Competitors monitoring is basically an analysis of your ecommerce competitor. It makes you aware of each and every move of your competitor, especially regarding its marketing strategies, pricing policy and stock.But how? One of the best ways to do so is by constantly monitoring your competitors by a web scraping service. Now, we already know that this brings negative context, but that’s not correct. To spy on your competitors doesn’t mean anything illegal, but more of a “sneak peak” if you prefer it that way.
Let’s look into a different perspective. For instance, your new employee was previously working for your competitor. With him coming on board, you’ll find more about your competitors’ strategy. Well, price monitoring tools work similarly.
Why Monitor Competitors And What To Monitor And Is It Wrong?
The current eCommerce environment has never been that more tough. New competitors are entering the market non-stop and monitoring competition must be an important part of your overall marketing strategy. You might say – well, I’m folating my boat, why would I need to pay attention to others? To be a successful business you have a keen eye on what your competitors are doing this is the answer.
You should always keep track of your competitors’ products prices. Mainly because you must exit on the market with the lower price to gain the customers but is not the only reason. You could also use the competitor price monitoring to better understand your competitor’s pricing strategy or market positioning and predict his business life, because nobody can sell underpriced products for too long.
In the past, competitor price tracking could be done manually by using Excel. Today, however, that approach comes with a high risk of making mistakes. That’s why in today’s world competitor price tracking is almost unimaginable without using a price monitoring tool. It will allow you to automate the process of price monitoring.
As you can see, spying on the competition was always present – price monitoring tools are just allowing you to do it in a more sophisticated and error-free way.
And truth to be told, your competitors are most likely spying on you too. The better your market position is, the bigger are the chances of you being spied on. Therefore, it’s not about stealing someone’s secrets, but more about understanding their strategy.
Competitor Price Tracking In Every Day’s eCommerce War
We talked about basics, but let us show you some practical examples.
Dynamic pricing, also referred to as surge pricing, demand pricing, or time-based pricing is a pricing strategy in which businesses set flexible prices for products or services based on current market demands such as Amazon, eBay, or similar marketplaces are changing the prices a few times a day. There is no other way to compete effectively if you’re not aware of those price changes.
If you are at beginning of your eCommerce journey, and you’re not sure whether to use marketplaces or to create an eCommerce store – here are a few tips for you.
More and more ecommerce stores are looking to track their competitors’ products’ prices in a daily and automatic way, or even multiple times per day.Competitor price monitoring can be pretty tricky, because while Amazon and Walmart have teams behind them building and maintaining their price-monitoring bots, an average small/medium ecommerce store doesn’t.
Do you understand the meaning of this?
Even if you haven’t been active with competitor price tracking so far, it’s still not too late! As you can see, you’ll have a huge advantage over your competitors! Remember, it’s not just about being the cheapest, but offering the right price at the right time. All you have to do is investigate what options are available and you’re all set!
Competitor Price Tracking In Every Day’s eCommerce War
In the past, tracking and comparing prices was done by walking to a competitor’s shop and checking their prices. Nowadays all this is done online. Every ecommerce store knows that its prices are being monitored on a daily basis, not only by their competitors (either manually or by using a price monitoring software) but also from consumers. And no, don’t worry, your competitors can not find out that they are being monitored by you.
To fight this war, they have developed software that aids their ecommerce pricing strategy by tracking each others’ prices, and when one of them drops the price, the other one does, too – automatically. Much important decision that can not be made based on your hint. You need precise information so that you can make accurate decisions.
Trying to manage all this by yourself is impossible. Price monitoring software is here to help you save time, so let it do the hard work. It’s more effective and accurate and it will provide you the budget that can be spent on other business aspects.
Don’t Waste Chance of the Success
As technology evolves, the pricing wars will become more and more unavoidable – not only for big retailers, but for small and medium ecommerce stores as well. However, being the cheapest retailer isn’t the only way to stay competitive.
Competitor price tracking became a necessity – without using it, you don’t stand a chance in an overcrowded market. To keep up, retailers and brands need to have real-time information. You can call it spying, monitoring, gathering information, but the end goal is the same – making effective pricing decisions. Therefore, you shouldn’t be scared of using the opportunities that you have.
Competitors can not know that you’re the one who is monitoring them. It’s almost certain that they are monitoring you too, as well as some other players are monitoring them as well. Therefore, it’s a whole circle and there is no point in staying out of it.