Too many competitors to monitor? Here's what retailers are doing!
The retail industry is one of the largest and fastest growing. For that matter, the retail industry in the UK is expected to create £381 billion in spending by 2024 and 30% of that would be online! This means, despite the pandemic and inflation, people are still willing to spend money.
• The retail sector is fast growing and aggressively competitive, especially the groceries and consumer electronics sector.
• Competitor monitoring gives you powerful competitive insights and inspiration to stay ahead.
• Monitoring competitors manually is too slow, time- and resource-consuming, and inaccurate
• Competitor Monitoring Softwares monitor competitors for updates to catalogues and prices, promotions, reviews, etc.
• AI-driven Softwares fetch data promptly and accurately to help businesses respond to market trends faster and see higher RoI
In the UK, groceries and consumer electronics form a large part of the retail sector. These are also the segments that are highly saturated with competition. While the way to stay ahead of the curve is by monitoring your competitors and adopting strategies to stay on par or ahead of them, the sheer number of competitors that need to be tracked can make it extremely daunting and consuming.
Competitor monitoring in retail
Any major retailer you can think of off the top of your head is likely using a competitor monitoring tool to track the prices, promotions, and customer perception of their competitors so they can up their game accordingly in order to retain their existing customers and if possible acquire some of the competitions’.
This is because monitoring your competitors can give you powerful competitive insights and inspiration that give you the edge you need to stay on top of an aggressively competitive market.
Can you monitor competitors manually?
Of course, you can track your competitors manually if that’s what you prefer. But if you are doing this because you believe investing in software is too expensive, then you cannot be more wrong. Here’s why!
If you are a very small business with only a handful of products to offer and a couple of other retailers to compete with, then you are probably fine tracking your competitors manually.
But if you're a growing retail business with about 100 products, then you are probably losing more money and customers while manually tracking competitors. Just imagine, even if each of your products only had 3-4 competitors (you probably have a lot more), that’s about 400 product pages that you have to manually monitor for changes in prices, offers or promotions, stock status, reviews and ratings, etc.
The job doesn't end with monitoring. You also have to record the data, keep them updated, regularly clean and sort the data so pulling reports are not challenging, and when needed, have them represented well so consuming the data and making decisions is quick and effective.
Evidently, this is a lot of data to collect, maintain, update, and analyse manually on a daily basis and more often if they are highly price-sensitive products with high demands. The challenges do not end with the magnitude of work. The time and manpower required and the potential for errors are serious considerations too.
Competitor monitoring software
Competitor monitoring softwares basically monitors your competitors and tells you when they update their catalogues and prices, offer promotions, get reviews, etc.
Businesses are able to use this data to understand how their competitors are acquiring customers and keeping them happy and use it to optimise their own business strategies and decisions to one-up the competition.
Advantages of investing in a competitive price intelligence tool
In 2020, the retail industry in the UK is also investing 20% of its revenue in technology even though the revenue growth was only 5%. This is because retailers are beginning to see how big a role technology plays in their growth.
An area of business where businesses are investing and leveraging technology significantly is competitor intelligence. According to reports, over 90% of businesses are investing heavily in technology that helps gain competitive intelligence and here’s why:
Prompt and accurate key business insights: AI-based competitor intelligence tools know what to look for, where, and when. They fetch data quickly and accurately so you are able to make crucial business decisions promptly based on current and relevant information.
Improved customer acquisition, retention, and experience: These tools do more than just collect data. They record and present the data in a clean and structured manner making it easy for you to analyse, see patterns, forecast customer and competitor behaviour, and their response to market changes.
This allows you to plan your product launches, pricing, and promotion strategies to give your customers better prices and deals without compromising on your margins.
See data and RoI almost immediately: Most AI-based competitor monitoring tools are quite easy to set up and begin capturing data almost immediately. This means you are able to start optimising your pricing and promotion strategies almost immediately to improve revenue.
You will also be saving a lot of time, money, and manpower that you would otherwise be spending on collecting data, cleaning it up, and representing it in a manner easy to visualise and analyse.
The retail industry in the UK alone has been investing over £ 1 billion each year in new technology to improve customer experience and automate business processes making it almost imperative for any retailer looking to stay profitable to start leveraging technology to do it.
And if you are new to AI-based technology, tools that give you access to immediate and actionable data like AI-based price monitoring software are a good place to start. They allow you to experience the power of technology by showing you almost immediately how your competitors are pricing, stocking and promoting their products.
To see the benefits of how automation in competitor monitoring works speak to our team.
