Free White Paper: Master Your Distribution and Boost Your Competitiveness with Price Observatory and Price Monitoring!
Faced with increasingly intense competition, brands must have a firm grasp of their retailers' and competitors' pricing information across the various markets in which they operate. Failure to do so can result in a loss of competitiveness, lower margins, and damage to brand image.
Price Observatory offers an effective price monitoring solution to help manufacturers overcome these challenges. This Practical Guide provides tips on how to beat the competition and preserve your brand value. Companies such as Schneider Electric and Vtech testify to the concrete benefits of this solution, particularly in terms of competitor price visibility and digital distribution optimization.
Patrick Moreau, Head of Pricing & Performance Manager at Schneider Electric, says that Price Observatory enables them to make informed pricing decisions thanks to increased visibility of market prices.
Patrick Semporé, Key Account Manager at Vtech, appreciates the speed with which he can obtain a comprehensive report on digital distribution, thereby optimizing their presence on marketplaces.
With Price Observatory, you have the keys to master your distribution, stay competitive, and maintain your brand value.
Pricing Intelligence: The Complete Methodology to Stay Competitive
As competitors grow ever more agile, price remains one of the most powerful levers to grab attention, trigger purchases, and protect margins. But without a clear methodology, pricing intelligence can quickly become time-consuming, imprecise, and hard to act on. Data piles up, but decisions stall. The real value lies not in the data itself, but in how systematically it’s analyzed and intelligently used.
In this article, we break down a complete methodology for pricing intelligence—from defining your scope to fully automating your process, including data collection, analysis, and continuous monitoring.
You’ll learn how to structure your approach, choose the right tools, avoid the most common mistakes that hurt competitiveness, and how Price Observatory can help optimize your pricing strategy.
What Is Pricing Intelligence and Why Does It Matter?
Pricing intelligence refers to all the actions involved in collecting, centralizing, and analyzing your competitors’ prices—either for identical products or for equivalent references. It requires a structured, methodical approach to get a clear, up-to-date view of the market.
It differs from:
Competitive intelligence, which covers broader aspects like product strategy, communication, channels, innovation, and partnerships.
Pricing science (or pricing optimization), which relies on data science and AI to model demand, forecast competitor reactions, and optimize prices in real time.
The goals of pricing intelligence are multifaceted:
Stay competitive by adjusting your pricing to actual market conditions—without falling into profit-eroding price wars.
Protect and grow your margins with a granular understanding of profitability thresholds and competitor tactics.
Adapt your positioning to market movements and validate or fine-tune your strategy as needed.
Identify commercial opportunities, such as poorly timed competitor promotions, stockouts, or exploitable price gaps by segment or region.
Pricing intelligence becomes your strategic radar—it guides decisions, reduces uncertainty, and turns price data into a long-term competitive advantage.
The Foundations of a Strong Pricing Methodology
To turn pricing intelligence into a true strategic asset—not just a passive data collection effort—you need a clear framework.
Start by defining a precise scope: Determine which products, ranges, competitors, and channels you want to monitor before collecting any data.
Ensure data reliability: Sound decision-making depends on accurate data. That means robust product matching (via EAN, GTIN, or visual recognition) and regular validation to avoid mismatches that distort results.
Set the right monitoring cadence: Collection frequency should reflect your market dynamics—daily for volatile sectors like electronics or e-commerce, and weekly or monthly for more stable ones.
Analyze, don’t just collect: Effective pricing intelligence goes beyond gathering numbers. It should produce clear KPIs: price indices, trends by channel, competitiveness ratios, and share-of-shelf metrics.
Integrate pricing insights into your business processes: Your pricing, marketing, procurement, and sales teams should all be able to act on these insights immediately.
Without this structure, pricing intelligence becomes just another spreadsheet—dormant, underused, and with little impact on your competitiveness.
The Key Steps of an Effective Pricing Intelligence Methodology
How can you implement effective pricing intelligence? It’s not something you can improvise.
To turn raw pricing data into strategic decisions, you need to follow a clear, structured process.
Here are the 7 essential steps to building a robust, sustainable methodology.
1. Define Your Pricing Scope
Start by precisely outlining the scope of your monitoring.
This means identifying the strategic products or ranges to focus on, the priority competitors to track, and the key distribution channels and geographic zones.
A well-defined scope helps focus resources on high-value data. Begin with high-volume or high-margin items, then expand gradually.
Also monitor areas with aggressive competition or segments prone to price wars.
A scope that’s too broad can dilute your analysis, while one that’s too narrow may cause you to miss key opportunities and weak signals.
2. Choose the Right Tools and Methods
Tool selection depends on your catalog size, number of competitors, and your internal capacity to process data.
Manual collection: Suited for small operations or limited SKUs, but extremely time-consuming.
Included services (warranty, installation, support)
Stock availability
Packaging and product variations
This level of detail avoids misleading comparisons and gets you closer to the real price paid by the customer.
Modern tools enrich your data with these variables automatically, giving you a consistent and reliable foundation for analysis. The more structured your collection, the more meaningful your decisions.
4. Ensure Accurate Product Matching
Product matching is the step that ensures data relevance. It consists of pairing each of your SKUs with its closest competitor equivalent.
