommerce price data and doing repricing without the hassles of wrong pricing data.