Information About the Availability of Goods from Competitors as a Source of Additional Profit

By Thomas Bennett Financial expert at Priceva
Published on August 14, 2023
Whether you're a business owner or a manager of a commercial company, monitoring your inventory is crucial to the success of your operations. There are many reasons why it's vital to keep a close watch on your supply chain.

Let’s discuss a few key reasons why inventory management is important.

1. Meeting Customer Demands

One of the primary reasons for monitoring inventory is to ensure you can meet your customers' demands. Customers expect to be able to purchase the products they need when they need them, and if you can't meet their requirements, they'll switch to another provider who can. By tracking your supply chain, you can identify potential shortages or production delays in time to take preemptive measures and guarantee that you always have the products your customers need.

2. Managing Stock Levels

Inventory monitoring also allows for effective stock management. By keeping track of how much merchandise you have in your warehouse, you can avoid overstocking items that don't sell well, while at the same time ensuring you have sufficient stock of high-demand items. This helps optimize cash flow and minimizes the risk of stock shortages or excesses.

Overall, effective inventory management enables businesses to better control their expenses, optimize pricing strategies, and remain competitive in their respective markets.

3. Optimizing Cost of Goods Sold

Effective supply chain management is crucial for maintaining profitability. Inventory management plays a key role in pricing, allowing businesses to accurately determine the cost of goods sold (COGS). COGS is the sum of money a business spends on producing or purchasing a product. The more accurately a company can determine the cost of goods, the more accurately they can price their products.
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4. Boosting Profit Margins

The availability of a product plays a critical role in effective pricing strategies. When a product is easily accessible in the market, its demand may be low, and thus, you may need to adjust prices downward to increase sales. On the other hand, if a product is scarce or in high demand, prices can be raised to maximize profits.

Furthermore, a product's availability can influence its perceived value. When a product is readily available and widely distributed, consumers may perceive it as less valuable, and a price adjustment may be necessary to correct this perception.

Thus, product availability directly impacts pricing. The absence of a product from your competitors at a specific point in time allows for higher pricing and greater earnings.

5. Increasing Customer Base

Beyond boosting profits, the absence of products from competitors can also contribute to expanding your customer base at their expense. If an online shopper cannot find a product at your competitor's place, the likelihood of them coming to you for that item increases dramatically. Consequently, the willingness to pay more for that product also increases significantly. Such is consumer psychology!

Focusing on this product in your advertising messages would be a prudent step.

Here are the advertising channels worth leveraging to make the most out of your competitors' lack of inventory:

● Context and Target for the Product

A correctly set-up contextual and targeted ad campaign aimed at potential customers ensures every potential buyer is aware of your offer. Moreover, since the product is available only at your online store, motivating its purchase will be much easier.

● Remarketing to Website Visitors

You can create remarketing campaigns for visitors who have been to the product page, reminding them that you're the sole vendor of the product at the moment.

● Email Blasts

Send emails to the audience who have added this particular item to their cart.

All these actions aim to attract more users to the product page. When visitors compare your product with your competitors', they'll realize that you're the only vendor currently in the market.

The exclusivity of your product is an advantage that can help foster a positive perception of your business in the minds of customers. It will lead to increased customer loyalty. In the future, when they decide to make an online purchase, your online store may be one of the first places they'll look.

How to Organize Inventory Monitoring

The ability to gain the above advantages sounds attractive. But how can you effectively organize the acquisition of timely and accurate information about competitors' product availability without spending a lot of time and money?

This becomes possible if you automate the monitoring of your competitors' prices and product availability. The Priceva service is ready to provide a solution that will allow you to receive this information at the required frequency in formats convenient for analysis.

Data Availability in Dashboard Form

In your personal account on the main page, you will see a general dashboard that will show how many products were available at the time of the last check: at your place, at competitors', at both you and competitors', and not available anywhere.
Then, by going to the "Products" section, you can get detailed information about the availability situation for each product separately.
And if you enable the filter, you will sort by a specific type of availability.

The screenshot located below demonstrates what the personal account page of the service looks like after enabling the "Only we have available" filter.
If competitor monitoring shows that the product is currently not available from any of them, but you have it, you can play on this situation by performing operational repricing. The service also provides this opportunity.

Data Export in Various Ways

But the presentation of information is not limited to dashboards. You can export it for further processing and analysis in various ways:

● export data 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 transmission through API integration with any CRM, ERP platform, or configure data upload directly to the website.

The easiest way to collect data for subsequent work with them is to export the data as an Excel file. The service offers a choice of 5 pre-configured availability reports.

Summary

To stay one step ahead of your competitors, you need to always be on the lookout, watching not only for price changes but also for product availability. With this information, you can more effectively organize your pricing.

By assessing the availability of a product, you will be able not only to adjust prices but also to raise the perceived value of a product, as well as regulate the dynamics of supply and demand. And all this in combination can have a beneficial effect on the overall economy of the enterprise.

And the Priceva service will definitely help you with this! Create a free account and test how it works on your products.

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