How do you price your products or services? Can you keep up with market price fluctuations? How tough is it to adjust prices to stay competitive and maximize profit margins simultaneously?
There is no doubt that all can be done manually. However, in highly competitive industries like eCommerce, many businesses have large inventories and prices change several times daily.
If an eCommerce business decides to manage prices manually, it must allocate a vast amount of time and money for people involved only with prices. All the processes preceding optimized prices require 24/7 market monitoring and prompt price adjustments.
With prices constantly fluctuating due to competitive dynamics and internal business factors, businesses should consider automating all processes possible to succeed in the fast-paced climate.
Pricing software solutions help businesses set, adjust, and optimize prices. The purpose and importance of pricing software is to collect and process information in a timely and accurate manner and react to market changes per the set rules.
Even if you are unsure whether your business can benefit from pricing software, stick to the end of the article, and once you learn all about the best features, you should be able to select the most comprehensive tool for your business, based on your needs and preferences.
What are the most important features of good pricing software?
Let’s break down the best pricing software for eCommerce by features and see how to make the most of them to your business advantage.
Price Monitoring
Competitor price monitoring
Competitor price monitoring involves tracking and analyzing product and service prices offered by competitors. Continuous monitoring is crucial to comprehend market dynamics and allows you to detect pricing anomalies and assess the impact of competitors’ pricing changes on market share. These insights are valuable for your positioning and forming pricing strategies accordingly to attract customers and maximize profitability.
Marketplace price monitoring
With a similar aim, you should have available for analysis data coming from online marketplaces and price comparison sites where you operate and sell. By monitoring prices on multiple marketplaces, you can smoothly identify pricing disparities and, if needed, optimize your pricing strategies to ensure consistency across all channels.
MAP and MSRP monitoring
Minimum advertised price (MAP) and manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) monitoring concerns brands only and heavily impact brand reputation if violated. Brands are advised to establish MAP and MSRP policies for retailers and distributors to follow. MAP and MSRP monitoring helps enforce policies and allows brands to control their prices fully.
What else can be monitored?
We advise you to research the software’s crawling abilities, what additional product details can be captured, and what monitoring frequency is possible.
Good crawling abilities imply software that can extract data on any website and bypass any bot protection.
Disclaimer: Web crawling is not illegal, however, websites implement bot protection measures to safeguard their content, resources, and users from unauthorized access, misuse, and malicious activity.
Therefore, if your pricing software monitors hundreds of thousands of products on a website, it must have an ace in the hole, in terms of advanced monitoring technology, if monitored sites try to ban or even block traffic from your server. Additionally, web crawlers must be able to extract data in any language, currency, and location and even provide extra product data.
How does that benefit eCommerce businesses?
Capturing extra data can give more thorough market insights and further influence business decision-making. eCommerce professionals in the real world frequently request monitoring shipping costs and time, stock status, seller name, number of reviews, average review score, etc. Also, software must capture multiple seller prices from a marketplace, as several sellers are often displayed on a single product page. Of course, once all the information is captured, it is crucial to have the ability to sort them per individual need, meaning to have an option for custom reports, for insightful analysis.
Monitoring frequency is significant for businesses in extremely dynamic markets. For example, a single product price in the audio and video equipment market can change multiple times a day, therefore businesses that are a part of this and other dynamic markets must ensure their pricing software allows users to define the monitoring frequency.
What can you do to secure a successful price monitoring process?
- Identify competitors
- Identify products to be monitored
- Gather products’ URLs
- Define monitoring frequency
Product Matching
Why were the URLs just mentioned? Your product URLs are crucial for the product matching processes. They allow your pricing software to identify equivalent products on your competitors’ sites and link them with your corresponding products for monitoring and comparison.
If the above tasks seem time-consuming and overwhelming, look for a pricing software solution that can take over competitor discovery and URL collecting for you. Product matching can be done in three approaches, depending on the product and competition data available.
Automatch
Automatch is a continuous automated product matching process ideal for industries using standardized product identifiers (EAN, UPS, ASIN, etc.) and businesses aiming to monitor thousands of products. Pricing software will over and over again strike to pair products from your list with newly added ones by competitors and on marketplaces. Automatch is the most economical option.
Manual matching
Manual matching is time and cost-consuming but secures human-made and high-quality matches of higher reliability. Manual matching is especially effective for businesses in fashion, sports, grocery, and similar industries as their products lack unique identifiers. Humans research not only product names but images and technical specifications for an ideal product match. The best pricing software can provide matching in any language.
Hybrid matching
However, If your products cannot be effectively matched using unique identifiers or have many variations, look for pricing software that offers hybrid matching. In this process, humans and machines jointly work on matching, and as a result, users will get matching accuracy very close to 100%.
What can you do to secure a successful product matching process
Pay attention to ensure your chosen pricing software is flexible and is known for responsive customer service as you will jointly decide on the best product matching option according to your needs to secure a successful process.
Well-set and functioning product matching is crucial as it is a base process for pricing software, further influencing market price monitoring and data collection, vital for informed decision-making concerning setting the most effective dynamic pricing methods for your business.
Dynamic Pricing
Dynamic pricing automatically adjusts prices in real-time based on set pricing rules and market conditions. Based on the business goals, pricing software will optimize product prices to maximize revenue, boost sales, or remain competitive.
The best eCommerce pricing software provides a dynamic pricing feature for users to define their own pricing strategies and rules based on different parameters, such as product prices, competitors’ product prices, product cost prices, stock availability, desired profit margins or pricing position, or even targeted prices such as MAP or MSRP.
The world’s most successful companies such as Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb use dynamic pricing as a key driver of business growth and success, that is how beneficial this feature can be for your business.
Now, let’s see what can boost your customer experience as a pricing software user.
What else differentiates the best from good pricing software?
So far we covered all the main features of pricing software that most comprehensively affect overall business success. The following list will emphasize the main extras to check when evaluating pricing software.
- Advanced analytics and reporting: Your software gathers an incredible amount of data, however, you need the most meaningful. Therefore, the chosen pricing software must offer reports specialized for specific purposes, customized reports, and dashboard widgets for the smooth analysis of valuable data.
- Customization and flexibility: As mentioned several times, the best pricing software tends to accommodate the unique needs and preferences of each business. Besides reporting capabilities, this includes customizable pricing rules, segmentation options, and more.
- Integration capabilities: Ensure software seamlessly integrates with tools and systems your business already uses (ecommerce platforms, inventory management systems, and CRM software) so you can leverage pricing data across the organization.
- User-friendly interface: We are aware that, based on this article, pricing software seems like a complex tool, but this is all under the hood. There are tools easy to use. Besides a user-friendly interface, make sure the setup process is easy and assistance will be provided.
How to know which software is the best for your business?
Let’s be honest now, you don’t know until you try. After all the research is done, which mostly serves to select the best ones (top X pricing software list), according to someone else’s experience (even if it’s coming from the same industry, two businesses can’t be alike) it is time to try them out.
Now, new questions arise, do you have to pay for, let’s say, the top five software you selected, just for a trial? Also, is there enough time to examine five different pieces of software one after another? Select the pricing software that doesn’t require a subscription right away and offers a free trial, long enough for you to comprehend its processes and see the benefits.
Test Price2Spy for free
Price2Spy offers a 30-day free trial. Besides long experience (since 2011) and hundreds of worldwide clients of all sizes, from different industries, it is easy to find online testimonials and success stories about the software’s adaptability and constant improvements. Across the most popular online software reviewing platforms, many testify about exceptional customer service and easy-to-use software.
Now, it’s up to you to try it out.
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