Competition is the norm by which a pricing is often defined. Recognizing your customers’ needs and demands and acting on them quicker than your competitors can give you a pivotal advantage in an increasingly tough market. In addition, you must understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses and know how they will react to all the things you are reacting (it’s a closed circuit, really) so you can be one step ahead.
We’ve already talked about what your competition knows about your pricing. They already know what you charge, what are your bestsellers and how you deal with customers both directly and indirectly. Just like the truth in X-Files, they’re out there, looking and scooping around. Now, it’s time to turn the tables and let them worry how to react to your standards. We wanted to begin by saying that we’ll use our Incompetitor product for this experiment. Only, we’d be wrong as this is not an experiment but rather a proven, scientific method to determine the competition’s reactions and moves to your pricing. Silly us. Anyway, let’s proceed.
What is Incompetitor?
Incompetitor, if the name didn’t give away a little bit of the mystery, is a competitor tracking tool that helps businesses spot opportunities and market trends to stay on top. It provides quick and timely competitor insights about pricing, promotion, and catalog movement. Its large product database delivers benefits of a comprehensive and accurate, not to mention affordable data feed.
Now that we’ve sorted that out, let’s move on to the main question at hand.
How does it help?
The short answers would be – a lot or greatly. Both would be right and both would be wrong as they are true but don’t really show the nuances that make the tool so useful. These include:
- It has one of the world’s largest product databases
When we say large product database, we mean gigantic. Our proprietary database covers more than a billion products. That’s nine zeros. The tracking is done across 800,000 e-commerce websites and over 1100 retail categories. With that kind of data at your service, you’ll have no trouble finding out your competitor’s offerings and track the changes they make. On top of that, Incompetitor performs these actions across 29 different languages with the ability to convert the data back into English for a uniform dashboard.
Incompetitor dashboard
- It provides real-time data
There would be very few benefits of having a truly global volume of information at hand if it didn’t come with insights into actual developments during the process. Real-time insights allow you to see momentary developments in a shifting market and respond on the fly. You can receive instant reports at the time of your choosing on the newest price and product changes and trends, so you know precisely when your competitors make a change and know just how to react.
It also means there is no longer the need to waste (not spend) time browsing through competitor’s websites. Incompetitor does that for you by automatically monitoring products and their prices. As a direct result, this retains the highest levels of accuracy as it eliminates the human error. Speaking of accuracy…
- Incompetitor is very accurate
Through our proprietary categorization algorithm, we are able to deliver unmatched 95%+ accurate granular insights. We achieve these super-high levels of accuracy thanks to our attributes similarity feature which is plugged directly into our comprehensive database of attributes and a technology overlay that deliver near exact-match visibility. It’s not perfect but it’s very, very close.
How does it work?
Ah, you want to know about the inner machinations. Smart. As you already know, every brand or retailer has their own SKUs (unique URLs with product code) related to each product. Incompetitor tracks these SKUs and all other parameters or attributes of these products, such as price, product description, color, style, material and so on. From there, our own proprietary algorithm finds similar and exact matches and sorts them out according to a number of parameters you choose.
After you are done mapping all products for your competitors, the monitoring begins. Usually, price tracking is the first and foremost practice is such occasion but it can be sometimes misleading as sometimes retailers list products that are out of stock in reality, but keep their price tag on. That is why at Intelligence Node, we also focus on catalog gaps (product availability) and product visibility to get a complete picture.
It works like this – you enter your website, choose the category you want to cover and identify any number of competitors you want to track. And that’s it, Incompetitor does the rest of the work for you. It provides a real-time display of your and your competitor’s pricing, products, and their attributes. Customizable by nature, Incompetitor allows users to view data by a number of different parameters, including price range, product performance and assortment, internal feature offerings like shipping and much more. Trust us, it’s really that easy.
Conclusion
In today’s retail space, market research is an essential means to gain insight into your competitors’ prices, as well as the price customers are willing to pay for your products and services. It is crucial to set your pricing strategy at a level that makes certain your business remains profitable while preventing your customers from looking elsewhere and fleeing the ship. However, to do that, you need to have insight into how your competition reacts to your pricing.
That is where competitor price tracking tools enter the fray. Using these tools is no longer a hassle for thriving e-commerce businesses as automated solutions like Incompetitor ultimately save loads of manual labor hours and resources and ensure that customers don’t leave your store for better prices of your competition. By having access to Incompetitor’s vast library of data and accurate real-time insights, you’ll be able to balance competitive pricing with satisfactory profit margins while being one step ahead of everyone.
