In this day, and with the increasing numbers of online sales, more brands and retailers focus on the e-commerce world in general. According to a study by Statista in 2020, the total revenue in sales worldwide was $4.28 trillion. The good news carries on for eCommerce as steady growth is expected in the following years. 

Source: Statista  

Knowing your environment and especially your rivals are essential for development and growth in the eCommerce sphere. The perfect combination for any company is. Sell for better prices and to beat the competition. One of the ways to know what your competitors are up to is by tracking their prices.    

However, many retailers, or manufacturers, do not know what price monitoring is or understand how price monitoring works. If they do not understand it, they are wasting a great concept for their companies. This article intends to help you avoid the most frequent mistakes of price monitoring in eCommerce.     

Mistake #1: Monitoring just prices     

If you think that monitoring only prices takes you to the top, let me tell you that you are wrong. You have to see the bigger picture and focus on other aspects. Their inventory and delivery times, for example.       

Having more inventory than your competition in a hot selling product, for example, allows you to have more people buy from you because you have more availability. While your competitors might be out of stock, you do not, and you can use this to your advantage. Also, if you monitor their delivery time and find out that they take too long to dispatch their products, you can benefit from this and offer your customers a shorter delivery time.     

Mistake #2: Not defining your competitors      

Look at this case. If you own a big supermarket, you cannot monitor all the supermarkets in your area. You have to determine which are the relevant competitors to your company. While for some of them, it might be beneficial to monitor small shops with no customer service ratings. That is not the case for you as a leader in your sector. 

For that reason, you should take your time to investigate and analyze the market. In the example above, examine which marketplaces and shops are your real competitors so you can monitor them.     

Mistake #3: Implementing pricing changes with a delay     

You noticed that a competitor implemented a price change on one of their products in the morning. What are you going to do with that information? You immediately have to respond to this modification.     

You can’t wait until the afternoon or the next day to make changes. If you take too long to implement changes, chances are a new price change has occurred on the same object you monitored earlier. That leaves you many steps behind everyone else.     

Mistake #4: Do it yourself     

We want to make clear is that we are not against Do It Yourself (DIY). But sometimes it is better to have a specialist create something because they have a lot of experience building or doing new things. In this case, we are speaking about web scrapping. You can do this manually, with your own created software, or buy a program. 

Carrying out manual web crapping takes a lot of your team’s time and your time. Another point is that some price updates happen at midnight or early in the morning, conveniently when people are not in the offices ready to make any change. And as we stated before, if you take too much time implementing price changes, new price changes happen.       

Creating your price monitoring program requires having a qualified team, and having people that possess this kind of knowledge can be expensive for your company. On top of that, building it from scratch takes a lot of time and a lot of testing before it can function correctly.        

Conclusion     

Before, price monitoring took a long time. You had one person in your company visit the store of your competitors. When he came back, your team analyzed the information they collected. Then, they proceeded to adjust your prices. Now, this is action automated because of the existence of price monitoring software. The advantage of this is the possibility to do this faster and more effectively.    

PriceTweakers provides you with accurate data about your competitors, including stock availability insights, and gives you real-time analytics scripts and reports. We will monitor all your competitors and provide you with price recommendations to yield more profit. Follow us for more information. 

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