Price monitoring was always one of the most important aspects of running a business, but nowadays, it’s more important than ever. The internet is a very crowded and busy business landscape with more and more companies trying to get ahead of the competition.
It has increased the priority of price monitoring and made it one of the most vital business aspects of running a business in the digital e-commerce landscape. When we say price monitoring, we refer to a method used by e-commerce businesses to track and monitor their competitors’ pricing strategies.
If we take the mentioned importance of this method into consideration, we can safely say it’s one of the most vital elements of online business strategies. Businesses rely on this technique to keep an eye on competitors’ prices. Since it’s a way to gather valuable data, it has an array of benefits to offer to your business.
The Process of Price Monitoring
The main goal of price monitoring is to gather competitive data on prices and pricing strategies to create your own business strategy that will get your organization ahead of your competitors.
E-commerce businesses use this technique to track competitors, analyze their pricing strategies, and create a more customer-centric approach that will not only keep the existing consumers happy but lure in new ones.
Such a business technique allows businesses of all sizes to set adjustable prices according to the real industry scenario. It feeds organizations valuable data that helps them adjust their prices according to the competition and demand on the market.
Those with the most competitive prices and smart pricing strategies have a far greater chance of attracting a wider audience and beating the competitors. The process of monitoring prices includes three driving factors:
- Price index – a metric that allows businesses to see their ranking against competitors.
- Margin – a benefit you obtain by earning the difference between your purchasing cost and retail price.
- Conversion rate – the number of potential prospects who checked out on your website.
Simply put, the process of monitoring prices in your industry and market is one of the most effective ways to improve your competitiveness and obtain a higher ranking against your main competitors.
Business Benefits
There are many different price monitoring benefits, from expanding your business to beating your competition and becoming an authoritative brand in your business niche. Some of the benefits of this fantastic and quite effective technique include:
- Increased level of business competitiveness
- Save resources, effort, and time
- Improve decision-making
- Increase lead generation and conversion rates
- Meaningful customer relationship and brand loyalty
- Customer-centric price promotions
- Increase revenues and sales
- Advanced monitoring and tracking of your customers’ preferences
- Highly competitive pricing
- Improve ranking against competitors
- Better brand reputation
Potential Issues with Price Monitoring
E-commerce price monitoring is not without its challenges and issues. Some of the biggest problems include:
- Product matching – no two retailers have the same product, which is why one of the biggest challenges is to match the products from one retailer to another. That includes SKUs, model numbers, product names and descriptions, their attributes, etc. Since these metrics aren’t universal, product matching is hard to achieve.
- Obfuscated product matching data – retailers don’t want their competitors scraping data from their websites. They handle this by obfuscating product data, making product matching almost impossible.
- Dirty data – a very wide range of e-commerce businesses don’t bother with lax quality controls in the data entry, which is the reason why their information isn’t clean and sorted and needs filtering.
Fortunately, there’s a way to solve these problems and turn the data you need into fully usable, structured, and meaningful information. The answer is straightforward – proxies.
Proxies for Price Monitoring
Proxies have many different purposes, ranging from web scraping to web monitoring. They can be very useful for getting accurate and competitive data from your competitors.
Their biggest advantage of proxies is the ability to visit websites without being detected. Many target websites use different security measures to prevent third parties from spying on their web activities, traffic, data, etc. Proxies have a way around these measures because they work as an intermediary and assign you a different IP address. This is the reason why target websites cannot track your activity, which is why businesses use proxies for tracking and monitoring their competitors as well.
Aside from monitoring of all sorts, proxies also excel at web scraping and data extraction, allowing businesses to scrape data from competitor sites regarding products, product images, shipping fees, prices, and so much more.
Proxies have the power to solve the challenges we mentioned above and allow you to gather valuable and accurate, clean data from target websites that you can put to good use without your competitors ever knowing about it. If you are interested in proxies, then you may look for some cheap private proxies as well.
Conclusion
If you do your price monitoring properly and without raising red flags all over the internet, your conversion rates should go sky high. Drive more traffic to your landing page, increase your sales and revenues, and provide your consumer base with the most competitive prices on the market. It’s the most effective way of expanding your business and gathering more prospects along the way.
