How can Price2Spy help your business?

The number of Price2Spy clients is growing fast, and we thought the following 2 storeis might be of interest to you

Case 1 – making swift pricing decisions – online fashion retailer from Southern Europe

When this client approached us, their business was suffering from their competitor’s frequent price changes, which were very difficult to track.
One of our first tasks was to match the products supplied by the client to products on competitor sites, so we could start price monitoring.
In the beginning this task was done by client’s interns, but soon enough it became clear that interns are making very slow progress, with questionable matching data quality.
That’s when Price2Spy data entry team stepped in, and in next 2 weeks time, we have managed to match more than 5000 SKUs across 5 competitor sites.

Ever since, Price2Spy has been monitoring these products, with several immediate benefits for our client

  • our client has identified the pattern one of competitor used to alter it’s product prices
  • our client became immediately aware of any price changes, being able to react swiftly. However, since we’re talking about more than 5000 SKUs monitored – with many different product managers involved, we have set their account up so a product manager gets email alerts just for products they manage

Several months on, in words of the client himself

  • their turnover increased by 12% in less than 4 months they’ve been using Price2Spy
  • they have been able to increase their profit margin by an average of 7% for products which were underpriced
  • they plan integrating Price2Spy into their internal logistic software tools
  • they plan to add further 5000 SKus in their Price2Spy package

 

Case 2 – MAP policy enforcement – kitchen systems manufacturer from US

This client is one of the world’s leading producers of kitchen equipment, working with hundreds of retailers worldwide.
Their problem was detecting resellers who are not in accordance with strict MAP policy they contracted.
When this client approached us, they had a list of several hundred websites selling their products.
Price2Spy first task was to crawl these sites and to automatically get product URLs, which we started to monitor.
More than that, Price2Spy’s data entry team has conducted a Web research which resulted in several new websites, previously unknown to our client, who were not in accordance with MAP policy.

Few months afterwards – they have all market players firmly under their control.
Price2Spy warns them instantly of any price changes, saving them endless hours of manual work.

Show price in cart – how does it work?

Show price in shopping cartMore and more online stores are using seemingly strange and useless technique: instead of attracting customer with a great price, they would show the price only upon placing the product in the shopping cart.
In the beginning mostly used by Amazon, BestBuy and other big retail names – this has become pretty common way of (not) advertising prices which are below certain point.

The question is – why do retailers do it? The answer is very simple – the price they offer on their website is below contracted MAP (Minimal Advertised Price).
The trick seems so to be naive, but it works: we sell at price which is real low (too low) – but we’re not advertizing it, we just show it to the customer once he places it in his order…

First we saw it in the electronics (TV, video cameras etc) markets. Nowadays it’s becoming increasingly popular in car parts, fashion and sports retail stores.

Lets analyze some pros and cons of this technique.

PROs
- some customers might make orders out of pure curiosity (hm, how many such people do you know?)
- trick the MAP contract (I believe this is the main reason, actually)
- make it more difficult for your competitors to track your prices (actually, it’s not a problem for Price2Spy)

CONs
- customers might find it too hard to do that extra click in order to find the actual price out. Large percentage will just go away
- Google Shopping, nor other comparison sites won’t be able to pick up the actual price (because you must not advertise it)

Although I have listed more pros than cons, I’m a big opponent of this technique.
Why? Not only because of tricking the rules (offering the price below MAP) but mainly for the reason of making customer’s choice lest transparent.
You might be offering a better price, but customer’s experience is such that you’re actually hiding something (and you are, because you cannot advertize that price)

Anyway, we in Price2Spy do witness large increase of such online stores worldwide. Most of them (90% or more) are located in US, but we see more and more such stores emerging in UK, Australia etc

Finally, in terms of being able to monitor such price – Price2Spy easily handles it (Premium account required)

Do let us know your experience with selling products below MAP price – how does it work in your niche?