What is Price Intelligence – The Complete Guide

GrowByData
What is Price Intelligence – The Complete Guide
Devik Balami |
|READ 8 MIN
what-is-price-intelligence-the-complete-guide

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 that negatively affects the health of your business.

Modern technology has enabled buyers to analyze prices from multiple providers and 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.

This is where pricing intelligence becomes paramount.

What is Price Intelligence?

Price intelligence is the capacity to monitor, track, and analyze competitors’ prices in your market landscape to help you make informed data-driven pricing decisions. Understanding market competitor price data and ensuring you update your prices quickly and competitively is key to your sales success.

Since competitor prices are always fluctuating, you must constantly analyze 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 gather price intelligence data on competitors over time to understand trends and make the best pricing and advertising decision on your products.

Features of Price Intelligence

Below are the best features of Pricing Intelligence and why you should use it to gain an edge against your competitors.

  • You can identify key competitors, monitor their prices (including shipping costs, promotions, product bundles and others), and track changes. You can use these variables to track your product’s sales performance by market and channel.
  • You can gain holistic insights into the price elasticity and demand of your products by market.
  • You can quote the right price which will not only boost your returning customer sales but also attract new customers.
  • 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 description, 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 other service provider.

Importance of Price Intelligence

Pricing intelligence is important as it determines the sales and profitability of your business. As stated earlier, you must analyze the 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. They go through different stages of the shopper’s journey comparing your product with others before buying. In this whole shopper journey, having competitive prices is key to win the sale of today’s smart shoppers.

Big 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, and proactively optimize their pricing strategy including repricing, dynamic pricing, and even monitoring 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 and down to the metro level.

Process of Gaining Price Intelligence

Having Price Intelligence requires 4 steps –

  • Identify your competitors
    Identifying your competitors is crucial not only for pricing strategies but also for marketing strategies.
  • Acquire pricing data on competitors
    After identifying your competitors, it is time to acquire real-time pricing data on these competitors.
  • Analyze the competitive pricing data
    Look for patterns in your competitors’ pricing habits & practices and get insights into your competition and the competitive landscape.
  • Set and adjust pricing 
    Use the competitive and market insights to make informed decisions on your pricing strategies. Factor in demand signals that you can get from sites like Google trends, your historical sales data and other macroeconomic signals.

Insights & Use Cases of Price Intelligence

Here are some insights and use cases of GrowByData’s Pricing Intelligence software and service across categories.

What is a Pricing Strategy?

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

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, and marketing objectives. And, external factors consider customer demand, competitive price, socio-economic conditions, inflation, supply chain factors and more.

There are various pricing strategies to use. Below are four common strategies –

  • Value-Based Pricing
  • Price Skimming Strategy
  • Cost Plus Pricing Strategy
  • Competitor-Based Pricing Strategy

Challenges of Price Intelligence

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.

  • Variant Level Product Matching
  • Collecting Pricing Data globally from different platforms
  • Large-scale Data Collection & Monitoring
  • Conducting Automated Repricing

What is Dynamic Pricing?

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

Dynamic Pricing is an under-utilized concept. However, it provides tremendous pricing advantages to a business when done the right way. Unlike static pricing strategy, Dynamic Pricing 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, track product prices in real-time, and rapidly make adjustments to win the shopper and ultimately grow market share at higher margins.