Price Monitoring in Retail Business

The process of launching an online business is often a long and arduous one. You first have to do some research and come up with a niche and brainstorm for a unique domain and business name. You also have to take time and come up with a list of products that sell and design a web store while at it.

Finally, you will need to get your sales tax needs in order and begin the marketing process. If your marketing is done right, you should soon have a steady flow of customers into your online store. What happens if potential customers are coming in, viewing your beautifully laid out product pages but are not buying from you?

The importance of price monitoring

If they are not spending their money in your store, then they are spending it at your competitor's store. Perhaps you ignored the fact that your customers judge your store based on your pricing policy. Are your prices competitive or not?

Many online retailers often undervalue the need for price monitoring for competitive product or services pricing. Factors such as the growth of your business, expenses reduction, and the increase of income should not be prioritized over the pricing strategy formulation.

Unlike brick and mortar stores, where a retailer can judge the effectiveness of their pricing strategy based on the shopper feedback, online shop owners do not have that advantage. If their prices are too high, the result will be low sales. Data shows that over 81% of all online shoppers conduct in-depth price researchers before making a purchase.

Since customers are looking out for the best deal that they can find online, you should come up with a competitive price that will keep them coming to your store. Note that a good price is not arrived at by dropping your prices to unprofitable levels.

Your goal should be to beat the competition in sales. This implies that you need to find what the optimal price for goods and services is by monitoring your competitor's shop prices. Price monitoring will highlight prices that are too low or too high. The process will also reveal who your true competitors are.

Price monitoring via web scraping

Price monitoring can be done by web scraping pricing data tools. Web scraping is the process of indexing and downloading large amounts of data from online sources. Also referred to as web data extraction, screen scraping, or web harvesting, the process saves all data collected in databases or local computer file formats such as .CSV.

Web scraping is an automated form of the traditional copy and paste function. Scraping the data using spiders and artificial intelligence aided bots speeds up the manual process, making it more accurate, efficient, and affordable.

Businesses that have robust IT departments can build their web scraping tools for price monitoring. Small startups however do not need to go through the expense and hassle of hiring programming specialists to build scraping tools. All that they need is to access web scraping tools online, paid on subscription basis.

One great reason why you should pay for the best web-scraping tool is that web scrapers need access to a rotating pool of residential proxies to effectively collect data. In the absence of these premium proxies, your web-scraping tool or bots will be blocked or banned by your competitors' websites.

Residential proxies are however expensive and are not easy to access as datacenter proxies are. The best web scraping tools will however have a pool of these proxies at hand making price monitoring an easy to implement operation. You will find point and click web scrapers with intuitive user interfaces that make web scraping a breeze.

The benefits of price monitoring for businesses

• The automated process of price monitoring eliminates data collection challenges such as errors and duplications. Web scrapers can index and scrape particular pricing data under universal product codes that are used to identify and label products worldwide.

• Price monitoring can easily reveal your product's gray market sellers that profit off your brand without your authorization. The monitoring tools scan websites for products with your UPC, so they will reveal websites that are abusing your brand.

• Competitive price wars often become very ferocious. Retailers need real-time web scraping solutions to bring in fresh data as soon as price changes are enacted elsewhere. Fresh data will keep your prices competitive throughout the day and will enable you to adjust your prices to respond to your competitor's prices in time.

Conclusion

Price monitoring has become a critical need for any online retailer that wishes to stay competitive. It is not only a faster method of data collection but an efficient one as well. Additionally, price monitoring can improve the business data analysis by mapping the life cycle of products.