Monitoring Competitor pricing

[ibscom]

I know this is probably going to be like an, "is there a way to make gold question" but I am going to ask it anyway.

Does anyone know of a way in which you can monitor competitors pricing for products that are listed on the internet i.e. if it is changed. It appears an impossilble task as we set prices on our website competitively but the next minute our prices are vastly over priced because the major websites/our competitors have dropped again. I know we should compete by service as well as price but we need to be in the same ball park and at the moment we are too slow resulting in us loosing customers.

Hope there is something out, either package or system there which could automate the process.

 

[office man]

I can understand your concerns, we have to monitor competitors pricing every month on nearly 500 products - its not easy but i find that if you earmark five or six key prodcts and make a weekly check on them, any movement will trigger you to investigate the rest.

try not to get into a price war though, its about profit at the end of the day the same as any business.

 

[Astaroth]

It depends on the technologies your competitors are running.

Many sites include a standard feed for inclusion in Froogle or Pricerunner etc. It is certainly possible to pick up the feed.

For a previous client we created a system which picked up the feeds and automatically set their prices below their competitors - each item had a minimum sale price. The risk is that some sites intentionally try to damage their competitors reputation by slashing prices of items that are out of stock but not allowing orders. Our client however was only targeting large corporations that were unlikely to use these tactics.

 

[ibscom]

I don't want to get into a price war and to be honest I'm not that fussed if we are slightly more expensive as I know we give an excellent service. The only problem comes when we are way out on a product that everyone is slashing their prices on. This is happening a lot at the moment and we are loosing sales.

The following site has been suggested to me of some software which may do what I want. The only problem is I don't really have any budget for this a the mo.

 

[Astaroth]

the same process can be used for reporting only, our previous client simply wanted to be able to say they were cheaper than the likes of Currys/ Comet/ Argos etc

 

[bluelightning2k]

Hi there.

I'm interested how much you charged for that service Astaroth?



I can build a script that, when executed, will compare the differences, alert you to any that are more than 10% more or less -- but it would need a realistic budget.

I doubt you will get any ready made software to do this because even a pre-made script for exactly this purpose would need some extensive customisation which is quite tricky.

 

[Rob Holmes]

As a long term prospect a price war is probably quite far down the list of sustainable, profitable approaches to squash competitors.

First you need to establish that it's competitors that are affecting your sales as actually there maybe a much larger reason why sales are dropping. Have you tried surveying existing customers to see if and where they shopped around before using you, Why they decided on you, etc etc ?

But to answer your question... A simple and cheap way of monitoring cometitors prices is to have a script that alerts you when the content of one of their URL's changes - then you can specify the url's you want to track

Hope this helps,

Rob

 

[Rob Holmes]

This looks like it might do something like monitor pages..

http://www.markwell.btinternet.co.uk/webmon/scrshots.html

R

 

[Astaroth]

The price would be subject to the similarity of the XML feeds from the monitored sites. Our previous client happened to chose a number of stores that all had almost identical feeds so was relatively easy to achieve.

Whilst a price war is not an ideal situation I wouldnt have thought the likes of WalMart would reduce their price for an XBox simply because mr small sole trader is under cutting them by a couple of dollars. Our client wanted to have a marketing message to use about the large competition stores. Naturally this sort of application would cause much more issues if targeting other SME businesses

 

[UKISS]

You can get Excel to load data from a web page, simply select web data source and follow the onscreen instructions.

This might help with your price monitoring ?

 

[g4joe]

Been looking for a solution for a loooong time - I found one !!!

insitetrack.co.uk provide a cost effective solution that can automatically track 1000's of prices. You define the products and competitors and it does the rest.

We've been running the service now for about 6 months - does the business for us.

 

[edmondscommerce]

wow that's £steep

with that kind of budget to play with I would definitely consider getting a bespoke solution which could then update pricing automatically, obviously with safeguards etc.

 

[Steve2507]

You can get site scraper software which willgo through a site and download all the data you want. You need to set it up first and they are not easy to use, but what you want is perfectly feasible, it's how many of the price comparison stes work.

 

[bigjoe]

Have a look at a program called Website Watcher:
http://www.aignes.com/

Monitors when websites change and can be confgured to only look for changes to pricing.

 

[movietub]

I am part way through setting up a web-bot to scour google base. It compares prices to its database of our own. If there is a lower price that we can afford to beat it flags up the product for review.

Its not perfect yet but there have been a few months of very worthwhile operation.

Not an easy task of course. If I can get it working reliably (and easy to set up) I would sell the implementation service as I think its invaluable!

How much would you pay for something which would check 1000's of products every night - and from anyone on Google Base?

 

[SearchData]

You could try Mozenda (www-mozenda-com). Might not be as autometed as you want but it's simple to set up and does a good job of scraping.

HTH

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
www-searchdata-co-uk (Competitive Intelligence for SEO)

 

[chuck429]

Guys check out this company that seems to do exactly what you were looking for

company called pricemanager.com

monitors and checks all of your competitors pricing on products you want them to do

my company is using them now and they arent that expensive

 

[Onlineshopper]

We needed something like this ourselves, you need:

http://www.competitor-price-watch.co.uk

 

[Lorro2]

I don't really bother how much my competition charges. I'm not the cheapest but certainly the best

 

[MadArtSoft]

Hi,

I developed similar software as described above. The software uses google API to search products, prices, services.

Please visit my web page. www-madartsoft-com

 

I know this is probably going to be like an, "is there a way to make gold question" but I am going to ask it anyway.

Does anyone know of a way in which you can monitor competitors pricing for products that are listed on the internet i.e. if it is changed. It appears an impossilble task as we set prices on our website competitively but the next minute our prices are vastly over priced because the major websites/our competitors have dropped again. I know we should compete by service as well as price but we need to be in the same ball park and at the moment we are too slow resulting in us loosing customers.

Hope there is something out, either package or system there which could automate the process.

In general you only have to be concerned about the competition on page 1 so checking is quite easy.

It will also help to use "cheap your product" or "cheapest your product"

In the search engines to identify competition.

Earl

 

[Onlineshopper]

Hi,

I developed similar software as described above. The software uses google API to search products, prices, services.

Please visit my web page. www-madartsoft-com

I couodnt get it to install. It looks ok as a very basic free tool, but competitor price watch is an all singing all dancing site where they do everything fo you and you simply login and can run many different text and graphical reports. You also get daily updates by email as well.

So, two very different products for different businesses perhaps.

 

[MadArtSoft]

As a free tool its limited but as a full version its also cheaper than other software also contain reports, daily updates, comparision and keep records in the database.

 

[Sinan YILMAZ]

Thanks for the great article. I would like to also mention that our solution prisync.com lets e-commerce companies of all sizes to track their competitor prices automatically in of the most frequent and beautiful ways.