Today’s market is like a car race track, where businesses are the racers. If they don’t drive fast, they’ll be left behind and eventually forgotten in the crowd of other racers. And for driving fast in the business, you need the data which is up to date and even better if data updation happens in real-time. But how can you track the real-time data effectively without any struggle?
Well there are many technics in the market which can help you many ways, for example Dynamic Pricing t helps you to change the prices in real time, Product Auto-Match helps you to match the product accurately with your competitors, on the other hand there is Competitive Price Tracking which helps you to track the prices of your competitors on real-time. So you can know instantly if your competitor acted upon something.
Useful tool, isn’t it?
But it will be useful if you can implement or integrate it into your business, so this is the step-by-step guide form the implementation of the competitive price tracking in your business.
Excited? Let’s dive in.
What is Automate Competitor Price Tracking?
Automate Competitor price tracking is the technique in which businesses track, monitor and analyze the different competitors’ prices for different competitors who are dealing in the same or similar products. For example, you are having the business of breads, so you need to know the prices at which your competitors sell breads for that first, you need to track the competitors, then monitor their moves and analyze the patterns of your competitors as well as customer behaviors to understand what the market is demanding.
Competitor price tracking is a very useful process as it provides guidance during the business’s creation of pricing strategy on the basis of facts and figures, rather than just assumptions. To know more about competitive price tracking, visit What is Competitive Price Tracking article. It starts with the square one on the topic.
Steps to Implement Competitive Price Tracking
Now that you know what is competitive price tracking, you must have realized the importance of the competitive price tracking process for businesses and the value it can add to your business too. But there must be business you adopted it ages but didn’t saw the magical result we are claiming, well there are chances that while implementing the competitive price tracking technique you skipped some of the essential steps, but no worries, in this article we will discuss step by step guide to implement competitive price tracking in any business.
Define Your Price Tracking Goal
Every act we ever define, the first question that arrives is why do we need to do it. So it is very important for the business to know their “Why” when they are implementing competitive price tracking. This will not only clear what they wanted or expected from the tool, but it can help them to realize whether is it the right tool or not.
So, setting goals makes it clear for the business as well as the team members who are going to apply these techniques what they need to focus on. Is the business implementing the technique to increase the market shares or dominate the market, or to see when their competitors are undercutting and respond according, or just because the business wants to analyze the market and customers’ demand?
Setting a goal not only helps the business to understand where they are going, but it also helps the teams to understand what part of the information they should focus more on. So, set your goals.
Select Competitors and Relevant Products
Every industry has countless products and every business has countless competitors, but it is very important for a business to understand which product they should concentrate on and which competitor they should keep an eye on. So in these steps, businesses need to take two major decisions :
Who to track: It is very important for businesses to understand with whom they are competing, what are their target audience and the impact on sales.
For example :
– If you are providing A+ services, then your competitors must be premium brand that provides similar types of services
– If a business is more focused on budget strategies, then they are competing with the companies that offer regular discounts and are budget-friendly.
– If you wanted to increase the market presence, then your main competitors are the top seller of those categories.
So understanding who are your real competitors are is very important for to growth of the business.
What should be the product SKUs:
Choosing the right SKUs wisely is an important decision because it tells the team on which product they should focus more on, while on the other hand, there needs to be more factors like whether the product is a fast movers, has high-profit margins or not, is the product is seasonal. If you are a new business, starting with 20-50 SKUs is recommended before expanding, as it provides an idea to the business of what type of products customers are demanding and what type of products are dying.
Choose a Tracking Method
After making the selection of what to track, now is the right time to decide how to track it. There are mainly three ways by which businesses can track the data. They are as follows:
Manual Tracking: In manual tracking, a person or a team of people copy and paste the data from online and other sources and store the particular data in Excel or Google Sheets manually.
Semi-Automated Tracking: Semi-automated tracking is the combination of automated collection of data through web scraping, but the process of cleaning, organizing and analyzing the data is done manually. This method is better than manual tracking, but still it is labor intensive.
Automated Tracking: In automated tracking, there is no intervention of human activity; the data is automatically collected, cleaned and organize, and become analysis ready data through visual representations like dashboards and charts. It is the premium service that helps the business understand the information about the business without spending the human resources.
Technical Approach: Scraping Vs APIs
While bots are everywhere and technologies are taking over the mundane and repetitive tasks, businesses can’t avoid technology and expect to still dominate the market. That’s not how it works. So, we will discuss the technical approaches through which a business can automate the collection of data.
