Price monitoring for brands

Monitoring the current price level has been an important task for most brands for many years. The range of control options ranges from the selective checking of individual online shops, to the use of price comparison services such as Idealo or the use of systems for price monitoring. In the following, various options will be examined from the industry’s point of view. Because this is in many ways different from that of the trade when checking the prices of the competition.

Manual checking of individual online shops

The manual review of individual shops is certainly only possible and useful in certain cases in the event of price discrepancies or after corresponding information. Active and proactive monitoring of the behavior of market participants in relation to their own products or competing products is therefore not possible.

Control with price comparison services

Using price comparison services is a much better and more efficient way to do this. They give a quick, detailed and supposedly comprehensive market overview of current prices. Other useful options are the display of price developments over a longer period of time and proactive price alarm clocks. And of course the entire spectrum of competition can be observed. It should be noted, however, that only one product can be called at a time. Several products are correspondingly time-consuming. A positive effect, of course, is that, from the brand manufacturer’s point of view, this process does not cause any additional costs other than working time.

So far so good. Unfortunately not quite. On the one hand, not all prices are available from all customers. Only those who proactively provide their prices at the right time. On the other hand, the simple visual inspection does not really allow an analysis of the price situation to be carried out. Unfortunately, Google Shopping as another comparable option is not a better choice here.

Price monitoring systems

The last option is the use of price monitoring systems. There is now a very large number of providers with a wide variety of options.

On the one hand, a provider of simple solutions for the browser. Relevant products can be defined and important data sources selected here. A critical check is certainly whether the data sources that are relevant to you are available or can simply be added to the data sources offered. And whether the content and depth of the data meet the required requirements. It must also be clarified in which cycle data is queried and thus it can be determined who was the price driver and which retailer followed the price development. The requested data can usually be analyzed accordingly on the web or can be downloaded for your own analysis.

Other providers tend to take the technical approach and offer the possibility of querying price data very flexibly via an electronic interface. Here, too, a key question is which data sources are available. The integration of these providers is technically complex for the brand manufacturer. Logic and corresponding expertise are required to automatically query the interfaces and to present and analyze the results. It is therefore questionable whether this type is suitable for many brand manufacturers.

Relevance for brand manufacturers

Historically, the systems for price monitoring tend to come from the requirements of other retailers. The aim was to recognize as quickly as possible when direct competitors change prices and then to react as automatically and intelligently as possible. The providers then used this to develop their offers for brand manufacturers. In many cases, however, this is just a different packaging for the same product.

For example, there is no link to other data worlds such as sales, stocks or your own marketing campaigns. The data analysis with regard to the price behavior of the dealers over a longer period of time is also often not available. The important question of who are the regular price drivers and what is the cause cannot be answered without additional data and corresponding key figures. Likewise, the exposure of possible previously unknown price drivers, which then lead to lower prices at important retailers, and thus to tension and the demand for sell-out support on the part of the manufacturer.

vcs Watch as a solution for brand manufacturers

Watch was conceived from the beginning as a solution for brand manufacturers and addresses all important requirements in order to monitor and analyze the price level quickly and easily. Watch recognizes price drivers, determines the price behavior of all market participants and integrates itself completely into the rest of a manufacturer’s data world. For all own and relevant competing products at a glance.

How do you see the situation? What are your requirements and experiences with regard to monitoring the price situation? We would be happy to discuss this topic with you and show you Watch in detail. Contact us.

Price monitoring – who’s driving the prices down? (valuechainsolutions.de)