Common methods include:
Unique identifiers (EAN, GTIN)
Image recognition to identify visually similar items
Semantic AI to match listings with different titles but similar specs
Poor matching leads to flawed analysis.
Top-tier solutions like Price Observatory combine automated matching with manual validation—especially important in technical categories or those with many product variants.
5. Analyze the Data
Once your data is collected and validated, the next step is interpretation.
Price indices to evaluate your overall competitiveness
Trend analysis: Identify recurring increases or decreases by season, channel, or competitor
Segmentation by range, category, or geography to prioritize actions
You can also include price elasticity models to predict the impact of changes on demand and margin.
The goal is to go beyond static observation and develop a dynamic, strategic understanding of your market.
6. Decide and Take Action
Insights must lead to concrete actions. Examples include:
Dynamic repricing to respond to market shifts
Negotiating better supplier terms if competition is eroding your margins
Targeted promotions to counter a competitor’s campaign
Stock clearance when needed
The key is speed of execution. A delayed decision often loses its impact.
That’s why pricing intelligence must be fully integrated into your operational processes to become a true performance lever.
7. Set Up Continuous Monitoring
Pricing intelligence is not a one-time audit—it’s a continuous process.
Set automatic alerts for significant price deviations
Keep your reporting updated with KPIs like price competitiveness, average margin, and share of shelf
Regularly adjust your scope and tools to stay aligned with your goals and market evolution
This proactive approach helps you anticipate trends rather than just react to them, making pricing intelligence a permanent pillar of your commercial strategy.
Embracing Automation and Data Science
Automation is now the cornerstone of successful pricing intelligence. SaaS platforms like Price Observatory allow you to monitor thousands—or even millions—of SKUs across multiple channels, countries, and currencies, with update frequencies adapted to your market.
These solutions provide:
Significant time savings, eliminating the need for manual collection
Broad and consistent coverage across all relevant marketplaces and territories
High data accuracy, powered by smart collection and cleansing algorithms
What to Look for in a Tool
A good pricing tool should offer seamless integration with your existing systems (PIM, ERP, BI), a user-friendly interface for data analysis, and configurable alerts.
Multilingual support and local format compatibility (taxes, price structures) are also essential.
The Role of Data Science
Data science transforms pricing intelligence into a proactive strategy.
With AI and machine learning, it becomes possible to:
Forecast pricing trends using predictive models
Analyze price-demand elasticity to understand how pricing changes impact performance
Identify long-term competitor behaviors and simulate pricing scenarios
By combining automation and predictive analytics, pricing intelligence evolves from a simple monitoring function to a strategic decision-making tool—helping you stay ahead of the competition before they even make a move.
Sample Dashboard from Price Observatory
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Effective pricing intelligence requires a clearly defined scope, reliable data, contextualized analysis, and quick action to remain competitive.
Without a real methodology, you risk bias, wasted time, and lost opportunities. Here are the most frequent pitfalls—and how to avoid them.
Poor Product Matching Comparing items that aren’t truly equivalent (differences in size, bundles, product versions, or refurbished status) skews your results.
For example, comparing a 256 GB smartphone to a competitor’s 128 GB model will lead to inaccurate conclusions. A reliable tool should leverage EANs, GTINs, or visual recognition to ensure meaningful comparisons.
Collecting Without Acting Gathering data without translating it into actionable decisions (repricing, targeted promotions, supplier negotiations) immobilizes valuable analytical capital.
Your indicators should drive real, measurable actions.
Uncalibrated Scope A scope that’s too broad will dilute your insights, while one that’s too narrow will give you a fragmented market view.
For instance, only tracking French prices might cause you to miss an international price war.
Neglecting Qualitative Factors Pricing intelligence isn’t just about numbers—stock availability, visual quality, product descriptions, and customer reviews also affect perceived value and competitiveness.
Ignoring these factors reduces the strategic impact of your monitoring.
Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Pricing Methodology
Pricing intelligence only creates value if you can measure its impact. That’s why it’s crucial to track relevant KPIs, such as:
Price Competitiveness Rate: The percentage of SKUs priced within the optimal market range. This gives a clear view of your competitive position.
Average Margin Before/After Adjustments: Determines whether pricing decisions are improving profitability without harming sales volume.
ROI of Pricing Actions: Measures the direct financial impact of pricing actions (repricing, promotions, supplier renegotiations) on revenue and margin.
Price-Based Market Share: Evaluates your market weight relative to your pricing position compared to equivalent competitors.
To be effective, these KPIs must be tracked consistently (weekly or monthly, depending on your sector) and integrated into a dynamic dashboard—like the one provided by Price Observatory.
Finally, continuous improvement is key: analyze your KPIs, identify areas for progress, test new actions, and measure their impact again.
This iterative approach ensures your methodology evolves with the market and keeps you competitive over the long term.
Conclusion
Today, structured pricing intelligence is no longer just a monitoring tool—it’s a true strategic lever for companies aiming to maintain long-term competitive advantage.
By combining reliable data, relevant analysis, and fast decision-making, you can stay competitive, protect your margins, and adapt your positioning in real time to market shifts.