Web Scraping
Web scraping is the process of collecting of data through bots or crawlers under the legal boundaries. Web scraping can help the business to collect a large amount of data in just a few seconds, which can be stored in many formats like Excel, database, JSON, etc.
API-Based
API, which stands for Application Programming Interface, is a data collection tool which let the user collect the efficient and reliable sources, many businesses had launched API to help their clients in collection of data, so the business can use the competitors official API for their internal as well as structured data. Other than the reliable collection, another perk of using an API is that it offers cleaner and organized data than web scraping.
Store Collected Data
When the data has been collected, then there comes the next important step which is storing that data. There are multiple ways a business can store data, but there are some of the most common ways are as below.
Relational Databases: Databases that are structured in relational databases are very useful when the data has to be interconnected to store the data in a structured way.
NoSQL Solutions: There are NoSQL solutions where there are diverse inputs and store complex data; those databases are MongoDB and Elasticsearch.
Cloud-Synced CSV/ Sheet: One of the most common way the small volume of data is stored is in excel sheet or CSV format. This data can synced into multiple platforms so the data is always up-to-date and the clients can access the data from multiple devices.
Normalize and Clean Data
When the data is being stored then the next step a business should perform is to clean and normalize the data.
Data Cleaning: It is the process in which the records which doesn’t have all the mandatory fields filled will be removed and all data cleaned to make it noiseless.
Data Normalization: Data normalization is the database design technique that organizes the data in a way that the data redundancy is reduced and data integrity is increased, with the help of data normalization, data is also divided into multiple parts and connected through connection to increase the reusability of data and facilitates in understanding the data.
Analyze and Visualize Price Trends
Data analysis is the final step, no matter how strong the foundation is people see the building, similarly it doesn’t matter how reliable the collected data is or how organized the data is stored but if the analysis is wrong or slow all the efficiency and efforts are wasted. So it is very important for the business to analyze the data fast and in an effective manner.
One way in which the businesses can analyze the data effectively is by summarizing the large volume of data into a single chart or page, like creating custom dashboards or using Power BI, Excel, etc, to understand and analyze the data quickly and correctly.
Automate Triggers and Alerts
In this era business can’t do everything on our own, no matter how hard business try, regardless of how many people they hire, there will still be some gaps which human resource is not able to cover up every single thing. That’s why automation company is taking over on the repetitive tasks, they respond the mail, reply for business in social media accounts, provide notification about the price drop or trend change by a tool, and the list goes on and on.
So if the business wanted to match the pace of the market, then they need to shrug of some of their part of work to the automation, so that they can have the real time notification of competitors actions, great deals the market is offering, changes in customers behavior and many more important information.
Integrate Pricing Actions
Price is the soul of the business, the main factors which decides if the business is growing or diminishing. And when every industry is booming with Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, businesses can leverage these evolvement for enhancing the pricing strategy and using it to grow the business. Below are some useful cases of of AI and ML for price.
Rule-based repricing: Repricing is the terms used when the prices of the product altered on the basis of what their competitors prices is set. So there are time when the competitors undercut their prices to attract new customers, with rule base repricing you can set the rules which should be fulfilled by the algorithms at the time of repricing.
For example, if the business has set the rule of having profit margin of minimum 10% percent at the time of repricing, so if the competitors are undercutting the prices of the business product still needs set the price which have 10% margin of profit.
Demand-driven repricing: There are many other techniques, one of them is demand driven techniques where the prices fluctuates on the basis of demand in the market, for example if the demand is more than the prices of product would be higher in comparison to the time when the demand is low.
Margin control: Margin control is very important for business to generate the profit in the market, margin control makes sure that the business is sustaining the healthy amount of profit even when they are competitive in the market.
Choose the Right Tools
In the market to grow, skills matter a lot, no doubt, but what tools you are using is also very important. If a great warrior is using a wooden sword then they can’t perform to their optimum limit and outcome will differ accordingly.
So there are different types of tools which provide different level of advantage to different types of businesses. Figuring out and implementing the respected tool can work like a charm for the business growth and customer acquisition.
Pilot, Validate, and Iterate
It is very important for any process to follow a structure, it not helps the business to know about their next step but also business and team members can track the step on which they are and if they are performing efficiently or not. Below is widely used structured which all the start-up or establish businesses uses.
