History of Prices: How to Track Competitors in Order to Get a Competitive Advantage

For a thorough analysis of market price changes, it's essential to track the dynamics of these changes over a specific historical period. It's beneficial to understand when your key competitors are raising or lowering their prices.

Imagine how useful such information could be during periods of mass buying, like on Black Friday or other holidays. Any online store would find it tremendously valuable to stay ahead of events by using this acquired data.

Understanding the structure of your competitors' past sales campaigns (for how long and by what percentage a particular competitor has reduced their prices) can give you a substantial competitive advantage during subsequent sales events.

Competitors' price history can provide you with the information necessary for effective positioning of your new product or gaining an advantage over competitors, as well as significantly enhancing your business efficiency.

Price history allows you to see how competitors' product prices have changed over time. It also helps identify price behaviors within a specific product niche throughout the year and reveal the seasons with the lowest and highest prices.

By tracking your competitors' pricing strategies, you can offer the market a product with higher profits and determine whether it's worth selling. In other words, studying pricing trends in conjunction with competitors' price history not only helps firms maximize profits but also shields them from losses.

You can study past price fluctuations and make future price forecasts based on the obtained information. This aids in making informed decisions. For instance, deciding whether to sell something now or wait until a competitor's price drops. You can also use price history to identify pricing trends. For example, whether prices drop during certain periods of the year or whether close competitors tend to increase or decrease over time.

Moreover, you can easily study how consumers reacted to new prices by observing the dynamics of their changes.

For online store owners, it's vitally important to track competitors' prices and adjust their prices accordingly. Meanwhile, manufacturers and brand owners need to monitor how partner prices change to effectively manage the market price level of their products.

Price history is a valuable resource for those trying to cut costs and increase profitability. Modern price monitoring services provide companies with the ability to acquire market price data in a historical perspective. We'll illustrate how this can look using the Priceva service as an example.

Both online store owners and manufacturers can gain access to historical data if they've set up automated price monitoring within the service.

On your personal account page under "Products," you can see insightful dashboards reflecting different aspects of price changes for your product over the past few days.

You can review information on how the minimum, average, and maximum prices for a specific product have changed over time.

On a clear graph, you can see how the product price changed across different trading platforms.

In another tab, you can examine the index of price and availability fluctuations.

Or track how the discount index has changed.

All this data provided by the Priceva service will help you clearly visualize your company's pricing position for a particular product relative to competitors. Additionally, it enables timely adjustments to the pricing strategy if necessary.

If your goal is to quickly assess how your product's price has changed over a historical period, you can do so on the "Products" page. When choosing the main tab of the dashboard, historical information about the product's price and its position relative to competitors will appear.

If you see on the graph that there was a significant change in market prices on a certain date that requires detailed study, you can use the "Export" button to download a detailed report in Excel format.

By receiving and aggregating these files, you can collect all information about product prices. Then, you can work with the accumulated data set at your discretion.

Consider the Seasonal Market:
Especially during seasonal sales, it's vital to set competitive prices. Studying competitors' behavior is useful before deciding on your planned promotions and discounts. Price history analysis helps understand how your competitors acted in recent holiday seasons. Did they lower prices, and if so, by how much? Or maybe they don't change prices on certain items during sale periods at all?

Change / Rebuild Your Inventory Information:
Overlaying competitors' pricing information on data about their product availability at certain times will enable you not only to set beneficial prices for you but also to timely adjust the inventory of the most promising products. Take advantage of the analytics provided by the Priceva service and develop sensible pricing strategies based on your historical chart.

Setting the Same Prices as Competitors:
If you don't want to be more expensive or cheaper than your competitors, setting precisely the same prices could be your strategy. Based on your historical chart, decide which competitor you want to follow and adjust the repricing of your products by choosing a pricing algorithm tied to that competitor's price. The Priceva service makes this easy and fast.

Timely Spot Competitors' Difficulties:
When the historical price level of your key competitor, which you follow, is unstable or constantly falling, it may be a sign of difficulties in selling that particular product. Armed with this knowledge, it will be easier for you to decide which pricing strategy your business should employ in this situation.

The more you know about the price history of your products and your competitors' products, the easier it will be for you to analyze the situation and make more balanced decisions.

By studying your competitors' price history, you can avoid costly mistakes. The acquired data can aid in increasing sales, reducing costs, and even discovering new market niches.