Ever wondered what's the best way to track your competitor's price for your eCommerce business? Here's our blog that discusses 10+ tips that will help you achieve this objective with minimal fuss.
The competition is fierce in an e-commerce business. If we consider emerging markets, we can see that the growth rate and investments are also raising the bar of competition. With the increase in the number of price comparison engines, users now have access to many different options. This shows how suppliers are fighting for any demand in this very competitive market.
According to Statista, Up to 83% of respondents stated that they typically compare prices across multiple sites before making an online purchase.
“Pricing is a game changer in this wild competition.”
Since online shoppers have easy access to any shop in the world, finding the best deal is not that difficult. You just have to check a few more sites—and they are only a few clicks away!
With this change in consumer habits regarding where to shop, e-commerce companies need to change their marketing methods as well. To attract customers, companies usually use taglines such as ‘best price’, ‘best value’, etc.
With such a dynamic market, it becomes difficult for the company to offer the actual ‘best price’. Claiming the best deals requires science-backed pricing studies and continuous analysis of all the prices competitors offer online. This manual analysis would take forever, considering all the online shops.
Not only is time wasted, but the company must also hire people to check every competitor’s website and obtain every single price for each product. With competitive intelligence being critical in the market, hiring people just to check the prices seems a good investment.
However, this repetitive manual data gathering and entering task becomes infeasible for employees since there are nearly a million active e-commerce companies worldwide. A new breed of business intelligence tools offers automated ecommerce price tracking to address this emerging need.
As this automation helps companies reallocate their resources into other important needs, such as marketing, the ones who are still doing this manually or not doing anything at all fall one step behind in the competition.
Steps Taken Before Automation
For automation to create the insights needed, proper, well-crafted human input must be entered into all business intelligence applications. We can rephrase this sentence as “requiring initial guidance” from the user. The two important factors which need to be clear for the tools to work properly are:
Competitor identification
Who are my competitors?
Which one of them should I track?
Product identification
What are my most important products?
Which of my products are most competitive in the market?
Which of my products are the most price-sensitive?
If these questions have answers coming from prior market research, then the answers can be easily fed into the tool and yield the optimum outcome.
1. Competitor Identification
To many shops to compare from!
Answers to these questions are critical. But most of the time, a company already knows its competitors. Usually, the problem is keeping track of the price and stock information of every single online shop selling the exact product. Yeah, you can check Google to see some of the prices. But are you going to do this a few times every day? And how can you be sure that there are no other companies on the other pages that sell for a cheaper price?
Looking at Google pages might not be a smart way. Google also offers Google Shopping to compare prices like other comparison engines you can find online.
Prioritizing competitors
Prioritizing the competitors is a critical step. To determine which ecommerce website to think of as the main competitor, you may consider these two factors:
a) Website traffic performance b) Revenue performance
A suitable method for collecting data on web traffic is to examine competitors' rankings on SimilarWeb or Ahrefs to see how they are doing in the market.
Other rankings that compare related companies are available to estimate the revenue performance ranking of online shops.
The company must pick their products to be tracked. With many eCommerce companies using such automation in competitor ecommerce price tracking, tracking only the top products rather than all SKUs (which are sometimes more than 10K) helped them not to get lost in too much data. This cropping yielded faster gains for these companies.
3. Getting URLs
Now that you know your competitors that sell your selected products, you will need the links of these products on your competitors’ websites. With these URLs, you will be able to see the price and/or stock availability information.
However, this process requires manual work. The good news is that it is a one-time task. The program will then take care of the rest. This task can sometimes be outsourced to service providers.
Apart from manually collecting URLs, there are several other methods to gather product URLs from competitors' websites:
Web Scraping Tools: Use web scraping software to extract URLs from competitor websites automatically. These tools can be customized to collect specific product pages, prices, and stock information. Tools like BeautifulSoup (Python), Scrapy, or Octoparse can help with this.
API Integration: Some e-commerce platforms (e.g., Amazon and eBay) provide APIs that allow businesses to extract product data, including URLs, prices, and stock information, in a structured format.
Competitor Monitoring Software: Use competitor monitoring tools (e.g., Prisync, Price2Spy) that automatically track product URLs, prices, and availability on competitor websites. After initial setup, these tools typically require little to no manual input.
Browser Extensions: Utilize browser extensions designed for web scraping or data collection (e.g., DataMiner, Web Scraper). These can help extract product URLs directly from competitors’ websites while you browse.
Sitemap Files: Some competitors may have public sitemap files on their websites, which list all the URLs of their product pages. Tools like Screaming Frog can help you extract URLs from these sitemaps.
Third-Party Services: Some companies specialize in gathering and providing competitor data, offering services to collect product URLs, prices, and stock levels. This approach allows you to outsource the entire process.
