Auto Planet Case Study: Automating Price Monitoring for a Successful E-Commerce Launch

Auto Planet is an automotive parts and accessories retailer with an assortment of more than 130,000 products. When the company began actively developing its e-commerce business, managing pricing across such a large product catalog became a major challenge.

To build a scalable pricing process, Auto Planet implemented Priceva and established systematic monitoring for around 15,000 SKUs. The result was a transparent pricing management system that, according to the company, helped increase both margins and sales.

Auto Planet is a retail network of automotive stores and service centers with an extensive product assortment. More than 130,000 products are available across its stores and inventory.

The company sells automotive parts and accessories, tires, and wheels for a wide range of vehicle brands. Its assortment includes products from approximately 180 manufacturers.

At the beginning of 2020, Auto Planet began actively developing e-commerce as a new business channel.

Implementing this strategy created a need for a solution capable of providing fast and accurate competitor price monitoring across a large and diverse product assortment.

Previously, price monitoring was performed manually and without a systematic process. The company used a standardized markup structure for different product categories depending on the price of each product.

Pricing was also closely connected to the company's wholesale business, which did not always accurately reflect conditions in the retail market.

For offline retail, category managers and store directors selectively reviewed and adjusted prices approximately once every 2-3 months.

For e-commerce, price adjustments were performed occasionally for selected products.

The fundamental limitation was scale. The large number of SKUs, product categories, and brands made it impossible to effectively manage online pricing manually.

The primary objective was to achieve the company's planned margin through a transparent and understandable pricing system, systematic market monitoring, and regular price adjustments.

To successfully develop its online business in a highly competitive e-commerce environment, Auto Planet needed to offer customers more than strong service and a broad product assortment.

Prices also needed to remain relevant to current market conditions.
Maintaining competitive market pricing can support customer loyalty and improve the likelihood that visitors convert into buyers.

The specialists responsible for competitor monitoring had three main tasks:

1. Determine whether competitor websites could be monitored effectively.
2. Identify the highest-priority products that should be included in monitoring.
3. Match the company's assortment with corresponding products on competitor websites.

To calculate product markups correctly, the company decided to monitor at least 10–15% of the most popular SKUs in every product category for each brand.

In total, the monitoring campaign includes approximately 15,000 SKUs for which data is collected systematically.

Every product category is represented in the analysis.

In July 2021, as part of its e-commerce development roadmap, the company's E-commerce Director analyzed providers capable of delivering the required scale and quality.

The company selected, evaluated, and tested around 10 different services.
Auto Planet was looking for a solution that could address three areas within a single platform:

• monitoring competitor websites;
• monitoring major marketplaces;
• supporting custom data collection requirements.

The company found the required capabilities in Priceva.

The full launch took longer than initially expected.

The company originally planned to have the project fully operational by September. However, additional time was required to configure and refine internal processes, and the complete launch ultimately took place in November.

The main objective was to automate as much of the company's internal workflow as possible once the raw monitoring data had been received.

Two tasks were particularly important:

1. Establish a validation process for the collected data, since monitoring results still needed to be checked for potential errors.
2. Automate price calculations based on validated average and minimum market prices while taking into account minimum price requirements, recommended retail prices, inventory levels, and other restrictions.

Priceva's collected data and analytics are used to support decisions about price adjustments.

Rather than treating monitoring as a standalone reporting process, Auto Planet incorporated market data into its broader pricing workflow.

Monitoring is performed 1-2 times per week.

The overall pricing workflow is automated:

• Priceva data is transferred via API directly into the company's internal business system.
• The data is automatically analyzed for potential errors and filtered according to predefined algorithms.
• Pricing algorithms calculate new prices for products included in monitoring.
• A markup structure is applied to calculate prices for products that are not directly included in the monitoring campaign.

This approach allows the company to use market data from approximately 15,000 monitored SKUs as part of a broader pricing system covering a much larger assortment.

Three employees are directly involved in the process.

The developer was responsible for building the overall workflow:

Priceva data → automated price calculation → dashboard.

The Project Manager coordinates processes between the different participants.

The role also includes catalog configuration — assortment, categories, tags, and related parameters — as well as maintaining product links and setting the current monitoring schedule.

The E-commerce Director is also involved in the process and oversees its use within the company's online business.

On average, employees spend no more than 30 minutes per day working with the service. During the initial setup period, however, significantly more time was required.

The Auto Planet team identified several capabilities that could make its workflow even more convenient:

• the ability to independently make bulk changes to tags, product names, and other attributes;
• more flexible control over what constitutes “current” data, since the acceptable age of pricing data may differ depending on the business task.

Priceva's data helps Auto Planet support the broader objectives behind its e-commerce pricing strategy.

The Auto Planet case demonstrates how automated competitor monitoring can support the transition from traditional retail pricing to a scalable e-commerce pricing model.

With an assortment exceeding 130,000 products, manual price management was no longer practical. By systematically monitoring approximately 15,000 SKUs, transferring data through an API, validating it automatically, and incorporating it into pricing algorithms, Auto Planet established a process capable of supporting a much larger product catalog.

The result goes beyond reducing manual work. According to the company, the project achieved its original objective by increasing both margins and sales while creating a transparent pricing management system — providing a stronger foundation for the continued development of its e-commerce business.

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