Competitor Price Monitoring Online: Methods and Tools

Market Price Monitoring to Create the Best Offer

In our previous publications, we have repeatedly emphasized the importance of analyzing market prices and overall market conditions.

In recent years, open sources have provided extensive information on how pricing impacts a potential customer's decision to purchase a product from a particular store. These sources highlight the critical role of understanding competitors' pricing strategies in driving online sales and profitability. Market price monitoring has thus become a key tool in competitive strategies. Below are some compelling facts:

Key Insights About Price Impact

1. Consumer Behavior Study in the U.S.
   A survey conducted a few years ago among smartphone shoppers in the United States revealed striking results:
   • 85% of buyers under the age of 35 compared prices across various online platforms before making a purchase.
   • Many used specialized price comparison services that monitored prices for their chosen products across online stores.
   • The main finding: 81% of potential buyers chose the platform with the lowest price for their desired product.

1. Psychological Pricing Experiment
   

   In one experiment, participants were asked to taste the same wine labeled with different price tags. The wine with the higher price was rated as having better taste, even though it was identical to the lower-priced wine.

1. Impact of Pricing Psychology ($9.99 vs. $10.00)
   Another study found that products priced at $9.99 sold better than those priced at $10.00, despite the difference being only one cent.
   • This is because customers tend to focus on the first digit of a price, perceiving $9.99 as "nine-something" rather than "ten."

These findings demonstrate that price is the most important factor influencing a buyer’s choice of seller. To set and maintain competitive prices, businesses must be aware of their competitors’ pricing strategies.

Market price monitoring allows companies to:

• Identify optimal pricing.
• Respond to competitors’ price changes.
• Ensure that their offers remain attractive to potential customers.

By leveraging effective market price monitoring, you can stay competitive, increase sales, and maximize profits.

What Does Price Monitoring in Online Stores Offer for Brands?

Price monitoring in online stores is a powerful tool for brands to navigate the competitive landscape effectively. By providing real-time insights into pricing trends and competitor strategies, it enables businesses to maintain market relevance, optimize their pricing, and enhance customer loyalty. Below are the key benefits of price monitoring for brands.

1. Control Over Pricing Policy Compliance
   Brands can track how their products are sold across various online platforms and ensure that Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) policies are being followed. This helps maintain pricing integrity and prevents price undercutting.
2. Optimizing Pricing Strategy
   Monitoring competitors’ and their own product prices allows brands to adjust their pricing strategy in real-time, ensuring competitiveness without sacrificing profitability.
3. Improving Market Position
   Analyzing price data helps brands determine optimal prices that attract buyers while preserving the perceived value of their products.
4. Increasing Customer Loyalty
   Maintaining competitive prices helps retain customers, especially in highly competitive markets.
5. Understanding Competitor Behavior
   Price monitoring provides insights into competitors’ pricing strategies, enabling brands to react promptly to market trends and adapt their own strategies accordingly.
6. Supporting Marketing Campaigns
   Brands can leverage price data to evaluate the effectiveness of their promotions and discounts, as well as to make informed decisions about launching new marketing campaigns.

 5 Benefits of Price Monitoring

Competitor price monitoring offers the following advantages:

1. Gain a Competitive Edge
   Regularly tracking competitor prices enables businesses to promptly adjust their pricing strategies, ensuring they remain attractive to customers.
2. Increase Revenue
   Up-to-date price data helps identify optimal pricing points to strike a balance between revenue growth and customer retention.
3. Retain Customers
   In a competitive market, customers seek the best price-to-quality ratio. Maintaining competitive prices fosters customer loyalty and reduces churn.
4. Evaluate Promotion Effectiveness
   Price monitoring allows businesses to assess the success of various promotions and discounts. Comparing pricing strategies helps refine marketing tactics, boosting sales and customer engagement.
5. Analyze Market Trends
   Reviewing historical price data enables businesses to predict future market shifts and adjust their strategies accordingly.

By leveraging price monitoring, businesses can stay competitive, improve profitability, and better adapt to market dynamics.

How to Conduct Competitor Price Monitoring Online

There are several methods to gather competitor price information:

1. Manual Price Monitoring
2. Price Monitoring via Phone
3. Monitoring Prices on Marketplaces and Price Aggregators
4. Automatic Price Monitoring (Scraping)

Let’s explore the fundamental methods for online price monitoring:

1. Manual Competitor Price Monitoring

This method is suitable for small online stores with a limited number of competitors and a narrow product range. Employees can manually collect competitor prices using computers or mobile devices. They visit competitors’ websites and record prices in Excel spreadsheets. Based on the findings, management can decide whether to adjust their pricing strategy.

