Price monitoring has become an essential tool for everyone from ecommerce businesses trying to stay competitive to savvy consumers looking to score the best deals online. By automatically tracking prices across websites and products, price monitoring software saves immense amounts of time and provides valuable data and insights.
In this comprehensive guide, we‘ll break down everything you need to know about price monitoring – what it is, how it works, the different solutions available, and step-by-step instructions for implementing it yourself. Whether you‘re a retailer, a manufacturer, or a shopper, you‘ll learn how to harness the power of price monitoring.
What is Price Monitoring?
Price monitoring is the process of automatically tracking the prices of products across one or more websites. Price monitoring tools visit webpages, extract pricing data, and compile it into readable reports that highlight changes and trends over time.
Businesses use price monitoring to:
- Track competitor prices and adjust their own pricing strategy
- Monitor their products‘ prices across sales channels and catch any inconsistencies
- Analyze pricing trends to forecast and optimize future pricing
- Identify unauthorized sellers and MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) violations
Consumers use price monitoring to:
- Track price drops on items they want to buy
- Compare prices across multiple websites to find the best deals
- Get alerted when a product falls below their target price
- Judge the best time to buy something based on historical price data
Price Monitoring Methods & Tools
There are four main ways to monitor prices online:
1. Price Monitoring Platforms
Price monitoring platforms like Prisync and PriceZag are web-based software built specifically for tracking prices across many websites. They feature:
– Automated monitoring of 1000s of webpages
– AI-powered analysis to accurately extract prices
– Real-time alerts via email or SMS
– Customizable reports and dashboards
– Competitor price and availability monitoring
– MAP & unauthorized seller monitoring
– API access for custom integrations
Price monitoring platforms are best for medium to large ecommerce businesses that need to track a high volume of SKUs across multiple competitor sites. Pricing typically starts around $100/month and scales up based on usage.
2. Price Tracking Tools
Price tracking tools like Keepa and CamelCamelCamel are designed to track prices on a specific site, most commonly Amazon. They cater to Amazon sellers, offering features like:
– Browser extensions that show price history right on Amazon pages
– Hourly price checks and price drop alerts
– Monitoring of sales rank and stock levels
– Tracking Amazon fees and profit margins
Price tracking tools are popular among individual sellers and small businesses. Many offer free basic plans and charge around $15-$20/month for advanced features.
3. Price Monitoring Extensions
Price monitoring browser extensions like PriceBlink and InvisibleHand notify users as they shop online if a product they‘re viewing is available cheaper on another site.
Pros of price monitoring extensions:
- Free to use
- Incredibly easy setup – just install and shop
- Work across many websites automatically
Cons of price monitoring extensions:
- Only for consumers, not businesses
- Ad/referral-supported so may be biased
- Very limited customization and features
4. Web Scrapers
Web scrapers are tools designed to extract data from websites that can be repurposed for price monitoring with some configuration. Scrapers like Parsehub and Octoparse allow you to:
– Select specific data points (price, stock levels, etc.) to extract
– Schedule recurring scrapes to monitor prices over time
– Handle JavaScript-rendered content and complex website structures
– Output data to various formats like Excel, JSON, and databases
Web scrapers work well for businesses that need flexibility to track unique data points or pull prices from sites that aren‘t supported by off-the-shelf price monitoring tools. But they typically require more technical know-how to set up and maintain.
How to Implement Price Monitoring
Now that we‘ve covered the different solutions available, let‘s walk through the basic steps of setting up price monitoring for your use case.
Step 1: Determine Your Needs
Consider what you hope to achieve with price monitoring:
– How many products or URLs do you need to track?
– Which websites do you need to pull prices from?
– How frequently does pricing need to be checked?
– What metrics matter most to you? Just price or stock levels, seller ratings, etc.?
– How do you want to access pricing data – dashboards, email reports, API?
Step 2: Choose a Price Monitoring Solution
Based on your needs, select a price monitoring platform, dedicated price tracker, scraper tool, or some combination thereof that provides the features and flexibility you require at the right price point. Be sure to take advantage of any free trials to test out tools before committing.
Step 3: Configure Your Monitor
Once you‘ve settled on a tool, you‘ll need to configure it to track the products and websites you care about:
– Enter the URLs of the pages you want to monitor (product pages, category pages, competitor sites, etc.)
– Select the specific data points to extract (price, stock status, reviews, etc.)
– Set the frequency for checking prices (hourly, daily, weekly)
– Create any filters or formulas for price data (currency conversion, MAP thresholds)
– Configure alerts and notifications (price drops, low stock warnings, etc.)
