Repricing and sales: the winning duo to boost your incomes!
While the summer and winter sales represent an opportunity for e-merchants (liquidation of stock, development of visibility, capture of new customers, etc.), consumers, who are increasingly used to discounts, are difficult to attract.
In this context, prices represent the most important lever of competitiveness for brands and e-retailers. It is therefore essential to develop a well-studied and coherent strategy... which must take into account increasingly demanding legislation.
In particular with the Omnibus Law, officially the European Directive 2019/2161, which aims to improve consumer protection in the digital environment. In the context of sales, the Omnibus Directive makes it mandatory, in addition to the updated price, to display the reference price, i.e. the lowest price offered in the last 30 days. The aim here is to allow customers to know the actual discount. E-merchants must therefore succeed in finding the difficult balance between attractive prices, compliance with legislation and safeguarding margins.
The Price War
For a given product during the sales period, what is the best price? How are competitors positioned? How is their pricing strategy evolving? To get an idea of the complexity of the answer, you should know that on the Amazon marketplace, and for some products, especially if several merchants sell them, hundreds of price changes can occur daily!
It is therefore absolutely impossible today to organize a price watch worthy of the name without automation and a repricing tool. Monitoring all identified competitors' sites to find prices and define dynamic, rule-based pricing that will allow for "repricing" (i.e. setting new, more competitive prices) has become essential.
The repricing tool will therefore allow you to define your own rules: which competitors I want to compare myself to, should I include promotions, shipping costs, the entire brand or only certain products, etc. It will also be used to choose the triggers: is the competitor x euros more expensive, if so what is the reprice (alignment at the same price or 1 euro cheaper, for example) and what is the expected level of margin. Repricing can be validated manually or automated, the prices are then updated via an API. Finally, it should be noted that this strategy can be multichannel, i.e. different prices can be set on different sites or marketplaces, and change several times a day during the sales period.
Margin protection
A repricing tool is not only for getting the lowest price. It must also be able to be used to increase margins. In this case, the tool may not offer to decrease, but to increase the prices. Indeed, there is no point in being much cheaper than your competitors, you just have to be the cheapest. For example, if, for a given product, the nearest competitor is 4 euros more expensive, the reprice offered can be + 3 euros, to keep a gap of 1 euro. This allows you to maintain your position as the cheapest seller while increasing your margin.
What's more, an efficient repricing tool must offer clear and complete dashboards, in order to support a BI (Business Intelligence) approach. All the data collected (prices, promotions, stocks, histories, etc.) can thus be transcribed in the form of graphs (ideally with multi-country and multi-currency possibilities). This will ultimately make it possible to know precisely the trends through the desired prism, and to make the right choices at the right time.
Good practices
Even with the best repricing tool on the market, it will be difficult to be the best during the sales without the application of a few best practices and a little common sense, so the adaptation of the homepage and product sheets should not be forgotten. As physical stores adapt their merchandising during sales periods, e-merchants must adapt their site to convert better.
Communication is also an important lever during this period. Whether it is a question of interacting with potential new customers or with the installed customer base, communication can, in addition to being set up on the site, be developed on more communication channels (emailing, SMS, social networks, etc.). Finally, we must not forget SEA (for Search Engine Advertising), which consists of paying to display targeted ads on the search results of Google and Bing (among others). Indeed, it is a good time to create SEA campaigns, carried out on products known to be the most sought-after during the sales.
An accurate and reliable repricing with Price Observatory
During the sales, Price Observatory meets the price monitoring needs of companies of all sizes and industries, and allows brands and e-tailers to monitor resellers' prices, analyze the market and the distribution network. Users of the solution can therefore easily carry out competitive intelligence, price positioning monitoring and automatic repricing.
No more drudgery of product reconciliations: as many references as possible are automatically matched by our algorithms. Just send us the product feeds and Price Observatory will take care of the rest.
Thanks to a precise repricing strategy, our solution also optimizes your margin by identifying in real time which offers are becoming cheaper than yours, and which products you can increase prices on.
In addition, with a current price history of 2 years, it is the guarantee of having all the data to be in compliance with the Omnibus Directive.
Finally, Price Observatory is agile, adapts to all types of companies and can be customized according to needs. And for companies that are just starting out in the field of repricing, Price Observatory ensures the implementation of support measures, to acculturate and promulgate good practices.
For personalized advice on the pricing of your products, do not hesitate to contact our team of experts on our Price Observatory website.