Today, business is not less than a war, the marketplace a battlefield, and competitors are your enemies. As e-commerce brought the revolution in the way the world shops today, the shift from offline to online is evident, and we all saw it. But now that we think about how to win a war in the digital marketplace, the only weapon we can see is the pricing strategy. Pricing strategy has the power to either make you rule the market of world market or wipe out your name from the map of marketplace. Customers are more aware today of comparing prices of each product they buy, from something as normal as a notebook to something as precious as a car; everything needs to go through comparisons and feedback before the customer makes a purchasing decision.
On the other hand, competitors is a different story, as the dynamic pricing reserve an important place in the price intelligence tool and techniques, competitors are changing prices every now and then, which makes is even more difficult for business to keep up with the competitors activity, making competitive price tracking tool no more an option but a survival tool.
But there is the thing, implementing and using competitive price tracking is not a cup of tea for everyone, it takes special knowledge and a lot of patience to deal with the issues at the initial phase of implementation, but still, you have to adopt it if you want to survive in this cut-throat competition. But not just the mental pressure and some inorganization, businesses can face technical, strategic and operational hurdles, making implementation of competitive price tracking no less than a treasure hunt.
But no worries, as a famous quote says, “No one manufactures a lock without a key” similarly, when there is a problem, there is also a solution.
So, in this article, we will talk about all the common problems a business faces while implementing competitive price tracking, but that’s not it, we will also decode the solutions of those problems so when you get stuck while adopting the modern tool, you also knows how to get out of it smoothly.
Let’s explore.
Challenges of Competitive Price Tracking
We don’t write an answer without reading the questions first. Similarly, we are first going to discuss the challenges before we can go to the solution because first you need to understand are reason why you have to take precautions.
Challenge 1 : Dynamic Pricing By Competitors
In today’s world, competitors are changing their prices on a daily basis and even in some industries on an hourly basis, based on many factors like customer behavior, time of the year, demand for the product, stock availability, etc. Tracking the prices of competitors on a manual basis is not only slow and inefficient but also prone to ignorance and human errors, leaving you blind to the real-time shifts of the market and its demand.
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Challenge 2 : Inconsistent Product Matching
In the price tracking process, the quality of data is as important as the quality of raw material to a manufacturing firm, because data only specifies the accuracy of the analysis. But the problem arises when the businesses name the same product with different names and the attributes don’t match, making the data extraction even more complicated and low. For this reason, there are time when the business miss the most important or biggest competitors because they named their product differently.
Challenge 3 : Global and Regional Price Variations
Price is one of the most important as well as most sensitive factors in business, just like the heart is one of the most important organs for our survival, but it is most sensitive. Price not only fluctuates during the different phases of the year, but it also differs in different regions and countries, according to the regional culture and demand of the product. Because of this, it becomes way more difficult for the business to expand the business in different countries or regions as they need to make a different pricing strategy for different regions.
Challenge 4 : Data Overload and No Clear Action
Let’s suppose you started extracting the data automatically, and now there are piles of data that can’t be analyzed by someone manually. now what? The mountain of data without any structure or insight and not being cleaned and organised is like a raw material; until you don’t manufacture it, you can’t use it for selling. But cleaning that amount of data will be impossible manually, and even if the business is able to do it, the effectiveness of that analysis will decrease over time.
Solutions of Competitive Price Tracking
Now that we know what problems you could face when you implement competitive pricing in your business, now you will understand why businesses should take the following steps to solve the problem. Below is the list of solutions to the problems we discussed above.
Solution 1 : Automated Price Tracking
One of the best solutions to address the problem raised by dynamic pricing is to automate the Importance price tracking process, so that you are notified whenever your competitors change prices or a trend shift occurs. In addition to that, you can also set the custom intervals for tracking the prices, which can be set from an hourly basis to weekly, as your business demands.
Solution 2 : Advanced Product Matching Algorithms
The solution in this era to retain the quality of data, when each product is called with countless name is that the business starts using more advance and modern day tools which are backed with AI and machine learning, making it possible to match the product with images and other attributes, increasing the accuracy of the product without any extra labor or spending hours for extracting the data.
Know more about Product Auto-Match and its uses for your business.
Solution 3 : Geo-Specific Price Tracking
When the business is planning to expand the business across boundaries or across different regions, then there are some practices the business should start to jump from the geographical difference pricing problem. Practices like businesses should deploy price tracking tools that support multi-region crawling with a proxy server. Businesses can also collect region-specific data, and there are many API that can change the currency in real-time for better comparison and analysis.
Solution 4 : Adopt Analytics & Automation
One of the best ways to solve a problem like that is to choose a platform that can transform the data into analysis-ready insight, so that you can take the actions on time and take the best advantage of the situation. But what are these tools you must be thing? Following are a few tools which can help you in tracking the prices and analyzing the data in real-time.
* Competitive Pricing
* Dynamic Pricing
* Margin Impact Analysis
While these tools are easy and useful, if you integrate them directly with your internal system, then you can have the real-time analysis of your data, every time you open the app.
Conclusion
Let’s be honest, changes are never easy, either in life or business, and this drastic involvement has some disadvantages with a bunch of advantages, and one of them is the complexity the business faces while implementing the tool. Competitive price tracking is not easy either, and it’s definitely not static. It is developed to deal with the fluctuating dynamics of the marketplace for you when trends change every month and prices are always changing, competitive price tracking will be the Prince in shining armour for your business.
So, are you ready to elevate your pricing game with competitive price tracking?
Curious about what else competitive price tracking can do? Check out Competitive Price Tracking and find out for yourself.
FAQs
- What is competitive price tracking?
Competitive price tracking is the process of monitoring and analyzing your competitors’ product prices in real time. It helps businesses make informed pricing decisions, stay competitive, and respond quickly to market fluctuations. - Why is competitive price tracking important for e-commerce businesses?
In the fast-changing e-commerce environment, prices vary frequently based on demand and competition. Competitive price tracking allows businesses to optimize pricing strategies, attract more customers, and maintain profitability without manual effort. - What are the biggest challenges in implementing competitive price tracking?
Common challenges include frequent competitor price changes (dynamic pricing), inconsistent product data, global and regional price variations, and overwhelming amounts of unstructured data that are difficult to analyze effectively. - How can automation improve the price tracking process?
Automation enables real-time tracking of competitor prices, reduces human error, and provides instant alerts when price changes occur. This ensures faster, data-driven pricing decisions that keep your business competitive at all times. - What technologies help solve product-matching and data-quality issues?
AI- and machine learning–based tools, such as Product Auto-Match, improve data accuracy by recognizing products through attributes, descriptions, and images even when competitors use different naming conventions. - How can businesses manage global and regional pricing differences effectively?
By using geo-specific price tracking tools with proxy servers and real-time currency conversion APIs, businesses can monitor regional markets, compare local pricing trends, and develop localized pricing strategies for maximum impact.
