What is Price Intelligence? The Winning Guide for 2024

The price of a product is one of the most important considerations in a consumer’s purchasing decision. If you price your product extremely high, you won’t sell. Similarly, if you set them extremely low, you will lose profits which negatively affects the health of your business.

Modern technology has enabled buyers to analyse prices from multiple sellers in real- time. As a retailer, manufacturer, or wholesaler, you must offer competitive prices to your buyers to convert new customers and win back old customers. All these emphasize the importance of price monitoring and inventory management.

This is where competitive pricing intelligence becomes paramount.

Price intelligence powers you to track competitors’ prices and make smart pricing decisions to significantly boost gross margin and market share constantly. Understanding competitor prices and updating your prices quickly and effectively is key to your business success.

Since competitor prices are always fluctuating, you must constantly monitor their prices and adjust yours as part of your dynamic pricing strategy. However, this does not mean that you should lower your prices just because a competitor does. Instead, you should analyze price intelligence data on competitors over time to understand trends and make the best pricing and advertising decisions on your products.

Below are the best features of Pricing Intelligence and why you should use it to gain an edge against your competitors, including analytics for retail ecommerce pricing.

1. You can identify key competitors, monitor their prices (including shipping costs, promotions, product bundles, and others), and track price changes. You can use these variables to track your product’s sales performance by market and channel.
2. You can gain holistic insights into the price elasticity and demand of your products by market.
3. You can quote the right price which will not only boost your returning customer sales but also attract new customers.
4. You can optimize your product detail page with the right attractive price to boost performance on search engine platforms like Google or Bing,. This in addition to correct and rich descriptions, images, keywords, customer reviews and ratings, and product availability.

Now, let’s learn more about the importance of Pricing intelligence for retailers, manufacturers, brands, wholesalers and, finance industry professionals and consultants.

Pricing intelligence is important as it determines the sales and profitability of your business. As stated earlier, you must analyze competitor’s market price data to better understand your competitive landscape to set price and reprice per your local market nuances.

As we all know, consumers don’t make purchase decisions right away, which makes price monitoring and adjustments based on price position important. They go through different stages of the shopper’s journey comparing your product with others before buying. In this shopper journey, having competitive prices is key to winning the sales of today’s smart shoppers.

Marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, and Target are constantly monitoring competitor prices of products in real-time and dynamically repricing to stay ahead of the competition, offer the best prices to the shopper, and win the sale.

Pricing Intelligence software allows brands, manufacturers, retailers, wholesalers, and agencies to track competitor prices, optimize their pricing strategy, run repricing, and monitor Minimum Advertised Price (MAP).

Top of the line pricing intelligence solutions will provide competitive pricing data and insights across marketplaces, direct-to-consumer sites, and even SERP components across countries, regions – down to the metro level.

Having Price Intelligence on Competitors requires a 4 step process. This is deeply intertwined with price monitoring and the dynamic nature of price changes –

1. Identify your competitors – Spotting your competitors is crucial not only for pricing strategies but also for enhanced marketing strategies and keeping your edge over competitors with competitive intelligence.
2. Acquire pricing data on competitors – After identifying your competitors, you can acquire real-time pricing data on these competitors.
3. Analyze the competitive data – Monitor patterns in your competitors’ price changes and understand strategy of top competitors across markets.
4. Set and adjust pricing – Use competitive and market insights to make informed decisions on your pricing strategy. Factor in demand signals that you can get from sites like Google Trends, your historical sales data, and other macroeconomic signals.

Here are examples of using GrowByData’s Competitor Pricing Intelligence software and service.

A pricing strategy is a method of determining the best price to set for a product that helps drive sales and profits. A wise strategy allows Manufacturers, Brands, and Retailers to set prices for their products & services effectively using statistical analysis, price elasticity signals, market trends, and competitive intelligence.

Choosing the appropriate pricing strategy is crucial to a brand’s thriving business model. Pricing strategies must account for various internal and external factors. Internal factors include revenue, growth target, target audience, brand position, product attribute, marketing objectives, and analytics. And, external factors consider customer demand, competitive price, socio-economic conditions, inflation, supply chain factors, and more.

Below are four common pricing strategies in use –

1. Value-Based Pricing
2. Price Skimming Strategy
3. Cost Plus Pricing Strategy
4. Competitor-Based Pricing Strategy

As competition across markets and industries increases, pricing intelligence vendors must overcome four challenges to offer the desired solution to brands, manufacturers, retailers, and agencies.

1. Variant Level Product Matching
2. Collecting Pricing Data globally from different channels
3. Large-scale Data Collection & Monitoring
4. Conducting Automated Repricing

Dynamic Pricing is one of the pricing strategies that businesses use to attract and sell to various groups of customers. It focuses on supply and demand focusing on the demand side. It is also referred to as demand pricing or time-based pricing.

It is an underutilized concept. However, it provides tremendous pricing advantages when done the right way. Unlike static pricing strategy, it helps maximizes profit by operating at different price points per market demands. The strategy is popular in industries such as hospitality, airlines, transportation, professional sports, retail, and eCommerce.

Conclusion

With an advanced pricing intelligence solution, you can get ahead and stay ahead in your dynamic competitive landscape. With GrowByData’s pricing intelligence solution, brands, manufacturers, wholesalers and agencies can easily constantly understand their competitors in ecommerce, track product prices in real-time, and rapidly make price adjustments to win the shopper and ultimately grow market share at higher margins.

If you have any questions and want to chat about your needs, please feel free to reach out to us at info@growbydata.com. We are happy to help.