In a market where competitors adjust their prices within hours, flying blind means losing ground.
In contrast, a well-structured and properly equipped methodology transforms price tracking into concrete opportunities: winning market share, optimizing promotional campaigns, and reinforcing your products’ perceived value.
Try Price Observatory now, our automated pricing intelligence solution. In a personalized demo, you’ll discover how to go beyond data collection and build a proactive, data-driven pricing strategy focused on growth.
Request your demo today and take the lead on your competitors.
Legality of Automated Price Monitoring: What Businesses Need to Know
A good pricing strategy directly influences your business success. Pricing impacts both your Google rankings and your conversion rates. In fact, 99% of consumers compare prices before making an online purchase, and 58% show greater loyalty to retailers offering discounts. However, the legal landscape surrounding automated price monitoring is becoming increasingly complex, particularly with the introduction of the Descrozaille Law, which limits promotional discounts to 34% for non-food products.
Today, competitive monitoring requires careful navigation through various legal frameworks. Recent changes to robots.txt files on French media websites and the requirements of the GDPR have created a strict regulatory environment for price monitoring. With over 17,000 brands and retailers monitored in real time, understanding the legality of automated price tracking has become essential.
In this article, you’ll discover the full legal framework for automated price monitoring, the potential risks involved, and the compliant methods to conduct effective competitor monitoring while respecting current legislation.
Legal Framework for Price Monitoring in France
In France, the legal framework surrounding the use of automated price monitoring software is based on several regulatory pillars that require close attention to avoid the risk of sanctions.
Laws and Regulations Applicable to Price Monitoring
The fundamental principle in France is that “the prices of goods, products, and services are freely determined by the forces of competition.” This freedom to set prices applies to all businesses, regardless of their legal structure.
As a result, a brand is not allowed to impose a resale price on its distributors in France.
However, this freedom is not absolute. In certain situations, such as monopolies or supply shortages, a decree can regulate prices. The recent Descrozaille Law, which came into force on March 1, 2024, perfectly illustrates this regulation by capping promotional discounts at 34% for non-food products.
For your business, understanding this framework is essential, as all competitive monitoring must operate within this context of supervised pricing freedom.
GDPR Impact on Price Data Collection
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) strictly governs any collection of information, including pricing data, whenever it can be linked to an identifiable person. This framework applies to your organization if it is established in the EU or targets European residents.
When conducting competitive price monitoring, if you collect pricing data linked to accounts with login credentials, you must comply with the following key principles:
Collect data legally, fairly, and transparently
Have a legal basis for collection (legitimate interest, consent, etc.)
Retain data for a limited period (maximum 3 years for prospects)
Ensure the security of the collected information
Non-compliance can lead to severe penalties, as shown by the €20 million fine imposed on Clearview.
To minimize risk, it is recommended to collect only public data from competitor websites.
Legal Risks of Non-Compliant Price Monitoring
Poorly conducted price monitoring can expose your business to significant legal consequences. The risks involved go far beyond simple warnings and can jeopardize the very sustainability of your operations.
Potential Sanctions for Violations
Administrative fines are the primary penalty for anti-competitive practices related to non-compliant price monitoring.
For companies, these financial penalties can reach up to 10% of their global revenue. This percentage applies to the highest annual revenue recorded during one of the financial years since the illicit practices began.
Beyond financial penalties, the reputational impact on your company can be disastrous. A study revealed that 80% of sanctioned businesses suffer significant reputational damage, affecting their relationships with customers and partners.
To ensure legal price monitoring, it is therefore imperative to strictly follow fair data collection practices and to avoid any behavior that interferes with the free setting of prices through market competition.
How to Conduct Legal and Effective Price Monitoring
To ensure the legality of your automated price monitoring, choosing the right tools and methods is essential. A structured approach will allow you to gather valuable insights without breaking the law.
Choosing Tools that Comply with Regulations, such as Price Observatory
Several legal solutions exist to effectively monitor your competitors’ prices.
Our dynamic pricing software, Price Observatory, tracks over 70 million public prices daily using robots specifically designed for efficient scraping. Its automatic matching technology quickly identifies identical products from your competitors without overloading their servers.
When selecting your tool, you should prioritize solutions that:
Use ethical data collection methods
Respect appropriate data extraction frequencies
Offer GDPR compliance settings
Respectful Configuration Toward Competitor Sites
To conduct legal competitive monitoring, you must adjust your data collection settings. First and foremost, limit the frequency of your requests (ideally based on industry standards) to avoid monopolizing the resources of the monitored sites. Experts recommend spacing out data collections and minimizing the number of requests to the bare minimum.
Additionally, in some cases, you can prioritize alternative techniques to scraping when available (for example, on certain marketplaces): RSS feeds, APIs, or open data sources. These methods ensure simpler and more efficient data retrieval while maintaining the legality of your approach.
Technical and Legal Limits of Automation
Automating price monitoring comes with limitations that are important to understand in order to stay within legal boundaries. These technical and legal constraints strictly govern your price surveillance activities.
Data Collection Frequency and Server Load
The frequency of your price data collection must be carefully calibrated.