Step 4: Analyze Your Data
After your price monitor has been running for a while, you‘ll start to amass historical data showing how prices fluctuate over time. Most tools provide reporting and visualization features to help you spot trends and draw insights:
– What times of day, days of week, or months see the lowest/highest prices?
– How do your prices compare to competitors over time?
– Which products have the most volatile prices?
– What items are most likely to sell out or go on sale?
Advanced Price Monitoring Tactics
Beyond the basics of tracking prices, there are more sophisticated ways to leverage price monitoring:
Stock Level Monitoring
In addition to prices, you can monitor inventory levels to identify fast and slow moving items. This can help with demand forecasting, knowing when to reorder products, and spotting issues like running out of stock on popular items.
Seller Tracking
On marketplaces like Amazon or eBay, monitoring the number of sellers and their rankings can give you a better view of the competitive landscape. Sudden changes in seller count or the appearance of unauthorized sellers can be a bellwether for MAP violations.
Dynamic Pricing
Combining price monitoring with dynamic pricing software allows you to reprice items automatically based on rules you set – lowering prices to compete or raising them when demand is high. Algorithmic repricers powered by AI can even predict the optimal price point.
International Monitoring
For businesses selling globally, price monitoring across different countries and currencies is essential. You‘ll need a tool that can handle multi-currency conversions, international proxy servers, and foreign language extraction.
Consumer Strategies
As a consumer, monitoring prices across multiple sites and setting alerts can ensure you always get the best price. Browser extensions make it easy to compare prices as you shop. For expensive purchases, tracking prices over longer periods can reveal seasonal trends and help you buy at the optimal time.
The Future of Price Monitoring
As ecommerce continues to grow and competition intensifies, price monitoring is only becoming more vital. Over half of retailers already use competitor price tracking technology and adoption is expected to accelerate.
At the same time, price monitoring solutions are evolving, leveraging advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data. Tools can automatically identify and extract relevant data points, even from websites and product categories they haven‘t encountered before.
Rather than simply reporting on price changes, the AI-powered price monitors of the future will proactively recommend optimal pricing and predict consumer behavior. They‘ll automate more of the competitive research and data analysis that humans do today.
We‘re also likely to see greater consolidation between price monitoring, inventory management, market intelligence, repricing, and other related tools. Centralized platforms will allow businesses to manage all of these functions from a single dashboard.
Expect price monitoring to become an even more indispensable part of ecommerce operations. Businesses that neglect or underutilize it will find themselves at a major disadvantage to competitors with a more data-driven approach to pricing and market positioning.
Choosing the Right Price Monitoring Solution
With countless price monitoring providers out there, it can be tough to determine the best one for your needs. Here are some key considerations:
- Coverage – Does the tool support all the sites and marketplaces you need to track? Can it monitor international prices?
- Accuracy – How reliable is the tool at extracting prices and data? Can it handle things like sales, variants, bundles?
- Speed – What‘s the maximum frequency for price checks? Is data available in real-time or only in batches?
- Usability – Is the tool intuitive to use or overly complex? How steep is the learning curve?
- Integration – Can the tool tie into your other business systems like ERP, PIM, repricers? Does it offer an API?
- Scalability – Will the tool still work well when tracking thousands of SKUs? How much does it cost at scale?
- Support – What kind of customer service and support are provided? Is there a knowledge base or user community?
Leading price monitoring solutions for enterprises include Prisync, Price2Spy, and Wiser. Popular options for small to mid-sized businesses are PriceZag, Competera, and Keepa. For consumers, Earny, PriceBlink, and CamelCamelCamel are great choices.
Implementing Price Monitoring Today
No matter your role or industry, price monitoring can be a game-changer. For businesses, it‘s a powerful tool for maximizing margins, optimizing prices, and outsmarting the competition. For consumers, it‘s an easy way to save money and shop smarter.
Hopefully this guide has given you a thorough overview of how price monitoring works and how to get started with it. To recap, the key steps are:
- Define your price monitoring goals and requirements
- Choose a price monitoring tool or combination of tools that fit your needs
- Set up the tool to track your desired products and websites
- Analyze price data to spot trends and opportunities
- Take action by optimizing your pricing strategy or making data-driven purchases
Price monitoring has never been more accessible or impactful. With the wealth of solutions available today, anyone can become a pricing expert. The tools and techniques may seem intimidating at first, but with a little research and experimentation, you‘ll soon be making the most of this indispensable ecommerce enabler.