Rahul Bali
It’s no secret. Knowing what your competitors are up to can give you an upper hand when planning your next moves. This is especially true when it comes to decisions about pricing.
You’re probably not the only one active in your market, so it’s almost certain your competitors are keeping a close eye on you as well. They’re looking for information like:
- what products you’re selling
- what prices you offer
- if you provide free shipping
- what your advertisements are like and even what your costs look like
Many of your competitors might already be undercutting you, if not on all products then at least for top selling products. If your prices are unmatched then they might come up with other strategies to steal business from you. They might beat you on pricing and then compensate for that loss with higher shipping prices. Many of them will be happy to take a loss on that one transaction if they can justify the LTV (Customer Lifetime Value).
If you’re not doing the same, you are at a significant disadvantage. E-Commerce business is fierce and unkind. You need to stay ahead of your competitors, and how do you do that? You start with data.
Table of Contents
Price Watch and DataFeedWatch
How does it work?
Benefits of using Price Watch
What’s next for Price Watch
How to sign up for Beta
Final Thoughts
Price Watch and DataFeedWatch
We’re always taking the next steps towards expanding our services and implementing new features. Our focus is to best support our customers in this competitive environment by providing a more comprehensive feed marketing solution. One of our latest ventures is the Price Watch feature.
Price Watch is an upcoming service that will enable you to monitor your competition by getting access to a plethora of data about them. This will give you the data you need to effectively fine-tune your pricing strategies.
How does it work?
At its core, Price Watch is a tool that searches for other advertisers that are selling the same products you are. You’ll be able to view the products and metrics all together and get a clear look at your pricing position. It does this in a few steps:
- Your products are identified and matched
- We scrap the pricing data
- The data is downloaded and broken down into various metrics
- The data is presented to you in a structured way
We’re able to identify products from your feed by matching the GTIN number with your competitor’s for a specific channel, like Google Shopping for example.
Matching the GTIN number works as a much better approach as compared to matching the product name. This is because the error rate is non-existent unless you or the competitor have an incorrect GTIN.
The data is divided into the following metrics :
- Cheapest Competitor
- 2nd and 3rd Cheapest Competitor
- Next Cheapest Competitor
- Competitor’s Price
- Price Difference in percentage or a number
- Number of Offers
- Google Offer Position
- Offers Above and Below
Another big feature is the filtering system. You can choose which competitors to sort the data by. This comes in handy if you’re wanting to keep an eye on someone specific.
Along with being able to view this data online, you can also download it and take it with you. All the pricing data in a CSV file is just a click away.
We’re not stopping here. With future releases we’ll be adding more metrics and channels. Price Watch is now available everywhere Google Shopping is.
Benefits of using Price Watch
If you’re advertising your products online, keeping up to date with your competitors will work to your advantage. You’ll be able to:
- have a complete overview of your market
- know where you stand compared to competitors
- save time by not having to search manually for your competitor’s activity
- have data to back up your decisions when forming strategies
- increase your ROI
- view suggested prices for your products
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What’s next for Price Watch
To get ready for Price Watch Beta, we started with an Alpha version. It was released in March and allowed our clients to begin by monitoring their competitors on Google Shopping for up to 1000 Products with 2 updates every week.
This experience gave us the information needed to move forward with a Beta version. If you are an existing DatafeedWatch customer, you can request Beta Access from your account and we’ll make sure to include you in the Beta process.
How to sign up for Beta
We will be sharing more info about the Price Watch tool in future blog posts including use cases and how you can increase your ROI by using Price Watch. So make sure to stop by the DatafeedWatch blog for updates. If you’re a DataFeedWatch customer already you can sign up for Price Watch Beta by clicking on the “Request Beta Access” button as shown in the screenshot below.
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Final Thoughts
“Information is Power” is something we are all aware of, but according to the New York Times, Bestselling Author Daniel Burrus “Information is power only if you can take action with it. Then, and only then, does it represent consequently, power.”
We at DatafeedWatch strongly believe in that.
We already have many features planned for the next versions of Price Watch like Price Alerts, Repricing, direct integrations with shopping platforms, higher number of channels and more. So if you have a suggestion please feel free to send it to Rahul@DatafeedWatch.com. If you’re already using our Price Watch tool, your feedback or feature request is highly appreciated and encouraged.
Check Out More Resources on Price-Watch:
- Price Watch BETA is Live - What Next?
- Price Watch vs Google Shopping Price Benchmark
- Price Watch - Zooming in on Competitor Metrics
- Price Watch and Google Shopping Offer Ranks