Excessive automation can overload the servers of the websites you are visiting. To conduct ethical competitor monitoring, you should adjust your data collection rate according to the characteristics of your industry and the aggressiveness of your competitors.
Some industries require daily monitoring, while others may only need weekly or monthly analyses.
When configuring your tools, keep in mind that:
Excessive server load may be interpreted as a denial-of-service (DoS) attack
Your monitoring activities must not impair the performance of competitor websites
Server capacity must be considered to determine the appropriate collection frequency
Legal Alternatives to Aggressive Scraping Techniques
In light of these restrictions, several legal approaches are available to conduct effective price monitoring. You should prioritize the use of tools that automatically filter out sensitive data while complying with data protection regulations.
To ensure regulatory-compliant monitoring, consider these alternatives:
Official APIs provided by e-commerce websites
Publicly available open data feeds
Formal partnerships with data providers
GDPR-compliant price monitoring services like Price Observatory
Automated price monitoring requires a careful balance between efficiency and compliance. Legal risks are significant, ranging from substantial fines to criminal penalties. However, legal solutions do exist to carry out high-performing price monitoring.
Ultimately, best practices involve choosing solutions that automate data collection while excluding personal information, ensuring a legal and ethical approach to competitor monitoring. And of course, as a brand, never impose resale prices on your distributors.
Conclusion
On one hand, respecting GDPR and the principle of free price setting forms the foundation of ethical price monitoring. On the other hand, using tools like Price Observatory allows you to gather valuable data without violating the law.
Businesses must therefore prioritize legal data collection methods. This responsible approach not only ensures regulatory compliance but also safeguards the long-term sustainability of your competitive intelligence strategy.
The impact of seasonality on prices and how price intelligence helps to anticipate these variations
The impact of seasonality on pricing is a major challenge for businesses, especially when you consider that half of the promotions do not generate any increase in sales.
This is because a successful business relies heavily on the balance between pricing, promotions, and inventory management. Thus, price monitoring becomes an essential tool for anticipating and adapting to seasonal variations.
This approach not only optimizes your prices according to market demand, but also improves your competitive positioning.
In this guide, you'll learn how to effectively use price intelligence to anticipate seasonal variations and optimize your pricing strategy. We go through the essential tools as well as best practices to monitor prices effectively.
Understanding Seasonal Rate Watch
Seasonal price monitoring is a permanent price monitoring system that takes into account periodic market fluctuations. This methodical approach allows companies to analyze and anticipate price changes throughout the year.
In addition to being able to track competitors' prices, this marketing technique also allows you to control the pricing applied by distributors to their own products.
The main objectives of this approach are multiple:
Accurate real-time market analysis
Identifying pricing trends
Strategic price adjustment to maintain competitiveness
Optimizing sales margins
The different types of seasonal variations
Seasonal variations occur in a predictable and cyclical manner, affecting each industry differently.
These fluctuations are characterized by several distinct components:
The trend-cycle: it reflects the fundamental variations over a long period.
The seasonal component: it corresponds to the fluctuations that are repeated annually.
Calendar effects: they take into account the impact of working days
The irregular component: it includes residual fluctuations.
To measure these variations and adjust their pricing strategies accordingly, companies use the seasonal coefficient, which is obtained by comparing the average sales of a period to the theoretical average of the quarters or months of the year.
More specifically, this analysis makes it possible to:
Knowing precisely the weight of a quarter's sales in annual turnover
Plan actions to adjust seasonal sales
Set up targeted promotions
Diversify products during periods of low activity
Impact of seasonality on prices
Seasonal price variations affect many industries, creating predictable cycles that directly influence business strategies. The magnitude and nature of seasonal variations depend on several sectoral factors.
In tourism and hospitality, prices soar in summer for seaside resorts and in winter for ski resorts. Property prices rise systematically in the 2nd and 3rd quarters, with a more marked increase for houses than for apartments. Seasonalrentals, on the other hand, are subject to strong fluctuations in cities dependent on seasonality such as Cannes or Megève.
Agriculture and agri-food see their prices change according to harvests and weather conditions, while the energy sector sees price increases in winter for gas and in summer for electricity, in response to heating and cooling needs.
As far as the retail trade is concerned, according to INSEE, toy sales generally increase significantly between November and December due to the end-of-year celebrations. Some products, on the other hand, such as winter clothing, have big discounts out of season. These variations may also differ between countries and economies, depending on the relative weight of sectors of activity in their economic structure. The health crisis has also changed certain traditional seasonalities, particularly in the transport and tourism sectors.
Essential tools for price intelligence
To meet the challenges of price seasonality, professionals now have sophisticated tools at their disposal for precise market monitoring.
Price tracking software
Among the most useful are price tracking software. These modern price intelligence solutions automate data collection and analysis.
Price Observatory is among the best competitive intelligence software. It extracts prices, promotions and stocks from competing sites on a daily basis and allows real-time monitoring of prices on all their merchant sites.
