10 May Why Pay For Price Comparison Tool, When You Can Get It Free?
You might be wondering how online retailers with thousands of SKUs could manage to maintain their price competitiveness in the market. Is it because they hired a lot of staff to help them monitor the slightest price changes in the product they are selling? Or, is there any smart tool out in the market that could simplify the process of capturing product price trends?
Nowadays, retailers no longer need to search on different e-commerce sites to obtain the average price range of the product they are selling. We have price comparison tools that make retailers’ lives easier.
Price comparison tools are platforms retailers use to gather product information like the product/service price offered by any participating retailers. The best part of using a price comparisons tool is that retailers could view the relevant pricing information obtained from different merchants’ sites on a single page. This helps retailers to better understand the market in order for them to develop pricing strategies that would win consumers’ hearts.
There are a few types of price comparison tools in the market. The first type of price comparison tool is entirely free. Some of the examples are Google Shopping, PriceGrabber and Shopping.com.
Let’s say if I would like to sell KF 94 face masks, In this case, I can go to Google Shopping for a quick search on KF 94 face masks to know the price of KF94 face mask’s price set by different merchants on different online marketplaces like Shopee and Lazada, and I can even get to know the price of KF94 face masks on e-commerce websites like The Face Shop as shown below.
Source: Google Shopping
Beside this, I could also choose to subscribe for a personalized price competitiveness survey service. Through this option, I can even request customized pricing information or set certain email trigger conditions like significant pricing changes of other participating merchants. For instance, if there is a merchant selling a similar kind of product of yours online and the price of the product is X % lower or higher than yours, an email will be sent to notify you.
You are probably wondering whether your retail business needs a paid price comparison tool.
But, why pay for price comparison tool, when you can get it free?
If You Have Hundreds of SKUs
If you are only selling a few SKUs, the free option would be good enough. However, if you are selling hundreds of SKUs, it would be great if you could automate this tedious pricing research process. Don’t get me wrong. You still can do that manually. However, imagine that you have 100 SKUs, each search takes 3 minutes, you will need to spend 5 hours (300 minutes) every day just to make sure you are well updated on the market prices changes of your products.
If Your Product Price Always Fluctuates
How many times do you conduct your price research? Daily? Weekly? Monthly?
Some of the prices of the product you are selling might fluctuate significantly. In this case, you will need to constantly search for the price changes of your product. For example, Gold price fluctuates every single minute. Would you be able to monitor the price every single minute? I would say the best bet is twice or thrice every day. Without a customized Price Comparison Tool, you may need to hire 1 person, just to monitor product prices very frequently, if you are in the industry with high price volatility.
Bear in mind, underpricing or overpricing could result in huge impact in your sales and cost to your business – losing profits or potentially losing customers.
If You Want To Stay Competitive
To stay ahead of your competitors, you need to be fast and accurate. Fast in detecting the trends, act quickly and accurately by moving to the right directions. Being price competitive is a crucial factor to win in the market.
Without real time data on your fingertips, you are relying on your executive to do price search on FREE price comparison websites, compile the information and prepare a report for you. Perhaps after a few hours? Then, only you can start strategizing and taking actions.
But imagine this, in the early morning, you received an email to notify you that your price is 10% more expensive than the market. You could have called your team for a meeting, or started negotiating with your suppliers or planned a promotional campaign that may have caught your competitors off guard. All these planning and strategizing works could be completed before 10am of the day. And, you are making quicker and more accurate business decisions.
If this paid and customized tool could 2-3X your work productivity and bring you 10-20X your sales revenue, don’t you think it is worth investing?
Looking for affordable customized price competitiveness tools? Reach out to Senwave which provides effective solutions for your business, and grab your FREE consultation slot.