Special Data

A Guide to Monitoring Competitor Prices for E-Commerce

Of course, e-commerce is a highly competitive industry. The established and emerging markets are so numerous (and their number is growing every day) that even the most diversified and seemingly unique online business will inevitably face serious competition sooner or later. And, most likely, this will happen sooner rather than later.

The only difference between companies may be the price. It has become so easy for consumers to find the best price and compare products and services that price has become one of the most important elements of online business in general. With just a few clicks, consumers can find alternatives that better suit their budget.

Consequently, e-commerce companies are forced to rethink and adapt their marketing approaches to ensure they offer the most products at the lowest price. It is not uncommon to see phrases like “best price” or “best offer” in company ads, all designed to attract more customers to their online stores. The problem, of course, is that this has to be true – there are so many regulations governing advertising that advertisers had better be able to back up any claim they make.

Select links to products

Once you’ve decided on the stores and products you’ll be monitoring, you’ll need a little more information, namely the URLs for each product on competing sites. This will allow you to track product availability, which is another benefit of automation. When competitors’ stocks are running low, you’ll know which products to promote especially aggressively so that shoppers interested in that product know where to find it when their usual store runs out.

iDatica products will free you from this time-consuming and endless work and do it for you; you will get more accurate results that will be available in real time.

The next step after identifying the stores and products you want to monitor is to fully automate them. With a price monitoring tool that visits each specified site and returns with the necessary information on prices and stock levels, you can accurately determine the pricing policy for your products and services.

This step can save you a lot of time and effort. Plus, you won’t have to hire someone to do this task, which will save you money and/or ensure that your employees can focus on their own tasks without having to worry about monitoring prices.

Data update

One of the key features of any price monitoring tool is the frequency of data updates. For example, once a month is clearly not enough, and several times a day will most likely not provide a clear picture of what is happening.

iDatica will allow you to check prices every 24 hours. Updating information several times a day can lead to an excessive increase in the volume of data, which will not allow you to react to changing market conditions. Volatile commodities, such as gold or currencies, require updating data several times a day. For more standard commodities, daily monitoring is sufficient, with the ability to update during key periods, such as Black Friday or other sales.

A significant advantage of such a tool is flexibility: as new competitors appear and the threat from the old ones decreases, the system can be reconfigured in such a way as to replace existing links to products with new ones. This means that you will not lag behind the market and will not miss anything.

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