This type of pricing tool offers several essential features:
Automatic detection of price changes
Analysis of market trends
Tracking competitor promotions
Identification of tariff adjustment opportunities
Competitive intelligence tables
The competitive intelligence board is another price tracking tool that offers clear visualizations of price positioning across different charts and curves. In particular, it allows you to:
Compare prices with competitors
Analyze market availability
Follow the evolution of prices according to the periods
The frequency of surveys can be adjusted according to seasonal needs. For example, once a month in low season and once a week in high season. Custom alerts can also be set up to flag significant price changes at competitors.
To maximize their effectiveness, it is essential to choose your competitive intelligence tools carefully and integrate them with your existing management systems. Thus, price intelligence data can be directly connected to ERP, CRM or quoting software. This interconnection makes it possible to automate price adjustments and improve responsiveness to market variations.matiser les ajustements de prix et d'améliorer la réactivité face aux variations du marché.
Implement an effective strategy
An effective price monitoring strategy requires a methodical approach and the right tools to anticipate seasonal price variations.
The first step is to precisely identify your key competitors and products to look out for. Modern tools make it possible to track thousands of brands and retailers simultaneously.
To obtain relevant results, it is essential to compare similar elements:
Prices including VAT or excluding VAT
Shipping costs included or not
Associated services
Sliding scale prices for B2B sites
Choosing the right metrics
Four main indicators can be used to optimise your price monitoring:
The average price of the product over time
Overall market behaviour
The characteristics of competing companies
Temporal and seasonal dimensions
This is because analyzing historical pricing data helps identify trends and predict future price fluctuations.
In addition, the monitoring of raw material and logistics costs has a direct influence on the pricing strategy. This approach is essential to ensure effective business intelligence .esoins and its internal resources to take full advantage of competitive data.
Automate data collection
Automation is an essential element for effective monitoring. A price tracking tool analyzes product pages in real time and automatically matches SKUs.
This automation is based on:
Barcodes (GTIN, EAN, UPC)
Supplier references
Image recognition
To ensure the reliability of the data, a similarity score is calculated for each match. This approach provides accurate, real-time analysis of the market, while preserving margins.
The implementation of an effective price watch also requires cross-referencing price data with quantitative (stock, distribution) and qualitative (customer reviews, merchandising) aspects. This global approach allows you to adjust your pricing strategy in a more relevant way in the face of seasonal variations.es.
Conclusion
Price monitoring is a real strategic tool in the face of seasonal price variations.
The data shows that companies that incorporate a seasonal coefficient calculation into their strategy benefit from better anticipation of market fluctuations while maintaining their competitiveness.
Modern price intelligence tools, such as competitive intelligence software and competitive intelligence tables, combined with a rigorous methodology, offer concrete solutions to manage these variations.
The success of a price intelligence strategy is ultimately based on three essential pillars: the precise definition of the monitoring perimeter, the judicious choice of indicators and the automation of processes.
Discover Price Observatory, the price monitoring software that allows you to monitor your competitors in real time, analyze market trends and adjust your prices optimally! Thus, you will ensure effective commercial monitoring by adapting to seasonal cycles while preserving your margins.
Competitive intelligence: the challenge of matching private labels and equivalent references
In a competitive business environment, the ability of retailers and brands to monitor and adjust their prices quickly has become a major strategic lever. This monitoring of competition is no longer limited to the simple observation of the prices charged by competitors, it now involves in-depth work on the matching between private labels (private labels) and equivalent products. This step is necessary for retailers looking to maintain their competitiveness and margin, adjust their pricing strategy and capture the attention of consumers, who are increasingly aware of price differences.
The challenge for retailers: the matching of private labels
In many areas, retailers are increasingly developing their own private labels to offer competitive alternatives to big brands. In sectors such as toys, for example, where each distributor offers its own references in addition to those of historical brands, it becomes complicated to make a direct comparison between similar products. This complexity lies mainly in the differences in coding: each private label product has its own EAN code, its own name and a separate title, even if, in essence, the product is identical.
To ensure effective competitive intelligence, distributors must be able to compare equivalent products and adjust their prices accordingly. And the real challenge lies in the ability to automatically match disparate SKUs, an essential step in applying rapid repricing strategies without having to go through tedious and lengthy manual operations. And without this correspondence work, retailers miss out on opportunities for alignment or price differentiation with their competitors.
Traditional tools struggle to meet this challenge, as they often rely on matches based solely on EAN codes. Fortunately, there are now advanced price monitoring solutions, powered by artificial intelligence, capable of analyzing product characteristics (dimensions, materials, ingredients, features, etc.) to suggest likely matches. For example, in the cosmetics sector, two beauty creams of different brands, but sharing similar characteristics (capacity, ingredients, fragrance, etc.) can be considered equivalent despite having different EAN codes. And this ability to identify matches will directly influence the repricing strategy. Without this, distributors risk either undervaluing their prices, losing margins, or overvaluing their products, at the risk of losing competitiveness. In addition, promotions and commercial actions require constant monitoring of the prices of equivalent products to maximize their impact.
The challenge for brands: comparing equivalent references
For brands, the challenge of matching is just as strategic. Identifying equivalent competing products allows you to adjust your price positioning and react quickly to market movements. However, this approach presents its own challenges: determining which products are actually comparable often relies on the end customer's perception. Brands must evaluate the similarity of products according to their own criteria and their knowledge of the customer, a time-consuming and subjective process.
