Is it not equally important how well ranked or accessible a given competitor's site is too?
Who cares if an obscure retailer is selling items cheaper that you if they rank really badly in Google.
Don't you need to compare this information against how visible they *really* are on the web as well?
Who cares if an obscure retailer is selling items cheaper that you if they rank really badly in Google.
Don't you need to compare this information against how visible they *really* are on the web as well?
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O
Onlineshopper
- Original Poster
- #6
Absolutely, a far as I see it you need to do a number of things.
1. Rank well for your main key phrase and products.
2. Sell at the right price point.
3. Optimise your site by a/b testing to ensure you convert as many visitors as possible.
We do 1 & 3 in house but point 2 was an impossible task with anymore than about 50 products.
Of course regarding price, you really want to monitor about 10 competitors so you get a good feeling for what the average price is as well as potentially the cheapest price.
It is very nice however, when someone rings us up for a price match and we can check instantly if theyre telling the truth, as we often get people ringing for price matches only to find the so called competitor is out of stock all the time, so cant sell the product anyway.
Most customers are quite amazed by how we always seem to know when a 'cheap' competitor is out of stock!
1. Rank well for your main key phrase and products.
2. Sell at the right price point.
3. Optimise your site by a/b testing to ensure you convert as many visitors as possible.
We do 1 & 3 in house but point 2 was an impossible task with anymore than about 50 products.
Of course regarding price, you really want to monitor about 10 competitors so you get a good feeling for what the average price is as well as potentially the cheapest price.
It is very nice however, when someone rings us up for a price match and we can check instantly if theyre telling the truth, as we often get people ringing for price matches only to find the so called competitor is out of stock all the time, so cant sell the product anyway.
Most customers are quite amazed by how we always seem to know when a 'cheap' competitor is out of stock!
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Couldn't agree more. In fact, if we're not talking about identically branded products but similar products with different labels, a higher price can often be preceived to mean its a better quality of product.
We drove a competitor out of business who sold differently branded products sourced from the same location as ours at a 1/3rd of our price. We made a big play of the guaranteed quality mantra and threw in an 'avoid cheaper lower quality copies' paragraph, worked a treat.
That was back in 2005 though, I think today's online shoppers are probably more price conscious but the perception of You get what you pay for is something retailers can play up to if they are brave enough.
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Onlineshopper
- Original Poster
- #8
That's correct, it only works in certain market places, i.e. where products are identical or for example our market which is camping gear etc.
It's a difficult thing though to try and get customers to perceive your products as higher quality from a website, even if they are.
With todays market place, we find 80% of customers quote price as at least part of the reason to buy from us.
Actually, we are also using CPW as mentioned above. I guess they must be getting well known now then!
It's a difficult thing though to try and get customers to perceive your products as higher quality from a website, even if they are.
With todays market place, we find 80% of customers quote price as at least part of the reason to buy from us.
Actually, we are also using CPW as mentioned above. I guess they must be getting well known now then!
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How are you determining results above normal growth and are you taking into effect the £1288 it cost in profit to use this service
Forcesreunited
I would have thought that most of your sales are impulse sales from Ex forces whilst looking at the site for ex oppo's, so as impulse buy do you need to be so compeditive?,
Forcesreunited
I would have thought that most of your sales are impulse sales from Ex forces whilst looking at the site for ex oppo's, so as impulse buy do you need to be so compeditive?,
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Onlineshopper
- Original Poster
- #12
Eh? How do you get we need to be £1288 in profit to get the benefit?
Any calculation it takes to work out what you need to be in profit to get the benefit surely means you would need to know trade prices/selling prices and volumes, which obviously you dont? Im guessing you worked out £99 * 12 plus one for set up? So a years cost would be £1298. Believe me, we make nearly that much more a month since using this service!
However, we have our own online shop which gets most of its traffic through Google organics not from FR.
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Onlineshopper
- Original Poster
- #15
A simple task? You must have a very small website!
We sell over 2,000 product lines and are currently monitoring 6 competitors.
Everyone else we looked at was charging £500 or more every month for that service.
I guess you really need to be a business with £250,000 turnover plus to warrant it though.
To try and track anymore than a handful of products is a nightmare of a task. All I can say is it works for us, and we are making a big increase in profits from it.
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Please realise - we aren't an ecommerce company, we are an ecommerce development company. Our website is just a content site. Our largest client site has a catalogue of over 120,000 products.
When I say task, I mean programming task - not physically doing it.
For reference, to create a bespoke system to track prices across 6 competitors sites I would estimate around £1800 of work (roughly £300 per site).
You are paying about £1200 per year. That's where i am coming from. It seems quite high, I might be interested to break into this market
Its not the number of products that makes the difference - once you can track one, you can track them all (per site).
How do you tell them which products to track - do you just give them model codes?