Drawbacks:

1. Time and labor-intensive: Employees must visit competitor sites daily to track price changes.
2. Often assigned as an extra task to unmotivated employees, which can affect the accuracy of the data.
3. If your product range expands, monitoring becomes more resource-intensive, requiring additional personnel.

2. Phone-Based Price Monitoring

Calling competitors to inquire about their prices is one of the most effective yet time-consuming methods. Employees posing as potential customers can gather data on prices, special offers, upcoming promotions, and loyalty programs.

Drawbacks:

1. Requires strong acting skills to convincingly pose as potential customers.
2. Time-consuming for employees but yields highly accurate pricing data.
3. Can be complemented by test purchases, allowing you to discover competitors' supply chains and evaluate their pricing strategies.

For more on test purchases, refer to our article: "What Is a Test Purchase in Online Stores and What Problems Does It Solve?"

3. Monitoring Prices on Marketplaces and Price Aggregators

Platforms like Hotline, Google Shopping, Amazon, and Rozetka can also be used for price monitoring. Simply search for a product, and the system provides all available offers.

Drawbacks:

1. Marketplaces and price aggregators often serve as advertising platforms, and 80% of the data is promotional.
2. Not all competitors list their products on these platforms.
3. Prices displayed may not reflect the actual selling prices; clicking through to a seller’s site often reveals different offers.
4. Some sellers intentionally lower prices to attract traffic, or even list products they don’t have in stock to redirect customers to alternatives.

For automated marketplace price monitoring, consider services like Price Control. Learn more in our article: "Competitor Price Analysis in Online Markets."

4. Automatic Price Monitoring (Price Scraping)

For businesses with a wide range of products or numerous competitors, automatic price monitoring tools are the most efficient solution. These tools scrape price data from competitors’ websites and compile it into usable formats.

Advantages:

1. Saves time and resources compared to manual methods.
2. Provides accurate, real-time data across multiple platforms.
3. Scalable for large inventories and numerous competitors.

Automatic monitoring tools eliminate human error and provide insights for creating competitive pricing strategies in dynamic markets.

By choosing the right price monitoring method for your business needs, you can stay ahead of competitors, optimize pricing strategies, and improve overall market performance.

Automatic Competitor Price Monitoring

Automatic competitor price monitoring is a regular process of collecting price and inventory data from various online platforms, where changes occur frequently, without requiring company personnel. In highly competitive industries, automated price monitoring systems are essential to track rapid market shifts and respond promptly.

Competitor Price Monitoring on Websites: How to Use a Price Scraper

The most efficient method for tracking competitor prices is through automated monitoring using specialized software known as a price scraper.

What Is a Price Scraper?

A price scraper is specially designed software that collects data about the prices of goods or services from the websites it visits. These programs can bypass anti-scraping defenses and are customizable to collect specific information in the exact format defined by the client. The process of collecting data using a scraper is called scraping.

What Is Price Scraping?

Price scraping is the automated process of monitoring competitors’ or partners’ prices on a scheduled, ongoing basis. Its purpose is to provide accurate, real-time market data to optimize pricing strategies and maintain competitiveness.

For online resellers, a price monitoring tool allows comparisons of competitors’ prices for the same products, helping define a competitive pricing strategy. For suppliers, such tools facilitate the comparison of alternatives offered by competitors, enabling an assessment of how appealing their prices are to customers.

Solutions for Automating Price Monitoring with a Price Scraper

1. Purchase a Prebuilt Price Scraper

A ready-made price scraper is a cost-effective, quick solution for businesses needing immediate results.

2. Develop a Custom Price Scraper

A tailored scraper is ideal for businesses with unique requirements, such as specific data formats, complex anti-scraping measures, or specialized platforms.

3. Use a Price Monitoring Service

Outsourcing to a professional price monitoring service provides comprehensive market insights without requiring in-house development or expertise.

Each option offers unique benefits based on your business needs, resources, and technical capabilities. Automating price monitoring with a price scraper ensures efficiency and accuracy in a competitive market.

There are three main approaches to implementing competitor price monitoring through a price scraper. Each option comes with its own features, benefits, and challenges.

1. Buying a Prebuilt Price Scraper

If immediate price monitoring is a priority and there’s no time for custom development, a prebuilt price scraper can be purchased and configured for your specific needs.

How It Works:

• These scrapers typically collect data and compile it into Excel or Google Sheets.
• Their functionality is based on macros or special formulas, automating actions to extract information from websites.