Brands must also take into account the specific criteria of the market. For example, in industries where the brand is of little importance (such as office supplies), consumers mainly compare prices. Conversely, in sectors where brand image is essential (cosmetics, fashion), matching must be more refined, taking into account the notoriety, perceived quality and positioning of competing brands.
As with retailers, repricing solutions can offer brands artificial intelligence algorithms that can automatically submit product matches. These systems analyze various criteria (brands may have more or less latitude on the choice of these criteria upstream) such as technical characteristics, ingredients and uses to generate relevant suggestions. These proposals are then submitted to the client, who can validate or adjust them according to their needs.
Let's take a concrete example with office supplies: for a basic product such as a roll of brown "moving" tape, the end customer is often indifferent to the brand and focuses on the price. Brands must therefore monitor their direct competitors, but also all equivalent products (roll size, weight, packaging, etc.) to remain competitive. By adopting high-performance matching tools, brands can refine their competitive intelligence strategy, detect positioning opportunities and adjust their prices in a more dynamic and responsive way.
The different methods of reference matching
There are several approaches to matching equivalent references. Here are the main ones:
Manual with Excel :
The customer creates an Excel table in which he manually fills in all the correspondences between these products via the EAN codes. This method offers full control but is time-consuming and error-prone.
Manual in the repricing application :
The customer performs the matching directly in the repricing application. In case of no EAN code, it can copy/paste the URL of the equivalent product, the algorithms of the solution will take care of the rest. This method is more flexible but remains largely manual.
Semi-automatic :
Repricing tools equipped with AI algorithms generate matching suggestions. The customer then has a validation interface where he can accept or correct the proposed matches. This system lightens the workload while maintaining human control.
100% supported :
Price Observatory offers full support for the process. The algorithms suggest matches, which Price Observatory's teams validate based on the information provided by the customer. This method completely frees the customer from the operational process while ensuring reliable results.
The matching of private labels and equivalent references is an essential pillar in competitive intelligence and repricing strategies. Whether for retailers or brands, the precise identification of competing products allows them to refine pricing strategies and optimize their competitiveness in the market. Between still manual methods and fully automated solutions, each professional must place the cursor in the best possible way, taking into account his budget, his needs and his internal resources to take full advantage of competitive data.
Brands: how to better control your Digital Shelf with online monitoring?
What is the Digital Shelf?
The Digital Shelf is the online equivalent of the shelves in physical stores.
It's the place where customers search, discover and buy products online, whether it's on the retailer's website or mobile app, or on another retailer's website or marketplace.
Just like in a physical store, customers want to be able to access well-stocked shelves, while remaining clear and organized enough, and have the information they need to make a purchase with confidence.
The digital shelf should allow customers to search for information about a product. Search results pages and product category pages are entry points for online customers and should contain a lot of information: images, videos, description, pricing, availability, variants and options, ratings, and customer reviews. The pages of each product should also provide all these information.
Supermarkets and brick-and-mortar stores have mastered the art of creating a quality in-store shopping experience. Thanks to merchandising, they know how to create attractive window displays, highlight leader products or promotions aisle head display offers, arrange the shelves in such a way as to highlight products with higher margins, offer a fluid in-store experience to the consumer and encourage them to buy by creating pre-defined universes and consumer journeys. They also offer impulse purchases near the checkouts, and offer immediate assistance on the shelves thanks to salespeople who are available for any questions.
Online, customers are looking for a similar experience: they want to easily find the product they are looking for using categories, keywords, etc., to get detailed information about each product, to have access to useful usage tips, recommendations and reviews from other consumers to be reassured about their choice, they also want to be directed to other similarproducts or additonal ...
The Digital Shelf: more and more points of contact
The digital shelf include all the touchpoints that consumers use to research, evaluate, and compare a product with other brands, and then make a purchase. With the development of digital technology, these touchpoints are multiplying, making the consumer buying journey increasingly complex. To manage this digital space well, it is crucial to ensure that products are easy to find, well presented, and accompanied by all the necessary information to encourage purchase.
Online monitoring, an essential tool for mastering your digital shelf
Online monitoring consists of systematically monitoring how your products are presented on your retailers' sites, on marketplaces and on the sites of other unknown retailers. This includes price monitoring (tracking prices, promotions, price changes), the way your SKUs are presented on product sheets (images used, description, presentation) as well as monitoring market trends, monitoring competitor SKUs, customer reviews and ratings on your products, and the promotional activities of other brands. The goal is to collect relevant data to adjust your online distribution strategy and stay competitive.
Online monitoring is particularly important for:
Monitor the competition: Observing competitors' strategies, their prices, promotions, and how they present their products can provide valuable insights to adjust one's own strategy
Adjust Prices: Stay competitive by adapting prices in real-time.
Identify Opportunities: Detect opportune times to launch promotions or discounts.
Adapt Quickly: React quickly to price changes and new offers from competitors.
For effective price intelligence, companies use price intelligence software such as Price Observatory that aggregates this data in real time via scraping technologies and APIs to extract data directly from competing websites.
