Maximizing pricing strategy to drive sales success

Retailer Sathya relies on GfK to inform fast decisions on pricing to stay competitive

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Sector:

Retail

Portfolio:

Technical Consumer Goods and Durables

Stores:

200+

Facts & Figures

Founded

1978

Headquarter

Chennai, Tamil Nadu

Employees:

2,000

Solutions used

GfK Online Pricing Solutions

Retail

The implementation of Online Price Monitoring (OPM) helps us to take quick strategic decisions on pricing our products competitively. The smart analytics, market trends, alerts and ranking algorithms save a huge amount of time from our team’s routine tasks in price management. The data-driven insights support our negotiations with suppliers for better pricing and compensation whenever market operating price deviations are reported. Complaints from customers in both our online and offline stores have drastically reduced. Our Product Managers can use the reports with minimal training and the dashboard is user-friendly. The live data facilitated by regular crawls, data export features and customization of report selection logic are a great resource for our teams.

Johnson Asariah

Founder & Chairman, Managing Director, Sathya Agencies

An omnichannel retailer with a reputation for excellent customer service

Sathya Agencies is a leading retailer of a wide range of consumer technical goods and durables including computers and laptops, audio and visual, electronics, home appliances and security solutions. Based in Tamil Nadu state, the private company has over 200 physical stores and a strong online presence.

The need for a consistent, competitive pricing model

Like many retailers in India, Sathya’s initial business success was driven by in-store sales, but the lockdowns of the Covid pandemic forced the company to direct its customers to its existing online presence. However, the challenge was that e-commerce pricing was inconsistent, out of date, and non-competitive. The team at Sathya had been manually mapping online prices across multiple items, product categories and competitors. Although this approach was adequate when so little business was transacted online, the store closures of Covid meant online was the sole shopping platform available for customers. The limitations of this manual approach quickly became apparent, especially when compared with the large, experienced market place players such as Amazon and Flipkart.

Choosing GfK as our intelligence partner was a great decision. Our vision is to build our brand and drive sales through innovative technologies. We need the very latest and most reliable intelligence to understand the market, our customers, and our competitors. To provide the high standard of customer service we guarantee, it is very important that our pricing strategy is right all the time. I trust GfK to help us achieve that – and a lot more too. Whether it is using data or the team’s expertise for more detailed customized consultancy, we know we can always rely on GfK.

Johnson Asariah

Founder & Chairman, Managing Director, Sathya Agencies

Trial of Online Price Monitoring

Sathya discussed its issues with GfK and decided to trial the Online Price Monitoring solution. The platform automatically delivers up-to-date, accurate price information at the SKU level for numerous categories across competition websites via a user-friendly platform. There are additional options to customize alerts for maximum efficiency. The trial period convinced the retailer that they could make rapid pricing adjustments and handle customer queries easily and efficiently.

Delivering a 20% growth in e-commerce traffic

Today, OPM is the basis of Sathya’s customer pricing strategy and negotiations with manufacturers. Pricing is transparent and competitive: every shopper pays the same, realistic rate whether they shop in-store or online. Traffic to the Sathya portal has increased by 20% and sales are up too. Staff have been redirected from manually managing prices to focusing their energies on driving business growth.

A long-standing partnership

The two companies have worked together for more than a decade, and have built a strong partnership in that time. When Sathya chose GfK as its intelligence partner in 2012, the retailer had ambitious plans to expand from a smaller player into a much larger retailer. Growth has been as vigorous as hoped, and Sathya now has 200+ showrooms across Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh state.