If you’ve chosen to venture into e-commerce, regardless of your role, you'll encounter a significant workload. In today's landscape, customers are skilled at comparing and identifying the best products based on price. Nearly 60% of online shoppers cite price as their main criterion for purchasing. Therefore, being aware of competitors’ pricing is crucial for e-commerce businesses. Yet many owners still track competitor prices manually. Let’s explore why manual tracking is not considered a best practice in e-commerce.
You can monitor competitors’ prices either manually or with competitor tracking software. Based on our experience, there are numerous challenges associated with manual tracking. This article will outline the reasons to stop doing it manually and the advantages of using automated competitor price tracking software.
1. Minimize the Risk of Errors
Excel is widely used across businesses and fits most workflow processes. However, it's not the optimal tool for storing and monitoring competitor prices. With thousands of data points to sift through, it's easy to overlook some information when transferring data from competitors’ online stores to your records. Essentially, manual tracking increases the likelihood of making mistakes.
Utilizing a reliable and proven competitor price tracking tool will help you eliminate the risk of errors.
2. Stay Updated on Price Changes
The price competition online can be intense. In sectors such as electronics, home decor, construction, sports, and music, prices can serve as a competitive edge and fluctuate frequently. Additionally, consider promotions and special prices for events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Valentine’s Day. Given this dynamism in pricing, updating data manually each day isn’t feasible.
Thus, having a competitor price tracker is essential to monitor the overall market. By enabling alerts, you can respond quickly to changes and adjust your prices dynamically for maximum profitability.
3. Time is Essential
Recognizing the value of time is crucial for boosting productivity. Imagine managing over 500 products in your online store. Can you fathom the countless hours required to track various competitor prices for all those products? Such a workload isn't sustainable and is likely to lead to losses. Furthermore, there may be areas for improvement in your business operations. Redirect your employees' skills to these areas and let automated tools gather accurate market data multiple times a day. Relying on manual tasks will become increasingly less viable in the future.
4. Reduce Costs
The relationship is straightforward; if you want to manually track 1,000 URLs daily, you’ll need to pay at least a junior employee’s salary, which would consume their entire working hours. In contrast, competitor price tracking software is far more efficient and cost-effective. Don’t hesitate to compare the average salary for a junior position to the pricing plans of competitor price tracking software.
5. Enhance Forecast Accuracy
By leveraging competitive intelligence software, you can focus deeply on data analysis. Saving significant time and resources allows you to understand your product's life cycle, anticipate price trends, and recognize seasonal price changes or opportunities for discounts and promotions. With this information at your fingertips, you’ll be better equipped to make informed decisions for your business’s future.