Competitive intelligence is not limited to price monitoring, other factors are also important to master your Digital Shelf.
Reputation management: Tracking customer reviews and feedback helps to react quickly to negative reviews and improve customer satisfaction.
SEO optimization: Online intelligence helps to understand which keywords and phrases are most searched for by consumers, which helps optimize content to improve search engine optimization (SEO).
Essential online monitoring tools to master your Digital Shelf
To carry out effective online monitoring, brands can use various technological tools:
Google Alerts: To receive notifications about brand or product mentions.
Semrush: To analyze competitors' SEO and content strategies.
Brandwatch: For an in-depth analysis of social media mentions and sentiments.
Price Observatory: To monitor prices, reviews, promos, stock on various e-commerce platforms (e-commerce sites and marketplaces)
Putting it into practice
Step 1: Define Intelligence Objectives Identify the aspects of the Digital Shelf that you want to improve, such as product visibility, access to offers, content quality, pricing, or reputation management.
Step 2: Choose the Right Tools Select the monitoring tools that fit your goals and budget.
Step 3: Collect and Analyze Data Set up regular alerts and reports to monitor relevant information. Analyze this data to identify trends and opportunities for improvement.
Step 4: Implement Corrective Actions Make the necessary changes to your digital shelf strategy based on insights gained from online monitoring.
Step 5: Evaluate Results Measure the impact of the changes made and adjust your strategy accordingly for continuous improvement.
Conclusion
Mastering your Digital Shelf is essential for brands that want to succeed in today's competitive digital landscape. Online intelligence provides an effective way to monitor and optimize the various aspects of the digital presence of products. By taking a proactive approach and using the right tools, brands can improve their visibility, attract more customers, and ultimately increase sales. For personalized advice on the pricing of your products, do not hesitate to contact our team of experts on Price Observatory website. Contact us for a demo, a real-world test or information
5 Tips for Choosing Your Price Monitoring Software
In the fast-paced world of e-commerce, staying ahead of your competitors' trends and movements is key to staying competitive. Competitive intelligence, as a strategic practice, requires appropriate tools to collect, analyze, and interpret relevant data. However, choosing the right tool can prove to be a challenge in itself. Here are five key tips to guide you in choosing your competitive intelligence and price intelligence tool for e-commerce.
1. Define your specific needs
Before you start your search, it's important to clearly define your specificcompetitive intelligence needs. This step will help you narrow down your search and choose a tool that precisely meets your needs.
A. What objectives do you want to meet with this tool ?
Increase your sales
Better adjust your margins
Identify products on which you can increase prices
Perform automatic repricing
Automatically monitor your competitors' prices and promotions
Identify in real time which offers are becoming cheaper than yours
Monitor your competitors' stock and stock-outs.
Know who sells the same products as you on the Marketplaces and who owns the Buy Box
Identify market opportunities by spotting your competitors' new brands
Have management and decision-making tools
Target your Google Ads ads to the products where you rank best
B. What types of products do you want to track ?
New products with EAN or Unique Reference codes
New products without EAN codes or Unique Reference
2. Assess the reliability and accuracy of the Data
Make sure that the tool you are considering offers comprehensive coverage of data relevant to your industry. Check the frequency of data updates (daily), the reliability of the data, and the accuracy of the information provided
A. Reliability of the data
Above all, a competitive intelligence tool must provide reliable, easily verifiable and verified data. For this, the accuracy of the algorithms is essential. Various control phases must also be carried out to ensure the validity of the data collected. Human control is also essential for all collated data that is not matched by EAN code or unique reference.
B. Frequency of surveys
The tool must also be able to collect daily or even real-time data. Make sure that the tool provides daily price readings and that you can refresh the data at any time in 1 click.
C. Accuracy of the data
Make sure the data is accurate. In particular, check that:
postage and delivery costs are collected
The dates of price changes are specified
Stocks are well harvested
Promotions and strikethrough prices are returned
the packaging is specified
Bundles and bundles are well differentiated
product combinations can be processed separately
Specific product attributes can be searched and displayed
D. Test the tool in real-world conditions
The best way to ensure the reliability and quality of the data and free test
Make sure the tool offers a variety of convenient ways to read and use data :
A user-friendly and customizable interface
An automatic repricing feature that recalculates new prices based on rules you set and automatically sends them to your merchant site
Advanced filtering capabilities to help you get the relevant data efficiently.
Accurate and varied analysis to make informed decisions
An API to retrieve data from your system
A chrome extension to have access to the main data when browsing your merchant site
Configurable programmable email alerts and exports
4. Consider Scalability and Integration
Your business may evolve over time, and your competitive intelligence needs may also change.
Choose a tool that is scalable and able to scale as your business grows.
Is the software publisher open to specific development and to adapt to the needs of its customers or is it more in a mass logic?
Additionally, make sure the tool can easily integrate with other tools and platforms you already use, such as your inventory management system or e-commerce platform.
5. Evaluate customer support and value for money
Finally, don't underestimate the importance of customer support and value for money.
Opt for a provider that offers responsive and knowledgeable customer support to help you with any issues or questions.
