Competitive Price Monitoring
Monitoring competitors's prices is something that every online seller will do, and if you have a long list of products, manual price monitoring can be a time consuming and boring task. In this blog post i will write about why price monitoring tools are important and how it can save time and be helpful to make better decisions about pricing your products.
Why it is important to monitor prices:
To maximize your sales you need to know what is the best price to sell the product, a price that consumers are willing to pay. To price your product perfectly you need to know at what price your competitors are selling the same product.
Why do you need a tool for monitoring prices?
If you have very few products then you may be doing it manually, one product can be on different eCommerce websites. For example if you have a product on amazon , you are not only competing with the similar products on amazon but also on ebay and Bestbuy etc. So you will check the price on each eCommerce site and if the price differences are high you make consider updating your products's price.
Frequency of the checking prices also matters, weekly , daily or hourly.
Doing all this manually is going to take time, and imagine if you have a large list of products, doing all this process manually will become almost impossible, this is where you will realize the need of a bot or tool that will automatically check for prices and notify you when there is a price change so that you can take some action e.g. to update your product's price.
What the tool should do:
First you will need to make a list of all of your products , at least have the product name and the URL , Then for each product you need to find out all the competitor's listed products that you want to monitor. Explaining all the programming related stuff to develop the tool will require a separate blog post, and I will try to make another blog post for this. Here I will not go deep about how to write the script for this tool.
Basic functionality of the tool should be to notify the seller whenever there is a price change on competitor's products, and have the ability to set a frequency of checking the prices. Tool will send you an email whenever there is a price change, you can take action according to price updates and adjust your product's price accordingly.
Advanced features:
The tool can also be used to automatically adjust your product's price according to competitor price changes. You can set the minimum price for a product and whenever your competitor updates the price, your tool will automatically adjust the price of your product. This feature can be implemented using the API (if available), and if the API is not available there is always a way to use the automation script to achieve this.
Deploying the tool:
Once the tool is developed, it's time to deploy it, we have two options
1: Install it on your own machine, and scheduled it using windows scheduler
2: Host it on a web server
You should decide about this at the start of the project, so that the developer can develop a script accordingly. If you have a small number of products and your PC is running most of the time, then it's good to save some hosting charges and install the tool on your own machine.
If you are a seller and want to have this type of tool developed, you can contact us and someone from our team will get in touch with you.