9 Reasons To Use A Pricing Tool For Competitive Benchmarking

The Growing Need for Advanced Retail Pricing Tools 

The retail landscape has changed dramatically in recent years. eCommerce has flourished and is forecasted to generate nearly 25% of the total retail revenue by 2025 – up from 10% in 2017. Consumer demographics for digital commerce largely consist of digitally savvy Millennials and Gen Z shoppers. These savvy shoppers have hundreds of online options to choose from and know the power they hold. They compare prices across websites and channels and are more price-sensitive than they are brand loyal. To cater to this new-age generation of channel-agnostic comparison shoppers is challenging and requires more than legacy tools and manual pricing solutions. 

Six Reasons to Use a Price Monitoring Tool for Competitive Benchmarking 

• Get visibility into the competitor landscape
• Price products competitively
• Grow market share and brand credibility
• Make data-driven, flexible pricing decisions
• Get insights on product lifecycle
• Identify best-selling products and market trends 

The Common Thread Distinguishing Retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Target 

All three retail giants, Amazon, Walmart, and Target saw exponential digital growth and won the pandemic season despite various challenges. How did these retail giants win the pandemic? They were flexible, digitally equipped, data-driven, and consumer-centric. They knew that shoppers care most about competitive prices, especially when the global economies are on shaky grounds, and made it their mission. Amazon is known to review the prices of millions of its products every few minutes and Walmart guarantees Everyday Low Prices, helping these giants maintain their position on the retail leaderboard, despite new DTC and digitally-native brands flourishing amidst the pandemic. 

These retail giants harness advanced pricing solutions and competitive analytics to make quick, accurate, data-driven pricing decisions. And to compete with these giants and many others following in their footsteps needs the right retail-tech investments and technological prowess. Here’s where the Intelligence Node price optimization solution comes into the picture. 

9 Reasons to Invest in Intelligence Node’s Pricing Solution

Intelligence Node’s pricing solutions are trusted by global fortune 500 retail businesses and are backed by advanced proprietary technology, AI algorithms, a sophisticated tech stack, and a patented similarity engine, among others. Let us dive into the key reasons why you should leverage intelligence Node’s advanced pricing and promotions solution to transform your eCommerce business:

1. Monitor Prices in Real-time

The retail landscape has moved from brick and mortar to eCommerce and omnichannel in less than a decade. The new-age retail is digital, fast-paced, and highly competitive. While prices change every few weeks or months in offline retail, players like Amazon change their prices every few minutes to offer the most competitive prices. Competing with giants like Amazon and Walmart, although seems like scaling Mount Everest, is doable with the help of advanced tech and AI-driven, rule-based pricing analytics. Intelligence Node’s dynamic pricing engine offers pricing insights at 10-second refresh rates for real-time price benchmarketing. It identifies competitor price changes and recommends competitive smart prices while protecting product margins. With Intelligence Node, retailers and brands can take advantage of pricing and assortment gaps left by competitors by monitoring, comparing, and updating prices with the most accurate data, at scale. It also helps monitor prices for price gouging, MAP violations, unauthorized sellers, and counterfeit products and counteract fast.

2. Compare & match competitor prices with 99% accuracy

To match prices with similar and exact competitor products needs the most accurate data. As, any discrepancy in the competitor pricing data can lead to large monetary consequences to your bottom line revenue. Intelligence Node understands this and has built technology that supports businesses with the most accurate, reliable pricing insights. Its pricing tool is powered by its patented similarity engine and proprietary AI algorithms that use a three-pronged matching approach, guaranteeing the highest price accuracy rates in the industry, at 99%. We say this with confidence and also have it added to our SLAs. 

3. Get global coverage across all retail categories

Intelligence Node’s pricing and promotion tool is both channel and language agnostic. This capability allows retail businesses to get pricing insights for any retail category –  from fashion and CPG to home decor and electronics and everything in between. Without language barriers, our pricing tool becomes truly global and can be used to monitor prices of products in any language from any region in the world. 

4. Get access to a dataset of 1.2 billion+ retail products

Intelligence Node boasts of maintaining and updating the largest retail repository of over 1.2 billion unique products. This exhaustive and updated database makes it fast and easy to find relevant matches for certain products that might already be scraped in the past. The database gives retail businesses access to multiple data points within no time and keeps them updated on the latest product and price information of their competitors. 

5. Get started within days with plug & play APIs

Our pricing tool can be accessed in the form of plug & play APIs that can easily integrate with your backend ERP or CRM systems for a seamless data flow. Customers also have an option to access data through a SaaS portal or file transfers. With minimum to no integration, our pricing tool can get set up within days and start recommending smart prices in no time. 

6. Optimize prices at a global or a ZIP code level

Whether you want a bird’s eye view of the competitive landscape or a worm’s eye view, Intelligence Node has got you covered. Our advanced ML algorithms can scrape competitor pricing data at a drilled-down level to compare prices locally based on ZIP code proximity. Similarly, brands and retailers can benchmark prices against competitors in completely different geographies and in any currency to get a complete picture of their global competition. 

7. Improve margins and profitability

Intelligence Node’s real-time pricing insights enable retail businesses to offer the most competitive prices while protecting product margins. By offering the right prices at the right time, retailers can strike a chord with their consumers and improve brand loyalty and market share. Intelligence Node’s retail pricing software also positively impacts profitability by enabling retailers to take advantage of market gaps and accordingly increase prices when competitor products are out of stock or the products are in high demand. Additionally, its high accuracy levels guarantee error-free insights and save resource costs by automating tasks. 

8. Get custom solutions that scale easily

We, at Intelligence Node, understand that every business is unique and so are its requirements. Our flexible, scalable pricing tool is built to accommodate customizations and can be tailored to fit an organization’s specific needs. From the number of SKUs to track, no. of competitors to benchmark against, to defining pricing rules, pricing thresholds, and geographies to track, brands and retailers can make these customizations easily and scale up or scale back their requirements as and when needed. With our open API, you don’t need to contact us to expand your scope, you can do it on your own with our intuitive interface. You have complete control and independence with our highly productized solution.

9.  Affordable price with rapid ROI

Intelligence Node’s pricing tool delivers amongst the industry’s highest speed and accuracy levels. The retail pricing solution’s advanced AI capabilities and patented similarity engine is battle-tested by the best in every industry. It gives you a solution for all your pricing and promotion needs at a fraction of the cost of a consultant and/or the over-featured fulfillment platforms. The quick turnaround time ensures a rapid return on investment, making it an ideal investment choice for data-driven brands and retailers. 

Final Word: AI Pricing for the Win

One of the key pillars in the 4 Ps of marketing is Price. And however strong your other three pillars are (product, promotion, and packaging), the business will sooner or later come crashing down in the absence of the 4th pillar or simply put, a solid pricing strategy. Pricing has historically played a massive role in establishing some of the biggest brands – Walmart, Apple, Samsung, Amazon, and others and continues to play as important a role today. But with the changing times, pricing has become more agile, fast-paced, and competitive. Access to data and analytics has made pricing more precise, targeted, and laser-focused, and technology is playing a critical role in enabling the same. Investing in advanced pricing solutions like Intelligence Node’s AI-driven pricing tool is your fail-safe solution to ensuring market stability, consumer loyalty,  and long-term growth and profitability.