What Is Price Monitoring?
Price monitoring is an analysis of the costs. It’s also known as price intelligence. Moreover, it focuses on monitoring the costs of the competitors’ products. Why is there a need for that? Such means of monitoring may help any business owner to come up with their own price strategies. In this sphere, you may notice 3 strategies of monitoring.
Photo by Tim van der Kuip on Unsplash
The first way focuses on finding out the costs and policy of the product belonging to the company. The second is known as fieldwork, which focuses on the collection of data. It also includes visiting the outlets of retailers. The last is about reporting and making plans. This one focuses on the reporting of the results based on the analysis.
Changes in market trends, micro or macro changes, are important factors when considering expanding or opening a new business. Never has it been so critical to have an idea about the possible changes in the market that will inevitably affect the business to a great extent. However, price monitoring should always reflect the latest tendencies and should not be outdated.
How to perform prince monitoring?
Being one of the most critical actions in grasping the possible trading strategy along with understanding your expectation in the market these days, price monitoring is an indispensable tool. Generally, to have this process done, you may employ a scraping tool or price tracking software. Before delving into how this process should be, it’s important to have a look at the following objectives to keep in mind.
1. The monitoring should be as accurate as possible: no matter which method is employed by you when monitoring the prices of competitors, it’s essential that you should acquire the data which will be accurate and valid. Thus, it’s important to have more reliable software in order to avoid flaws in the future.
2. The monitoring should be timely: it’s important to access the data when it’s needed. It’s about providing practical insights that will affect your business when such information is actual and relevant. What’s more, the data to be provided should be up-to-date.
3. The monitoring should provide useful data that will entail some actions: if the data to be gathered is actual and exact, it will help managers or business owners to make some important decisions to promote their business according to the information they possess.
4. The monitoring should provide the maximum benefit and advantage over competitors: the main point of gathering such information is to gain some advantage over competitors to use it in further actions, with the aim to have more revenues.
Without knowing about the price policy in the world of trading, it’s hard to promote your business. It doesn’t matter what kind of products you’re promoting, the main appealing factor for consumers would be the cost of the product. So, to know how to start monitoring the prices is quite an efficient step forward.
5. Start with market positioning: the efficiency of the products isn’t only the prices to be set. You need to promote your products in a better manner so that it will make a particular association in the minds of the prospective customers. You may be selling plates on the commercial sites, but how you position your product will be a determining factor. You can base this strategy by showing or demonstrating your product as something pragmatic, luxurious, applicable, etc.
6. Do your own research on competitors: there are different types of competitions that you will come across. For example, those will have a similar market positioning. So, here it would be important how you approach your pricing strategy. Moreover, the other example would be those with different market positioning. This research will give you a chance to see where your competitors are and decide how you will proceed with the data you’ll have, which means price monitoring will entail applicable insights.
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash
7. Come up with platforms and products to be monitored: being specific in your monitoring is what can save you time and energy. Since the process of monitoring might come with specific platforms like eBay, Amazon, Shopify, etc. and find particular products to keep the track of. With price tracking software, you’ll access other data such as descriptions of the products, images and reviews, and so on. The same is with web scraping tools as well.
8. Test with available information you have gathered: once you acquire the desired information about the products and other related stuff, you may start testing by applying all this on your products and decide whether you’ll observe any changes. You may opt for testing for several days up to one week, for example. After that, you may again analyze whether the collected data is right and beneficial.
9. Find out possible challenges and problems to be solved: the main benefit of price monitoring is that after testing the data of your monitoring, you may work on the possible flaws and problems regarded with your products. There are many unexpected things that may happen to force you to change your strategy. For example, the competitors may shift from one site to another.
10. Make the habit of monitoring the prices: this is great if you’re selling the products with the highest levels of competition, and thus, you better keep the track of the prices on a daily basis. Thanks to price tracking software with the main focus on price intelligence, this will be performed on your behalf. Your daily monitoring may give more opportunities in terms of new insights and useful information on market trends.
Conclusion
Is the price monitoring can be performed manually? Definitely, as you may find lots of videos and tutorials about doing so. However, is it practical to do it on your own? Thus, professional service won’t be bad at all. Here is the reason why MyDataProvider is the best choice for you since without service you’ll get faster, more efficient, and more convenient service.
