5 ways to protect your brand and improve the retailer-brand relationship with price monitoring
In the competitive world of eCommerce, price monitoring can give you more than simply collecting selling prices. Monitoring the prices of your brands’ products can help you strengthen your Brand and keep strong relationships with key retail partners.
How? Keep reading, and we’ll explain!
What is Price Monitoring?
Price Monitoring is the practice of monitoring your and your competitors’ products’ prices and price alterations across all eCommerce channels.
Pricing data, collected with a price monitoring solution, can help you identify changes quickly and allow you to take appropriate action immediately. Price monitoring also provides (historical) price trends and insights into your market that can help you understand and anticipate market developments.
You need retail partners to sell your products to consumers. When consumers are happy, your resellers will sell more, and your business will grow too. It may sound self-evident but, beware that a troubled relationship with retailers can quickly throw a spanner in the works. In this article, we’ll explain how monitoring prices can help you keep prices stable, build strong relationships with key retail partners, and ultimately make everyone in the chain perform better!
Collecting and analyzing eCommerce prices can be done manually, but that’s a time-consuming task with low coverage and update frequency, thus generating limited or incomplete data. Imagine visiting all pages where your products are listed, every week, every day, or even multiple times a day. Bet you can think of better ways to spend that time, such as focusing on your pricing strategy.
The process of automated product price monitoring takes over this manual task. It will save you much time collecting daily updated prices from retailers and competitors and provide high coverage and very high frequency. Keep in mind, that qualitative data will help you make better decisions for your Pricing Strategy.
Let’s see the 5 Ways to Protect Your Brand and Improve the Retailer-Brand Relationship ⤵
1. Price Monitoring to Prevent “Price Wars“
Retailers constantly monitor the prices of competing sellers and sites. Then they adjust prices in the hope of more sales. This way, a price war is set in motion that puts margins and profitability at risk for both the brand and key resellers.
Communicate with resellers about your common strategy, targets, and promotions.
Price monitoring contributes to:
– Understanding what is the price position of your products in the market.
– Monitoring the movement of your product categories.
– Adjusting your Promotions & Marketing Campaigns according to your Competitors.
– Protecting you from losing money from “unexpected” Promotions.
Also Monitoring your products’ availability in the retailers can help you increase your Market Share by preventing your retailers from being “Out of Stock”. As eCommerce had a hard time with the supply chain during the pandemic lockdown, stock KPIs are more important than ever.
Another significant factor of your Brand’s Success is how many products of your Brand are included in your Retailer’s Assortment and what is your brand share on the retailers’ e-shelf for each category. That’s why a regular Assortment Analysis is mandatory.
In a nutshell, a price war on the markets can lead to losing product listings, becoming ineligible for advertising, and losing buy box placement and -eligibility. Resellers will very much appreciate it if you try to protect their business.
2. Monitor 3P Sellers & their Prices
3P sellers who have no official relationship with your company can play a significant role in price wars. They have no interest in following your Marketing Strategy. If an unauthorized seller initiates a price drop, it forces retailers to match that price, even though that will decrease their margins.
The result: your key retail partners will lose sales profits and trust in your brand. And guess who will go pay the bill…
Prevent price wars with a Price Monitoring Solution
Price Monitoring Solution can inform you who is selling your products. Get notified of unauthorized sellers, figure out who the seller is and how to reach them. Try to reach them and make them your resellers. That way you can prevent or stop a price war from happening and maintain satisfied resellers and customers.
3. Be an Attractive Business Partner
It can become more challenging to attract new resellers when your products are online for a much lower price than the recommended retail price.
To attract new key retail partners, you have to protect your bottom line and your brand’s health by using a Premium Pricing Data solution.
You can use a Premium Pricing Data Solution to get an overview of the number of retailers selling your brands and their prices.
4. Protect your Brands’ Image
Price Monitoring contributes to a solid and consistent brand image.
For instance, consumers can lose trust in your brand when they find
the products they bought, at several lower prices.
As Price is one of the 4Ps of Marketing, it surely plays an important role in the buying decision, but other factors are at play. Shoppers evaluate a brand by the value it offers. A shopper’s perception determines what he or she is willing to pay for your product.
Record low prices can change a person’s experience, affect real quality, confuse buyers, and diminish the value of a product. When this happens, your brand or product will lose value to your retailers. After all, if the shopper no longer wants your products, why would your retailers want them?
Premium Updated Pricing Data allows you to take immediate action, protect your brand, and be an attractive partner for both retailers and consumers.
5. Competitor’s Price Monitoring
As a brand, you need to understand how prices evolve in a competitive environment.
If competitors lower prices during the growth stage of your product’s life cycle, you might need to drop your prices and adopt a competitive pricing strategy. During the decline stage, price monitoring can be helpful to decide if you want to discontinue the product or keep producing and selling it.
Overall, you monitor competitors’ prices to offer razor-sharp prices, which benefits your customers and, therefore, your retailers. With price monitoring, you can decide on prices for new products that provide good value for money.
Curious to learn more about Price Monitoring?
Or Would you like to test an All-inclusive Premium Data Experience in your company? Talk to our Experts or get a Free 15 Days Demo.