Automated Crawlers: Set up an automated crawler (such as a custom-built solution or a tool like Heritrix) that continuously scans competitor websites for updated product URLs and relevant data.
These methods can save time and effort by automating or semi-automating the URL collection process.
4. Getting Automated
After determining competitors and the products to be traced and providing the links, the rest is full automation! The tool will visit each site and get all the information needed, such as price and stock availability, at some frequency. It will also create reports with the results of the analyses.
With this full automation, the company will save a lot of time and won’t need to have a dedicated employee for this work. Instead, the company can now give more important jobs to those employees.
An automated solution for tracking competitor prices would remove this repetitive work of manually checking each product on each site. And leave the company with the desired results within a very short time and with almost no effort.
The tools that would be beneficial for companies must also have some specific features for the best results:
Updating price and stock availability information frequently
Being applicable on any country and any website without any barriers
Delivering user actionable alerts and reports
Providing C-level or more compact reporting
Offering an API for further integrations with other tools, the company uses
5. Frequent updates
The market is very dynamic, and prices and stocks change at every moment. So, the frequency of the checks is the most important feature the tool should offer. Multiple updates a day should be expected from the tool.
6. Dynamic Pricing and Monitoring
Dynamic pricing is a powerful strategy that allows e-commerce businesses to adjust product prices in real time based on market changes, competitor pricing, and stock availability. Companies can use tools like a dynamic pricing engine to remain competitive while optimizing profit margins. Features such as pricing intelligence and pricing optimization enable businesses to adapt quickly to fluctuations in demand and competitor activity, ensuring their pricing strategy stays ahead of the curve.
Price monitoring tools play an important role in enabling effective dynamic pricing. With capabilities like competitor price monitoring, stock availability monitoring, and price monitoring reports, businesses gain actionable insights to refine pricing across multiple sales channels. Tools equipped with functionalities like batch import, free SKU automating, and MAP monitoring further streamline the process, allowing for faster adjustments and improved compliance with pricing policies.
Companies can achieve better market agility and profit maximization by integrating dynamic pricing with advanced monitoring features. Solutions like Amazon Buy Box metrics and recommended price modules empower businesses to stay competitive, while insights from compliance pro advanced analytics ensure smarter, data-driven decisions that enhance overall performance.
7. No market coverage barriers
As with every other program, technological limitations might limit the tool. Some price tracker tools might only cover Amazon or Google Shopping or markets specific to a country or e-commerce vertical. Fortunately, some tools can cover any market vertical from any country. So, a company must be careful about this detail when choosing the tracing tool and choose the latter version if it wants to trace without limitations.
8. Actionable Alerts/Reports
The ultimate goal of the business intelligence tool should be to report competitors' price changes instantaneously. These changes should be alerted by special notifications, which can be configured from the admin panel of such tools. It may also allow different team members to control different brands or categories. Another critical factor when deciding on a price tracker is if it allows role-sharing in a team.
9. C-Level or more compact reporting
These tools can be important for executives at different levels as well. The tools clearly increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the action-takers of pricing decisions. In addition to the action-takers, the reports will provide higher-level executives with more crucial insights about the company's performance.
Since these tools provide historical trends regarding categories and brands, price managers can see the relative performance of products or brands and set KPIs for the employees who make pricing decisions.
10. Utilizing Data for Smarter Pricing Decisions
Price monitoring tools generate a wealth of data that can transform how businesses approach pricing strategy. They enable them to make informed decisions that enhance competitiveness and maximize profit margins. Companies can proactively identify market opportunities and adjust their strategy by analyzing price change trends and competitive insights.
One benefit of these tools is the ability to implement automated assessments and set price rules that adapt to factors such as price elasticity and customer demand.
By using web scraping and competitor data, companies can refine their pricing to align with market conditions, ensuring profitability in a competitive environment.
11. An API for further integration with other ecommerce tools
Businesses use many other tools that answer their needs. And the needs never end. Companies will continue to use many applications. So, a business tool must allow further integration with other tools that a company can use. A price-tracking tool must offer automated feeds or APIs that can be integrated with other tools.
Summing things up,
We can discuss the benefits of such ecommerce price tracking tools. However, these tools will help the company allocate the precious time spent tracking prices to developing strategies and actions based on the results of this operation.
Thanks to fully automated, cloud-based tools, small or mid-sized e-commerce companies can also use such tools for very affordable monthly fees.
As in the digital retail disruption through e-commerce, competitive intelligence also faces a major disruption. And it’s also starting to be packaged as a SaaS solution instead of an expensive conventional market research service or reporting.
This guide outlines what factors to consider when choosing a price tracker tool and how to benefit from it.
Sawaram Suthar (Sam) is a Founding Director at Middleware. He has extensive experience in marketing, team building and operations. He is often seen working on various GTM practices and implementing the best ones to generate more demand. He has also founded a digital marketing blog - TheNextScoop.