Additionally, carefully evaluate the cost of the tool in relation to its features and the value it brings to your business. A competitive intelligence tool can be a valuable investment, but it needs to offer value for money to be profitable in the long run.
In conclusion
In conclusion, choosing the right e-commerce competitive intelligence tool is essential to stay competitive in the market. By following these five key tips, you'll be able to select a tool that perfectly meets your needs and helps you make informed strategic decisions for your business.
As a manufacturer, it's up to you to set the prices of your products and your MAP Policy (minimum advertised price) This decision is crucial, as it directly affects your profitability, competitiveness, and market position. That's why understanding the fundamentals of pricing is essential to thriving in a dynamic and competitive business environment. Here are the 10 pricing rules all brands should know
1. Know your market
Before you set your prices, understand your market, your competitors, and consumer expectations. Analyze your competitors' trends, buying behaviors, and prices to define an effective pricing strategy. Price Observatory gives you access to the price trends of your market, the evolution of price changes by periods, seasons, years. All the prices in your market are logged over 2 years.
2. Identify Perceived Value
Customers pay for the perceived value of your products, not just their production costs. Identify the unique features of your products and communicate them in a way that makes consumers understand their superior value. Detail these features in your product descriptions and make sure your distributors use the right texts.
Pay special attention to photos of your products to increase their perceived value. In the same way, make sure that your resellers use the most up-to-date images of your products.
Price Observatory allows you to check with one click that all your resellers are up to date in the images and texts you have defined for your brand.
3. Establish your financial goals
Be clear about your financial goals, whether it's in terms of margin, market share, or profits. Your prices should be aligned with these goals to ensure thelong-term profitability of your business. Repricing tools must take into account these financial objectives, including margin targets.
4. Adopt a Dynamic Pricing Strategy
Don't set your prices statically. Take a dynamic approach by adjusting your prices based on market fluctuations, competitors, seasons, and promotional events to maximize revenue. Our data collection tools can allow you to track trends in price changes in your market. You can also use this data to inject it into your internal or outsourced tools to determine the best prices for your products through a system of rules or AI.
5. Be Flexible
Offer different options (prices, packs, combinations, etc.) to meet the varied needs and budgets of your customers. This will allow you to reach a wider audience and increase your sales (decreasing prices according to quantity, Bundle, Pack, Lots, Promo, Variation of the same product, etc.).
The Price Observatory tool allows you to automatically collect prices, promotions, strikethrough prices but also decreasing prices, product combinations and batch sales from your distributors and competitors in order to compare your data with theirs.
6. Keep an Eye on Your Competitors
Set up a price watch of your competitors' prices and adjust yours accordingly. Being aware of market movements will allow you to stay competitive and maximize your market share. The features offered by Price Observatory allow automatic monitoring of product references from other brands equivalent to yours. Price Observatory also allows you to track the prices, promotions and stock of private labels.
7. Control Your Distribution Networkand your MAP Policy
Check that your resellers are complying with your MAP policy with email alert tools that notify you in real time when a reseller sells below your floor price or when your products are out of stock, for example.
Check that the holding agreements are respected by your resellers (number of references and brands highlighted for example).
Automatically monitor your resellers' prices and promotions
Note the aggressiveness of your distributors (which retailer is driving the market down) and identify non-partner sellers and new players on marketplaces such as Google Shopping or Amazon. Determine who owns the Buy Box.
Track your resellers' stock and product availability to encourage orders and avoid stock-outs.
Check that your products are properly highlighted (do your retailers use the right images, descriptions, etc.)
Manage customer ratings and reviews of your products (should you consider product development or is it a usability issue you can address)
Track price variability
Keep track of your distributors' prices by period, season and year
Having a real-time view of the prices, promotions and stock of your distribution network is essential to enforce your MAP policy and knowing how your products are evaluated is also essential to avoid bad buzz and sales drops.
8. Don't Underestimate the Psychological Effects of Pricing
Prices have an emotional impact on consumers. Use psychological pricing techniquessuch as high prices, fair prices, "charming" prices (e.g. €9.99 instead of €10), and bundles to influence buying behavior. A high price is automatically associated with a notion of value and scarcity. However, all of this is purely psychological. For example, everyone believes that diamonds are expensive because they are rare. Diamonds are now among the most common gemstones on earth, yet they are the most expensive gemstones.
9. Offer Purchase Incentives
Use promotions, discounts, and loyalty programs to encourage customers to buy your products. Special offers can boost sales and strengthen the relationship with your customers. Always set an expiry date for your promotions and emphasize the rarity and exceptional nature of your offers in order to encourage people to take action by creating the fear of missing out on a good deal
10. Continuously Evaluate and Adjust
Pricing is an ongoing process. Monitor your pricing performance, collect customer feedback, and adjust your strategy accordingly to stay competitive and profitable. Price Observatory's monitoring tools and BI analytics will allow you to generate accurate reports on each pricing action. Customizable dashboards are essential indicators for Key Account Managers (KAMs), Web Marketing Managers and E-commerce Managers.
By following these 10 pricing rules, and with our monitoring tools, you will be able to maximize your revenue, strengthen your position in the market and ensure the long-term success of your brand.