Pros:

• Quick to implement for basic tasks.
• Ideal for platforms with minimal changes in structure or content.

Cons:

• Requires manual configuration of macros, which can be time-consuming.
• Limited to tabular output, restricting advanced analytics.
• Unsuitable for dynamic websites with frequent updates or complex anti-scraping mechanisms.

2. Developing a Custom Price Scraper

For businesses with specific needs or advanced requirements, creating a custom price scraper is a more flexible and scalable solution.

Who to Hire?

Freelancers: Cost-effective but may lack long-term support.

Specialized Companies: Offer expertise and ongoing maintenance but are more expensive.

Maintenance Challenges:

Websites often change layouts or implement anti-scraping measures, requiring regular scraper updates.

Decide who will handle maintenance—hiring a programmer or outsourcing to a service provider.

Pros:

Tailored to your specific requirements.

Capable of handling complex sites and collecting advanced datasets.

Cons:

• High initial investment in development.
• Requires ongoing maintenance to remain effective.

For more information on the challenges of scraping, refer to our article: "Competitor Price Scraping and Its Challenges."

3. Using a Price Monitoring Service

Specialized services offer end-to-end solutions for price monitoring, tailored to your business needs.

Advantages:

1. Professional-grade software designed to scrape even complex, highly protected websites.
2. Services regularly update scrapers to accommodate changes in website structures or defenses.
3. Cost-effective compared to maintaining in-house infrastructure or relying on manual labor.

Example: Price Control Service

1. Offers customizable solutions, including individual configurations for client-specific business tasks.
2. Provides specialized tools for Marketplace Price Monitoring, a feature gaining popularity due to the growing dominance of marketplaces as a sales channel.

Which Option Is Best for You?

1. Prebuilt Scrapers: Suitable for small-scale operations with simple requirements.
2. Custom Scrapers: Ideal for businesses needing a long-term, tailored solution.
3. Price Monitoring Services: Best for businesses looking for comprehensive, hassle-free solutions with ongoing support and maintenance.

For a detailed overview of the top 5 price monitoring platforms, including their features, pricing, and use cases, refer to our blog post on competitor price monitoring services.

Key Features of Price Monitoring Software

To effectively track competitor prices and make informed pricing decisions, price monitoring software must offer a comprehensive suite of features. From accurate product matching to user-friendly analysis tools, these capabilities ensure data accuracy, actionable insights, and seamless integration into business workflows. Below are the key features to look for in a reliable price monitoring solution.

1. AI-Powered Product Matching

1. What It Is: The ability to identify identical or similar products across various platforms for accurate price comparison.
2. Why It Matters: If the software cannot accurately match your products with comparable competitor offerings, the collected data will be inaccurate, leading to flawed pricing decisions.
3. Outcome: Ensures precise data alignment and avoids pricing errors.

2. High-Quality Data Collection Across Platforms

Effective pricing decisions depend on the quality of collected data. Given the complexity of tracking competitors across multiple platforms, the software must be capable of:

1. Gathering data from desktop and mobile websites as well as mobile apps.
2. Extracting data from price aggregators, online stores, and marketplaces.
3. Handling data across different regions, languages, and currencies.
4. Conducting regular and real-time monitoring to ensure data freshness.

This ensures that the system provides comprehensive and timely insights for market-responsive pricing strategies.

3. Unit Measurement Standardization

1. Purpose: To compare prices accurately, units of measurement must be standardized.
2. Example: If a competitor sells motor oil in 1-liter bottles for 1,100 UAH, and you sell the same oil in 0.5-liter bottles for 650 UAH, your price per liter would actually be higher despite appearing cheaper at first glance.
3. Impact: Without unit standardization, pricing analysis can lead to incorrect conclusions.
4. Functionality Needed: The software should automatically convert and standardize units to provide meaningful comparisons.

4. User-Friendly Interface and Data Analysis Tools

Data collection is only valuable if it can be analyzed and acted upon. The software should offer tools that facilitate decision-making, including:

1. Notifications about competitor price changes.
2. An intuitive dashboard for quick analysis.
3. Detailed reports and visual dashboards for comprehensive insights.

Additionally, the software should support:

1. API integration for seamless connectivity with CRM and other systems.
2. Easy data export options to integrate insights into existing workflows.

Why These Features Are Essential

A reliable competitor price monitoring system must provide precise, actionable, and timely data to enable businesses to:

1. Adjust prices dynamically.
2. Respond effectively to market changes.
3. Maintain a competitive edge.

For more detailed insights into pricing analytics and tool integration, refer to our guide on leveraging price monitoring for strategic market positioning.