Price Monitoring Tool: Your Complete Guide

eCommerce Managers

With real-time market intelligence, eCommerce managers could dynamically adjust their strategies to improve visibility, buy box wins, and optimize revenue across marketplaces.

Brand Managers

Price monitoring tools help brand managers track MAP violations among resellers across the marketplaces. It enables them to prevent the brand reputation, integrity, and most importantly customer trust.

Pricing Managers

With real-time competitor data and historical price trend data, pricing managers can craft better pricing strategies. It helps them protect profit margins and make data-driven pricing decisions.

Inventory Managers

With historical market trend data, inventory managers can forecast the demand more accurately, avoiding any shortage or excess stocking. After all, guessing is very much risky in inventory planning.

Marketing Teams

Marketing teams could analyze the competitor price patterns and strategically plan promotions and discounts at the optimal time. It ensures every campaign delivers the desired results.

Real-Time Market Intelligence

Real-time price tracking helps gain a better understanding of competitor pricing and market trends, enabling you to fine-tune your pricing strategies accordingly. Always stay ahead of changes in this dynamic market.

Informed Decision making

With access to accurate and up-to-date data, you could easily move forward and make more confident data-backed decisions. Let it be pricing, planning promotions, or managing inventory, no more guesswork.

Improved Competitiveness

By keeping an eye on competitor prices, you can anticipate market moves and align your prices with demand. Simply said, you can be proactive and not reactive. This means better positioning, more buy box wins, and increased market share.

Maximized Profitability

With data-driven insights, you'll be able to set optimal prices, balancing both sales volume and profit margin. This approach eventually leads to increased revenue and growth, without sacrificing profits.

Enhanced Brand Reputation

Monitoring resellers enables you to quickly spot and address unauthorized sellers violating the MAP policy. And, consistent pricing strengthens your brand image and enhances customer perception.

Saved Time and Effort

Price monitoring tool reduces the need for manual data collection and analysis (which drains hours), freeing up more time. You could allocate that time more efficiently to strategic tasks that actually drive growth.

Real-Time Tracking

A price monitoring tool should automate the entire process of price tracking, and give real-time updates on competitor pricing without any manual intervention. This way, you can make proactive decisions without missing anything. No lag, no missed opportunities.

MAP monitoring

For brands, tracking seller compliance is crucial. Your tool should be able to spot the MAP violations quickly, helping you protect your brand integrity.

Customizable Alerts

You should be able to set and receive alerts when competitor change their prices or a reseller drops below the minimum level. Catch it the moment they happen. So your team can respond immediately to the price fluctuations or policy breaches.

Dynamic Pricing Rules

Advanced price monitoring tools allow you to automate pricing adjustments based on competitor behavior, inventory level, or any preset rules. Trust me, it could save you a lot of time and effort.

Integration capabilities

It should seamlessly integrate with your existing tech stack, including ERP, CRM, Inventory Management systems, or any eCommerce platforms, to ensure a smooth data flow. You should be able to get the full potential of the tool without disrupting your existing operations.

Reporting & Analytics

Should offer intuitive dashboards, customizable reports to monitor key metrics and KPIs relevant to your business. Some tools even provide AI-powered chatbots that let you easily extract the key insights by just conversing, which is a plus for sure.

User-friendly interface

Your team should be able to easily navigate and understand the tool, with a minimal learning curve. After all, what is the point of having a tool with bad UI that takes away hours?

Scalability

Your tool should scale along with your business, accommodating the growing number of competitors and products. It should also support tracking prices in multiple currencies if you plan to expand globally.

DigiSense360

DigiSense360 provides AI-powered Digital Shelf Analytics, including real-time competitor price monitoring, MAP monitoring, customizable alerts, product rank tracking, customer review analysis, and channel specific content audit and generation.

Prisync

Prisync provides a comprehensive solution for all pricing needs, including competitor price tracking, MAP monitoring, Dynamic pricing, instant alerts, and also digital shelf management.

Price2Spy

Price2Spy provides a range of features that help brands and retailers, including real-time price monitoring, MAP monitoring, alerting, dynamic repricing and comprehensive reporting.

IntelligenceNode

IntelligenceNode provides competitive intelligence, including competitor price monitoring , dynamic pricing, MAP monitoring, content optimization, share of search tracking, assortment planning, and competitive benchmarking.

Dealavo

Dealavo provides numerous features meant for eCommerce professionals, including price monitoring, price automation, dynamic pricing, promotion tracking, assortment analysis and reporting.

Get clear on your Needs

Start by identifying your specific business needs. What do you expect from a price monitoring tool? Maintaining competitive pricing, MAP enforcement, or pricing automation, list them down. A clear understanding of your goals will make the rest of the process easier.

Decide on the type of tool

Based on your goals, determine the type of tool you need for price monitoring. Whether it's a basic price tracking tool, dynamic pricing software, digital shelf analytics software , or a comprehensive pricing suite. Your choice should depend on your business size, industry, and required features.

Look for key features

After deciding the type of tool, check if it has the key features we discussed above. Also make a list of features that you need other than the must-haves and look for them. But, don't get distracted by the features that you don't even use. Just look out for the ones that actually add value to your business.

Evaluate Usability

Just because a tool has a wide range of features doesn't mean it's the best. The core is usability. If the tool lacks a decent UI and your team can't use it efficiently, then everything is lost. Utilize the free trials offered, and check if it is easy to use and navigate without any complexity.

Analyze Pricing Model

Each tool in the market offers different pricing models. It could be either fixed, tiered, or usage based. Some even have customized plans, which is usually based on the features you opt for. Analyze it carefully and check if it fits within your budget. Don't forget to check if there are any hidden costs.

Consider Vendor Support

Though price monitoring tools are not so complex, assessing the quality of customer support is necessary. Check if they provide onboarding assistance, training resources, and any ongoing help if needed.

Revenue Growth

Is your revenue going up? Look for changes in sales volume and revenue before and after adopting a price monitoring tool, to see its impact on overall income.

Profit Margin

Has your profit margin improved by eliminating unnecessary discounts and price cuts? Measure the lift in profit margin percentage after implementing the price monitoring tool. If you want to be more specific, check this on SKU level.

Buy Box Win Rate

Are you getting more Buy Box wins? If you are an eCommerce seller, track the percentage increase in buy box share on marketplaces as a result of competitive pricing.

Time Savings

How much manual effort is reduced by automating price tracking and alerts? Record and compare the time spent on price monitoring before and after implementing the tool. To quantify that, multiply the saved hours by the hourly labor cost.

MAP Compliance Rate

Have the reseller price violations reduced? If you are a brand, track the number of MAP violations detected and resolved before and after, calculating the percentage decrease.