The retail industry is highly competitive and ever-expanding. The only way to stay ahead is to build yourself a competitive edge over the competition and nothing says competitive edge like competitor intelligence.

Competitor intelligence for retail industry

Simply put, competitor intelligence is information about your competitors that you can use to make strategic decisions to give your existing customers the best experience while also acquiring new customers.

This could include product, pricing, inventory, promotion, and logistic-related data that can help you optimise your own strategies and processes resulting in better customer experience, retention, and acquisition.

Why is competitive intelligence crucial to maintain profitability and customer relationships?

Since retail is one of the most aggressive and crowded markets, knowing where you stand in comparison to your competitors will help you stay responsive to market changes to help you make strategic decisions, ensuring that your customers continue to choose you over your competitors.

Some tangible advantages of competitor monitoring include the following:

Quicker response to market changes: With accurate and timely data about your competitor’s products, prices, and promotions, you will not only be able to not only stay in pace with them but also better forecast and plan for the future.

Increased market share: by being aware of your competitors’ prices and promotions, you are able to take advantage of a penetrative pricing strategy whereby you offer lower prices and better promotions to get your audience’s attention.

Higher customer retention: Once you get their attention, you can show them why they should choose you over your competitors. About 65% of a business’s customers are repeat customers, so once you have them, you are more likely to retain them than any other 3rd party reseller!

Earlier awareness of new market opportunities: With timely and accurate insight into competitor day, you go from reacting to market movements to forecasting and planning for them. This way you are not only able to forecast your competitors’ moves but also identify new business opportunities before them.

Better preparedness for potential threats: similarly, with prompt and relevant data, you are not only able to identify new opportunities to capitalise on but also identify potential threats before they become too big to handle thereby ensuring that you are never caught off-guard by new launch, promotion, or pre-order.

How pricechecker helps you gain competitive intelligence to stay ahead?

While competitor monitoring might sound expensive, time-consuming, and almost impossible to get right in a market as large, aggressive, and competitive as retail, AI-based competitor monitoring tools like pricechecker effectively and efficiently monitors, tracks, and fetches competitor data.

So what does pricechecker monitor and how does it help your business?

Products and product segment data: pricechecker not only tells you when your competitor has added a new product similar to yours or similar to products in your segment, but it also tells you where you stand for that segment in terms of price and demand.

For example, if you are selling 4 brands of sound bars, you can find out if your competitor has launched a new brand of sound bards and where you stand in terms of price and demand for the sound bar segment.

Pricing data: Along with product data, pricechecker also fetches the current price at which your competitors are selling their products along with past prices of the products so you are able to identify pricing trends which will help you forecast and plan your own pricing strategy better.

Promotion data: pricechecker also fetches promotional data about your competitors. This includes promotion codes and price after promotion thereby giving you an insight into your competitor’s promotional strategy while giving you the accurate pricing customers are paying if they choose to shop with your competitor.

This data allows you to optimise your marketing and promotion tracking strategy accordingly, so you are engaging your existing customers with the best deal possible while attracting your competitors’ customers with your competitive pricing.

Customer ratings and reviews: Customer reviews and ratings can give you crucial insights into the product, its performance, the potential demand for it, and any challenges faced that may impact customer satisfaction.

This can help you price, stock, and promote your products to maximise customer satisfaction while planning for exigent circumstances based on competitors’ customer experience.

Data relating to Supply and demand: outside of fetching accurate competitor product, price, and promotion data, pricechecker also fetches stock statuses of your competitor’s products. This data can help you understand and optimise your supply and inventory to avoid shortage or surplus.

Basically, by deploying pricechecker for your business, you will be able to make data-driven business decisions regarding your products, pricing, and promotion that will put you ahead of your competition.

Now that you know what is competitor intelligence, why you need it to stay relevant and profitable, and how pricechecker can help you, let us set you up with your trial account so you can see pricechecker in action!