Monitoring Income from E -commerce using Price Positioning

According to NielsenIQ, in 2022, 72% of consumers in the USA took active steps to cut expenses, and 89% of consumers considered price the primary criterion for choosing a product. These figures imply that in 2023, pricing will become a key factor in competitive strategy across the entire retail sector.

So, how can online retailers prevent customer loss due to less competitive prices? By establishing advantageous positioning relative to their competitors, this can be facilitated through the regular collection of current online prices for goods or equivalent products.

Pricing positioning defines the placement of a company's entire product lineup in relation to its competitors based on cost. It is an integral part of the overall positioning strategy, setting guidelines for pricing, and helping shape the pricing strategy for products.

Price positioning is the act of setting the price for a company's products or services within a particular price range.

The goal of positioning is to shape the target audience's perception of price levels correctly. A potential buyer, when considering your product, should quickly understand whether it is cheaper, more expensive, or at a comparable level to other options they're considering.

Pricing positioning creates a clear pricing logic for individual product lines within the company's portfolio.

A pricing positioning that is understandable to consumers is designed to stand out among competitors, reinforce product uniqueness, and positively influence the brand's image.

To achieve this goal, it's necessary to establish clear rules for managing prices relative to key competitors.

This could look as follows:

A clearly established pricing positioning can aid in making unequivocal decisions to adjust your prices whenever there are changes in your competitors' pricing.

In order to form pricing positioning or adjust the existing one, you need to identify your main competitors and monitor their prices.

However, a one-time measurement is insufficient. To clearly see the picture of price distribution among competitors, you need to analyze a large amount of data collected over a certain historical period.

This implies that the company needs to set up a regular comparison of its prices with those of competitors. Manually comparing hundreds or thousands of products on your site with equivalents on dozens of competitors' sites is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. If a large volume of data is checked by the company's specialists, the information may become outdated by the time one cycle of verification ends. Nowadays, to stay competitive in the market, up-to-date information is required on a daily basis.

The solution to this issue can be the automation of data collection. It allows for significant time and resources savings, providing current market prices and availability information for comparison and pricing positioning adjustment.

This solution is offered by automated price monitoring services, including the Priceva service. It helps you stay abreast of all price changes in the competitive environment and promptly adjust your pricing positioning.

Online shopping is a practice of price comparison. According to NielsenIQ, 73% of surveyed consumers compare prices for most products in online and offline stores. Moreover, 48% believe they can find cheaper items specifically online. In this scenario, achieving effective competition without understanding the competitive situation is implausible.

Defining competitors' pricing positioning is carried out by analyzing current prices on competitors' websites or marketplaces. By collecting data from websites, Priceva shows all current prices for a specific product or equivalent products, allowing you to adjust your pricing positioning in line with your chosen pricing strategy.

The Priceva software allows you to set the desired frequency of price monitoring and form analytics based on the collected data in the required dimensions. This way, you will always possess information about price changes and product availability from the companies you're focusing on.

In our service, you determine the number of products to track, the number of competitors, and the frequency. Moreover, you can promptly change the number of products or competitors.

You can easily analyze the price positioning in your market using daily updated data.

The service will show:

● which products have had price changes from competitors,
● who has what products out of stock,
● what percentage is the deviation from the minimum and maximum price of a competitor for each product,
● it will show the difference in rubles and percentages,
● it will denote the price index, i.e. the position of your price relative to the average price of competitors %,
● it will indicate the recommended price depending on the chosen pricing mechanism.

The service's information panel provides all the necessary pricing analytics. This data, both on consolidated dashboards and for a specific product, helps to quickly navigate if there is a significant price change in the market. Based on current and accurate data, you will be able to make the right pricing decisions.

The service's dashboards show the overall positions of your products compared to competitors. But if you need a deeper analysis, you can view all the information about products and compare prices with any of the competitors by downloading one of the reports by clicking the "Export" button in the "Products" section.

Reports are presented in different aspects:

● full export;
● broken down by regions, category brands;
● based on availability;
● promo prices;
● in a historical aspect, etc.

You can also choose a file format that will be optimal for import into your system.

Data retrieval can be automated. Priceva allows you to work with data in different ways:

● export data for further work using the export module in different formats: csv, json, yml, xml, and others;
● integrate with external resources: Google Shopping, Google BigQuery;
● set up automated data transfer through API integration with any CRM, ERP platform, or set up data export directly to the site.

All the above-mentioned capabilities of the Priceva service allow you to accurately determine your current price position. See the number of products that are the cheapest, average, or highest priced compared to your competitors. Understand which of the products need price adjustment and in which direction. And then consolidate this in the price positioning.

Once the positioning is set, the service allows you to set up automatic adherence to positioning rules. Staying competitive within the framework of predetermined rules is facilitated by automated pricing formulas.

The service's flexible constructor allows you to set different pricing formulas, based on the prices of other market players: making them equal to the nearest competitor or a few percent cheaper/more expensive. Moreover, formulas for different brands, categories, and even individual products can vary.

Also, the formula can take into account the presence or absence of a specific product among competitors. If at the moment only a couple of competitors are trading a product in the market, its price can be changed upwards without fear of a drop in sales. As soon as the market is saturated with the product, price monitoring will detect this at the next cycle of checks, and the price recalculation formula will automatically adjust the product's price.

The goal of any retailer is to sell products at competitive market prices. And the goal of the Priceva service is to help e-commerce companies of any size navigate the market. The service allows you to:

1. Save time and effort spent on market analysis with the convenient Priceva control panel and a wide selection of reports.

2. Make profitable price and market decisions through data analysis. Price optimization is one of the key ways to increase profits, and no other business tool gives such a quick return. A 1% price adjustment can lead to an average profit increase of 11%.

3. Gain a competitive advantage. The experience of our clients proves that the maximum speed of response in pricing, which is provided by the automation of monitoring and repricing, leads to an increase in gross margin and turnover, optimizes promo prices and KVI.

4. Make balanced management and strategic decisions that will be based on accumulated historical data.

When you have a tool like the Priceva service working for you, optimizing pricing decisions and maintaining competitive pricing positioning is not difficult at all.