How are you sure they are tracking the right products?
I am genuinely curious about this so thanks for your insight.
When I say task, I mean programming task - not physically doing it.
For reference, to create a bespoke system to track prices across 6 competitors sites I would estimate around £1800 of work (roughly £300 per site).
You are paying about £1200 per year. That's where i am coming from. It seems quite high, I might be interested to break into this market
Its not the number of products that makes the difference - once you can track one, you can track them all (per site).
How do you tell them which products to track - do you just give them model codes?
How are you sure they are tracking the right products?
I am genuinely curious about this so thanks for your insight.
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O
Onlineshopper
- Original Poster
- #17
Please realise - we aren't an ecommerce company, we are an ecommerce development company. Our website is just a content site. Our largest client site has a catalogue of over 120,000 products.
When I say task, I mean programming task - not physically doing it.
For reference, to create a bespoke system to track prices across 6 competitors sites I would estimate around £1800 of work (roughly £300 per site).
You are paying about £1200 per year. That's where i am coming from. It seems quite high, I might be interested to break into this market
Its not the number of products that makes the difference - once you can track one, you can track them all (per site).
How do you tell them which products to track - do you just give them model codes?
How are you sure they are tracking the right products?
I am genuinely curious about this so thanks for your insight.
I think I see where you're coming from but our products don't have SKU's (very common apparently). The company we use actually uses humans to physically match our data with our competitors data, as even our product names can be obtuse sometimes.
I doubt you could build what they have for £1800! Have a look at their website http://www.cpw.uk.com
It does an awful lot more than just scraping data, otherwise we wouldnt bother. We just track our most profitable products.
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Are you totally sure they are using humans - I don't see the requirement other than perhaps for the initial match.
Even if they use humans, I know for a fact that on a large scale there would be some mismatching (eg same product sligthly different sizes, carton quantities, reconditioned, etc etc).
As for what the system does - heh you might be surprised what we can do.
I'm definitely interested in this though.
Final question - what search terms did you use to find them?
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Onlineshopper
- Original Poster
- #19
Yes, humans for the initial matching was what I meant, not every day!
You know for a fact do you? Gosh, you're a bit arrogant aren't you?
We're the ones using the sytem, and have been doing for some time now. Out of all the matches we had, I think we only found a couple of errors.
You said you would build this for £1800, but our set up cost with them was £99 and then £99 a month. So it would take 17 months to work out cheaper, but then you would still need to charge something for ongoing costs such as hardware and customer service?
Of course, they have customer service staff at the end of the phone to talk you through getting best use of the product etc. I guess this could be a bit like whether you want to pay for a premium product or not from a dedicated provider.
We could've opted for a cheaper spider alternative from a web development company that pulled the data into an excel spreadhseet for us each day, as there's tons of them around, but that would have been a bigger waste of time as it would take ages to analyse and the data would have been inaccurate as we dont have SKU's. Their system allows us to do it in seconds each day.
Believe me, I research well when I'm investing time and money in something new, and I've seen what else there is in the market place. There was only two or three UK companies doing it this sophisticated, but you needed SKU's with all but this one. (Although they'll tell you, you don't).
We spoke with a company who were with one of these others that you need SKU's with, and they were told they didn't and ended up with data about 70% correct! WTF! We're basing all our pricing decisions on this, and they thought that was acceptable! So obviously it was a question we asked, and only the company we're now working with said we get 98% accuracy, which is definately what we got!
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Onlineshopper
- Original Poster
- #23
I agree, first and foremost thing is to cross check price.
And i think the thing which make you different than others is your services.
whether other are charging less but if your services are satisfactory then you ll be grow stronger day by day.
Agreed, most online stores these days are in a price sensitive market whether they like it or not, (and whether they think they are or not) because the Internet makes it so easy to cross check price.
Looking at our stats 85% of our customers are first time purchases, so you cant rely on good customer service winning their loyalty as you won't have serviced them yet, and altho we get many repeat orders from existing business, that takes years to build up big repeat business.
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G
giant systems
- Original Poster
- #27
Just to add my two cents;
Agree with all thats been said that matching with any competitor can sometimes be a bad idea. Personally if im after something online and search for it, i will often go for one thats a couple of places away from the cheapest, from a website that doesn't look like it was put together in the 90's!
On another note if it works for you then £99 p/m is a great price.
We provide a similar service through our ecommerce platform Cascade which is more expensive but is a lot more than repricing software.
Tom
Agree with all thats been said that matching with any competitor can sometimes be a bad idea. Personally if im after something online and search for it, i will often go for one thats a couple of places away from the cheapest, from a website that doesn't look like it was put together in the 90's!
On another note if it works for you then £99 p/m is a great price.
We provide a similar service through our ecommerce platform Cascade which is more expensive but is a lot more than repricing software.
Tom
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