Control purchase service

We make purchases from sellers on the Internet who openly trade in the goods of the customer. We purchase goods on a general basis, without misleading the seller. We provide the customer with the actual purchased goods and all accompanying documents. We do not violate the laws governing the rules of e-commerce.

Control buying is just as legal as web price scraping. When parsing prices, publicly available information not covered by data protection law about the pricing of a particular Internet site is collected.

To successfully conduct a test purchase, you need to find where the customer’s goods are sold on the Internet. To do this, we recommend that you search for brand representation on the Internet.

For timely analysis of competition in the market, it is necessary to have reliable information. With the help of a test purchase, you can find out the channels for the receipt of goods on the Internet sites of competitors.

For example, you have monitored prices on the marketplace and see that competitors are dumping, but you do not understand the reason for their pricing policy. Having made a test purchase, you will understand what kind of product competitors are selling..

Often, if competitor price monitoring shows prices lower by ten or more percent of the RRP, it turns out that competitors are selling contraband or counterfeit goods.

This is a direct reason to give information to the suppliers of this product, to apply to government agencies for the protection of their intellectual rights.

We can make a control purchase at any site that sells on the Internet and sends the purchased goods by mail, courier or through any delivery service.

Before purchasing, we monitor prices and availability of goods in online stores and marketplaces, find suspicious sites, and coordinate them with the customer.

The test purchase report is always discussed in detail with the customer before starting cooperation. It may contain photos and videos of the product itself and its packaging, photocopies or originals of accompanying documents, order information, the physical product itself…

Many of our clients give us full control over their TM in the Internet channel. For such clients, we prepare reports on the availability of their goods on the Internet, on product prices, and on promotions of online sellers. 

The results of price monitoring on marketplaces and online stores can be received by the customer either in the form of reports or viewed in the Personal Account.

The procedure for conducting a test purchase depends primarily on its purpose. Let me show you the example of the fight against price dumping in online stores.

At the preparation stage, we negotiate with the client which online stores or marketplaces will fall under our control. A prerequisite is that we regularly receive the minimum retail prices (MAP) for the Internet channel from the customer.

At the next stage, the sites selected for control are connected to our price parser. He regularly collects information about prices in stores and compares them with the customer’s MAP.

When dumping is detected, we find out its cause – the absence of a supplier’s fresh price list in the store, an error in pricing, a system malfunction… Based on the analysis of information from the store, a decision is made on the need to purchase a control one.

When the decision is made, the task is assigned to the procurement specialist. After its implementation, all the necessary information is transferred to the customer of our service Price Contros.