Monitoring Prices From Location-Sensitive Stores

Best practices in price monitoring 18.1.2021. Reading Time: 3 minutes

Nowadays technology allows eCommerce businesses to become global operators. Even the smallest brands can have clients from all over the world. 

What does that mean when it comes to price monitoring? In the sea of different price monitoring tools, you need to pay attention to one very important feature – the ability to monitor prices as they are shown to clients from different geographical locations.

geographical location

Why Is Geographical Location Important In Price Monitoring?

As the eCommerce evolves, many websites have enabled showing different prices (and product information in general) depending on the client’s location. Ideally, retailers would like to know the geographical location (IP address) of each visitor so that they can guide them directly to a corresponding currency and price. Understandably, this makes price monitoring more complex and difficult. In such cases, a price monitoring tool can not crawl only one price because the website will show different prices depending on the geographical location. 

Don’t worry! With Price2Spy this will no longer be the issue! 

To be more precise, Price2Spy can monitor:

  • Websites that show different availability/price/shipping costs based on the client’s address (which is often derived from his IP address). For example, websites that rely heavily on this technique are Amazon and Walmart.
  • Websites that explicitly ask you to choose your local store – and then display prices/availability from that store. We have encountered such websites in geographically dispersed countries – most of them Russia, but also UAE, Australia, and the US.

Luckily, Price2Spy can cover both such scenarios. All that clients have to do is let us know what locations we should use. For example, they can give 3 separate locations for Walmart – and we’ll treat them as 3 separate URLs in our reports – Walmart A, Walmart B, and Walmart C.

Do Different Geographical Locations Mean Different Currencies And Languages?

A very important question! Yes, often that is the case as well. When buying something from another country, customers like to have everything transparent. That includes currency conversion, shipping costs, and all the other possible extra expenses. Also, how long will it take for the product to be shipped, or how many products are left in stock is equally important. 

currency

Another issue worth pointing out is the fact that not all clients are comfortable with using English. That’s why many websites are using different languages. It’s understandable that customers feel more comfortable when there is an option to read the product detail in their native language – especially if the product is pretty pricy. 

These are all great news for customers, but for price monitoring tools they are a nightmare! So many variations that can affect the product’s price!

Fortunately, Price2Spy’s technology relies on one simple rule: if a human can change the website’s language/currency in his browser, Price2Spy can do it as well.

What does it mean for our clients? Put it simply – just let us know what language/currency you would like to pick up, and we’ll take care of it.

Conclusion

The key to having a successful international business is to know your market. The same rule applies to the success of price monitoring tools. Among the fierce competition, one must always try to find better and more suitable ways to help their clients. If your client has competitors all around the world, how will you be able to provide him the right data if you can not solve the problem of different geographical locations?

We like to carefully listen to our client’s needs so that we’re able to come up with a useful solution. That’s one of the main reasons behind Price2Spy’s technical superiority.

If you would like to find out more about the features that we are offering, we invite you to visit the Price2Spy website. Even better – start your completely free 30-days trial period and test all the features that you might find useful!


Author

Ana Popovic
Ana Popovic is a Digital Marketing Specialist at Price2Spy. She's a sociologist who found her place in the eCommerce world. As such, her love for writing has led her to discover the beauty of content marketing and given her the opportunity to inform people about eCommerce and pricing topics.