CuisineAddict uses Price Observatory to roll out its price matching strategy

CuisineAddict is a pureplayer e-commerce website that offers professional quality kitchen and pastry utensils, accessories and equipment, for retail customers.

Thanks to a rigorous selection of premium products, made in France and Europe and of professional quality, Cuisine Addict has maintained, for more than 15 years, its position as a high-end leader in the kitchen accessories market. With more than 15,000 references in its catalogue, Cuisine Addict offers a very wide choice of quality kitchen equipment.

Mathias Corbin, founder and CEO of Cuisine Addict, covers the challenges the company faced in terms of price monitoring and repricing:

"In e-commerce, price has a direct impact on sales. Consumers systematically compare prices before making an online purchase, especially for premium products like ours. The surge of marketplaces like Google Shopping and Amazon, as well as price comparison websites, has further accentuated this phenomenon, thus making it easier to compare prices online.

We quickly realized that anytime a competitor offered one of our products at a lower price, we immediately lost sales. We did all the marketing and conversion work but, in the end, it all came down to the pricing. Whenever consumers were ready to make a purchase, they would compare our price to those of our competitors and if they offered a lower price, the sale would always go to them. We had done all the heavy lifting convincing the prospect, and it was all for nothing. We lost only by a few euros.

On the contrary, when we offered the same product at the same price than the cheapest (serious) competitor, convinced customers would rather make their purchase on our website, significantly increasing our sales numbers.

It therefore became clear to us that we had to systematically monitoring our competitors' pricing in order to be able to quickly adjust our prices in relation to theirs (repricing) and avoid a possible loss of revenue. However, the increasingly large number of references in our catalog, together with the rising number of competitors in our market made this manual monitoring almost impossible. We therefore decided to implement a price intelligence solution that would allow us to monitor our market in real time and adopt the right price matching strategy.

After analyzing 3 other price intelligence solutions, we decided to choose Price Observatory because it was very complete and intuitive solution, and it offered the best value for money.
Their price matching strategy solutions had a real competitive advantage.
We are very satisfied with the use of the solution and the technical teams are always very responsive to our requests.

The solution was implemented in a quick and simple way. We defined the websites we wanted to monitor and set up a flow to connect our catalog to Price Observatory. The application was delivered in one week, and Camille trained and supported us in configuring email alerts, dashboards, and repricing rules as well as in deploying the solution. From then on, we could very quickly adjust our prices and react quickly to any change in competitors’ pricing.

For now, we want to keep control of the repricing and all price proposals coming from Price Observatory are manually validated by us, but we plan to go further by automating our repricing even more and connecting the Price Observatory API to our ERP in order to increase our productivity and also to manage our promotions in compliance with the omnibus law.

At Cuisine Addict we make extensive use of Price Observatory’s Dynamic Pricing which helps us match our prices with those of competitors. We never sell at a lower price point than our competitors because we don't want to fuel pricing war, but we do match them because we don't want to lose sales. We have set up highly detailed repricing rules by brand and category, and sometimes even on a selection of products. We can decide whether to include shipping costs and promotions in our rules or not. We can also set triggers and minimum margins based on our purchase prices. It's truly a comprehensive tool. 

We then manually validate the tool's recommendations and export an XLS. We later reimport this file into PrestaShop in order to display our new prices in promotions. The solution improves our margins and reinforces our brand image.

The tool also allows me to follow daily our price updates and see at a glance the work of the teams. I can see if our business operations, promotions, and pricing changes are up to date. It also helps me improve management of short-date consumable products. It's a huge time saver for me.

Price Observatory also allows me to benefit data that I can use during discussions with suppliers, in order to justify price changes. If a brand, during negotiations, accuses me of selling below their reference price, I simply open the Price Observatory application, go to the product’s price history and prove them that I am only following competitors who are driving the market down. The tool helps me maintain good business relationships with my suppliers.

The solution is a real asset. With Google Shopping and Amazon, together with an additional 20 to 30 serious players, the competition is tough!

The solution also allows us to easily identify new competitors on marketplaces.

Price Observatory also provides us with a 5-star customer service that is very responsive. They have gone above and beyond and implemented customized developments to meet our needs.

I'm really satisfied, and I think we'll be moving to full API automation soon.