- Start Small :- When a business is in initial stages or when it is very the established business wanted to launch a new product line, then at the initial stage the number of product or SKU should be limited, as it helps them to organize and analyze the product performance.
- Validate :- After the product is being launch, then the business should keep a close eye on it’s performance, how customers are responding to the products and what are the feedback. Business should modify the product according to customers feedback and then observe their behavior again, the pattern should continue forever.
- Scale UP :- When you know that your initial SKUs are perfect, then start adding new products and add competitors to grow,
- Measure ROI :- Return On Investment is a very important term, the business should measure the increase or decrease in the margin, beating the competitors, and understanding the market to see how your product is performing.
- Continuously Refine :- When the above steps are completed, then the business is ready to start the loop again and this loop continues.
Track KPIs and Business Metrics
Tracking the performance of the business metrics is an essential task for future strategy development, for that the business should tie with automated tracking systems to track the following factors.
Tracking Coverage:- It helps the business to understand to what extend they are able to track the market and competitors. It tells about the reach of business in the market.
Data Quality:– Tracking systems helps the business to match the accuracy of the data and also reduce the redundancy or duplicity of data.
Trigger Rates:- Business can set the trigger rates to optimize the number of notifications and alerts, for example if the business has set the trigger rate for competitive pricing is 10% then if the competitors changes the price by 5% the business won’t be notified.
Sales Lift:- Having taps of weekly and monthly sales without any extra efforts can save a lot of time and efforts for the business and also provide accurate overview of their performance.
Profit Impact:- It is very important to track down the difference in customer’s behavior after and before the price modification to know about the mindset of the business.
Time Efficient:- One of the greatest perk of using tracking systems is, it saves tons of the time of the business, which businesses can use in more important tasks then just tracking.
Foster Internal Adoption
After the implementation of the tool, it is very important for the business to ensure that their teams adopted those tools and using its resources. As all the departments of the business should be on the same page and should actively use the tools which are implemented by the business to see the result.
To ensure the smooth and hurdle-less adaptation, business should conduct the training programs or provide detailed documentation for better understanding.
Stay Ahead of E-Commerce Shifts
Today if you are visible online, then for most of the world, you don’t exist. It’s not just about reach, it about losing the potential clients and sales which a business can have from that reach. To ensure the visibility the business should be aware about :
* Market updates like buy box rules.
* Seasonal trends like vacations.
* Industry changes, like new rules about the industry.
* Implementation of tools for optimum performance.
Conclusion
Implementing effective competitive price trending is a complex and multi-level task which helps the business to define their goals, structure the working of the business, and allowing them to understand what works best for them. This is not a work of a single day, but it totally worth it to invest the time in implementation of such techniques to stay competitive in the market. When done right, it helps the business to react instantly, optimize their pricing in real time and conquer the market while sizing the opportunities of growth.
Implementation of competitive price tracking technique isn’t an add-on efforts, it is a magical technique which can sky-rocket your business growth after few months of implementation.
FAQs
- What is automated competitor price tracking?
Automated competitor price tracking is the process of using software or AI-based tools to monitor and analyze competitors’ prices in real time. It eliminates the need for manual data collection by automatically fetching, cleaning, and organizing pricing information from multiple sources. - Why is automating competitor price tracking important for e-commerce businesses?
Automation ensures real-time, accurate, and continuous monitoring of competitors’ prices. This helps businesses respond faster to market changes, adjust prices strategically, and maintain competitiveness without wasting time on manual tracking. - What are the key steps involved in implementing an automated price tracking system?
The main steps include defining your pricing goals, selecting competitors and products to monitor, choosing a tracking method (API or web scraping), storing and cleaning data, visualizing insights, and automating alerts and repricing actions. - Which is better web scraping or API-based tracking?
Both have their advantages. Web scraping is flexible and can collect data from almost any website, while API-based tracking provides cleaner and more structured data directly from official sources. The ideal approach depends on your business size, data needs, and budget. - How can automation tools help in repricing strategies?
Automation tools can implement rule-based or AI-driven repricing, where prices are adjusted automatically based on competitor movements, market demand, or profit margins. This ensures that your pricing stays optimal without constant manual intervention.
6. What metrics should businesses track to measure the success of price automation?
Key metrics include data accuracy, tracking coverage, trigger rate efficiency, sales lift, profit impact, and ROI. Monitoring these KPIs helps businesses evaluate the effectiveness of their automated price tracking system and optimize performance.