Price Intelligence & Stock
How to Increase Customer Satisfaction,
Market Share, and Profitability
The long delays in the shipment of goods from Asia, in combination with the lack of raw materials, directly threaten the smooth supply of the market. The market is faced with a difficult winter season, which in addition to the impending wave of price increases in a number of goods and services is called to manage an equally great risk: the shortage of products (!) In view of the Black Friday and Christmas period, where demand is rising.
The question that concerns the commercial world at the moment, is whether they will have sufficient quantities in their warehouses. Retailers mention that “The issue is not so much the demand, but the availability of the goods”, the lack of products, mainly low and medium price, hit a large number of their customers and affects 30% -35% of their annual turnover.
Professionals from the retail industry predict that the last quarter of 2021 and the 1st semester of 2022 will be a test for the market and the strategies every company followed.
How Price Intelligence can assist Retailers
When referring to Price Intelligence one’s mind naturally goes directly to price monitoring, which is of course the most important factor when talking about Pricing, but there are some other factors that are not directly linked to price, but are also important and keeping an eye on them is nevertheless an essential part of the price intelligence and decision-making process.
One of these factors is stock availability. Especially now it may be more important than ever. By monitoring the competition you can find many opportunities to increase Customer Satisfaction, Profits and Market Share.
Customer Satisfaction & Market Share
By monitoring the competition and knowing the prices and the availability of the products you have the opportunity to adapt and win from the gap that can be created by a shortage in stock.
For example, if you know that your main competitors do not have in stock some of your common products, you can focus on advertising them more intensely and not necessarily at a cheaper price to reach more customers. Many times even we have been lucky enough to buy a product preferring immediate availability even if the cost is a little higher, in a reasonable context.
So, it is important to be able to gain customers by offering a better experience than your competitors. This way you can earn double as you have great chances to make them loyal customers and gradually increase your market share.
Profitability
Sales, discounts, markdowns, promotions—no matter what form they take, eating into your profits to get your shoppers a little better deal is a necessary part of retail today. Of course, promotions cut into margins. However, you can control how much.
Promotions don’t have to hurt; instead, they have to be crafty. One way to do that is to get the timing right and beat the competitor to the punch. This can help you to see sales jump, while still protecting profit margins. Retailers need to change their strategy based on what the competition is doing in order to go to market with the best possible offers and promotions.
By monitoring your competition’s availability of products you can understand when it matters most to run a promotion. A possible reason to run a promotion is to follow up with your competitors but why run a promotion when you know that you are the only one with Stock Availability?
Conclusion
Stock analysis is therefore an important thread of price intelligence, because price when looked at in isolation, can be very misleading.
A retailer might be cheaper on price, but when you investigate further and attempt to buy the “cheaper” product, only to find it is not available and hasn’t been for 3 months. At this stage, the price becomes irrelevant because this retailer is not able to deliver the product at this price.
As such, stock analysis allows retailers to identify competitors who set prices a certain way but are not able to deliver products. These “competitors” need to be taken into account as a class all of their own because in many cases their “price points” are irrelevant when they can’t deliver the products in question at the advertised price.
Also by monitoring the competition you can go back to older records and by studying the data to conclude what was the market trend in a certain period of time and make decisions about your stock more correctly through forecasts.
