4 price monitoring tools to keep an eye on prices and competitors
In a hyper-competitive environment, e-tailers, brands and B2B service providers need to constantly monitor the market to adjust their pricing policies and stay competitive. One of the best ways of doing this is to set up a strategic intelligence platform that includes competitive intelligence , sales intelligence and pricing intelligence. Already mentioned in our marketing intelligence comparisons, these different types of intelligence are essential if you want to stay one step ahead. Focus on price monitoring and the best monitoring software and tools on the Internet.
SUMMARY
What is price monitoring?
Price monitoring is a marketing technique and business intelligence tool that enables you to monitor prices in a given market on a regular or permanent basis. It can be used to monitor the prices charged by competitors, but can also be used in e-commerce to monitor the prices charged by distributors for its products.
By setting up a price monitoring unit, you can keep better informed and constantly align your prices so that you are listed at the top of price comparison sites, and so increase your sales.
Traditionally, price monitoring is carried out by surveying prices at points of sale. Today, however, it can be carried out automatically by means of a technology watch that extracts price data from the Internet. This can be based on Google, Hootsuite or Netvibes alerts.
Competitive price monitoring: staying one step ahead of the competition
Competitive marketing intelligence consists of researching, analysing and exploiting data relating to your company, its competitors and its sector of activity, in order to increase your productivity and competitiveness. Competitive intelligence can serve several purposes:
- make more effective decisions ;
- monitor the market and potentially public opinion;
- assessing the competition and the company's brand image (e-reputation);
- improve the company's current operations and procedures;
- anticipate competitors' actions to better prepare its own strategy.
Integrated into this competitive surveillance, price monitoring therefore makes it possible to combine marketing strategy and economic intelligence (as KB Crawl does, for example) to gain a better understanding of competitive pressure and define more relevant pricing strategies.
Why and how do you monitor competition and pricing information? In digital marketing, for example, price intelligence enables you to gain greater control over your competitive environment and activate new growth levers. If you have an e-commerce business, you can use this monitoring of your competitors' selling prices to trigger impulse purchases of your products.
Price monitoring as part of a sales strategy: a key conversion lever
Sales intelligence, also known as marketing intelligence, is a more general term used to describe the collection, processing and dissemination of information about products and markets. In particular, it enables you to anticipate new markets or prepare for the launch of new products. Market intelligence is essentially based on :
- market research (quantitative or qualitative) ;
- observation of distributors, subcontractors, suppliers, customers, competitors, influencers, etc. ;
- analysing data from search engines and natural referencing tools (the most sought-after keywords) to understand consumer expectations.
As part of this overall sales strategy, price intelligence acts as an aggregator, enabling you to differentiate yourself from your targets in a collaborative way. Whether you charge less or more than your competitors, you can better profile your competitive advantage: lower price, better service, etc.
As part of a forward-looking e-mailing campaign or content marketing campaign, for example, price monitoring with a commercial objective helps you to find customers and optimise your customer loyalty rate by positioning your offer correctly. In addition to monitoring prices, this monitoring also includes monitoring commercial practices in the sector and invitations to tender.
E-commerce price monitoring: choosing the right monitoring software!
Automating your e-commerce price monitoring enables you to remain responsive, save time and therefore money! Whether you opt for free or paid price monitoring software, there are a number of strategic monitoring tools on the market that offer very practical features for processing information more quickly and accurately. Here are four of the best web monitoring solutions currently available:
- PriceComparator (BSWEB): a SaaS webmarketing intelligence solution to optimise the strategic decisions of e-tailers, brands and manufacturers. This collaborative monitoring software automatically extracts prices, promotions and stocks from competitor sites and marketplaces on a daily basis, as well as from your network of distributors, to help you control your image. As a bonus, it also monitors e-mail offers and social networking strategies.
- Price Observatory : a price monitoring and aggregation tool for real-time monitoring of the prices charged on all Internet merchant sites. All the monitoring actions are automated, and the data is transmitted to the user via the tool's dashboard, a browser extension, by email or via an API.
- PricingAssistant : a suite of web monitoring solutions enabling e-retailers and brands to optimise their search for information, their marketing strategy and their prices in relation to their competitors.
- Paarly : pricing analytics software for analysing the entire market. This pricing intelligence tool automates the processing of information to monitor your competitors' prices, stock levels and product ranges.
1 of 4
 PriceComparator |  Price Observatory |  Pricing Assistant |  Paarly |
|---|---|---|---|
| For companies with more than 1 employees | For all companies | For all companies | For one-employee companies |
| See software | See software | See software | See software |
| Learn more about PriceComparator | Learn more about Price Observatory | Learn more about Pricing Assistant | Learn more about Paarly |
PriceComparator.pro
- ✔ Product matching
- ✔ Competitor special offer alerts
- ✔ Multiple currency management
- ✔ Social network monitoring
- ✔ API integration
PriceComparator
Price Observatory
- ✔ Product matching
- ✔ Competitor special offer alerts
- Multiple currency management
- ✔ API integration
Price Observatory
PricingAssistant
- ✔ Product matching
- ✔ Alert on competitor special offers
- ✔ Multiple currency management
- ✔ Automated bidding on Adwords
- Automatic repricing
- ✔ API integration
Pricing Assistant
Paarly
- ✔ Product matching
- ✔ Competitor special offer alerts
- ✔ Multi-currency management
- ✔ Automatic repricing
- API integration
Paarly
How do you go about price monitoring?
In practical terms, price monitoring, marketing monitoring or strategic monitoring is all about choosing the right monitoring tools and putting a real strategy in place. Whether you're an e-commerce player, a distributor, a brand or a service provider, whatever type of monitoring you're considering, think about your competitive edge. When it comes to price monitoring, business intelligence and digital strategy tools give you an overall view of the prices charged in your market, so that you can stay competitive. They also provide you with good examples of competitive intelligence reports. Make the most of them!
Article translated from French