With saving money the number one reason that consumers shop online, retailers need to ensure they maintain the right price position. This involves a careful balancing act if you are to stimulate sales without any loss of margin. But you can manage this successfully if you get six core activities right. We take a quick look at the first three of those activities here…
You don’t need to track all of your competitors’ pricing and promotions activities to meet your pricing objectives. It is far better to focus your resources on tracking those pricing and promotions activities that can have the greatest impact on the performance of your business.
Pricing activity may happen at a product level, but tracking the price position of your full product range across categories using a pricing index is important. This will enable you to ensure your price position compares favorably to the rest of the market. By evaluating pricing at both a product and category level, you can identify any price shifts and their potential influence on your price position early.
Ensuring the prices of your specified products are benchmarked against all relevant competitors is a real challenge. Particularly when product descriptions and attributes can vary significantly across retailers. The accuracy of this matching process is key to the success of any pricing strategy. With data you can trust, you can better direct pricing decisions and negotiate with your suppliers to drive immediate value for your business.
Connected Consumers’ ability to check prices whenever and wherever they choose using different devices has made it difficult for retailers to effectively manage their online pricing. To remain competitive, you must identify those pricing and promotions activities of your competitors to track. You need to examine your price position in the context of the market. You must also ensure you are basing your pricing strategy on the right data. But pricing decisions don’t simply end there, there are several other factors to consider that can drive your bottom line which we will explore further in our white paper.
The positive impact on your revenue and profit of making the right pricing decisions can far outweigh your investment in the processes and services that support these decisions. The winners in the new retail battleground will be those that utilize pricing intelligence to get their online price position right.