Competitor Pricing Analysis: A Step By Step Guide How to Monitor Competitor Pricing

How many competitors do you have? Five, ten, more? Keeping ahead of the competition is more important than ever. One powerful way to gain an edge is by conducting a competitor pricing analysis. By monitoring your competitor pricing, you can make smart decisions that sharpen your strategies and boost your growth. Times gone by, you would send someone round pretending to be a customer. Today, companies monitor online, focusing on competitive analysis and pricing optimisation.

Understanding the Market: Competitive Analysis

Understanding your competitors’ product offerings, pricing strategies, and market positioning can provide invaluable insights. By monitoring their product lists, pricing policies, and new launches, you can identify market trends and gaps that your business can exploit. This knowledge allows you to respond swiftly to market changes and stay competitive.

Example: If a competitor is gaining traction with a new feature, you can quickly innovate and offer a similar or improved feature.

To dive deeper into competitive analysis, consider the following steps:

1. Monitor Competitor Pricing Products and Services: Regularly review your competitors’ product lines and service offerings. Companies like DataGro.io can help you monitor changes and updates.
2. Analyse Market Positioning: undertake competitor pricing analysis to understand where your competitors stand in the market. This includes their brand perception, customer base, and market share. 
3. Identify Gaps and Opportunities: Use the gathered data to find gaps in the market that your competitors have not addressed. This could be in the form of underserved customer needs, unexploited niches, or product features that can be improved.

Setting the Right Price: Pricing Optimisation

Setting the right price is crucial for attracting customers and maximising profits. Competitor data helps you stay aligned with market prices, allowing you to adjust your pricing strategy effectively. By analysing your rivals’ pricing models, you can pinpoint the optimal price point for your products or services, ensuring you remain attractive to price-sensitive customers while maximising revenue.

Tip: Regularly review competitor pricing to maintain competitive yet profitable pricing for your products.

For effective pricing optimisation, follow these strategies:

1. Monitor Competitor Pricing: Use companies like DataGro.io to track competitors’ prices in real-time. These tools help you understand their pricing strategies, discount patterns, and promotional tactics.
2. Analyse Pricing Models: Study the different pricing models your competitors use, such as subscription tiers, bundled pricing, and seasonal discounts. Determine which models are most effective in your market.
3. Adjust Your Pricing Strategy: Based on the data collected, adjust your pricing to find the sweet spot that balances profitability with customer appeal. Ensure that your pricing reflects the value you offer and differentiates you from competitors.

Success Stories: Real-World Impact of Data Analytics

A UK based client in the building and plumbing supply trade, wanted a complete audit of like for like products, against their 4 main competitors. The client had around 3000 products on their website and their competitors between 4,000 – 6,000 each.

Issues:

• Our client and its competitors listed the same products using varying product titles. Text matching only matched 300 products.
• Even if the product titles were the same, lengths and quantity differed. Some competitors sold products in bundles, others as singles.
• Even if everything was the same, consideration had to be given to the product manufacturer. FloPlast, Plasline etc. 

Steps:

• Datagro.io scraped 5 websites.
• Standardised and normalised the data.
• Simplified data attribution
• Matched like for like products.
• Consolidated more than 10 sheets of Excel data giving a final list of just over 1600 matching products. 

TJ also compiled everything into a dashboard, allowing the client to see:

• All client products with their current prices
• If any of our clients competitors listed a product cheaper
• If the average price across the competitors was cheaper than our clients 
• All of this in one easy to read, Excel row. 

Result:

As the project was carried out recently we don’t have the hard data yet. The client is using their internal team to review low ranking product matches. However from our final checks we can see our client lists:

• 576 matched products at a cheaper price than their competitor average.
• 294 matched products at more than 50% cheaper than their competitor average. 
• This leaves them with 1000? ‘s of identical products that they are selling at a higher price. It has given them the hard, cold data to be able to accurately devise a pricing strategy.

Summary

Leveraging competitor data is industry standard. By integrating this information into your pricing and market analysis, you can make smarter decisions that drive growth and success. Embrace the power of competitor data to stay ahead of the curve and achieve your business objectives. For more insights on effectively utilising competitor data, contact DataGro.io to discuss our advanced web scraping and data enrichment services. 

You’ll have noticed we don’t often name drop our clients (including plumbing and supply merchants!). That’s mostly down to NDA’ s. But should you contact us to discuss how our data services can be tailored to meet your unique business needs – we have been known to let slip a name or two.