Right Price Monitoring System – What To Expect
If you’re considering implementing an automated price monitoring system for your products, first of all, congratulations. Gaining real-time intelligence into how retailers are advertising your products online – especially if that monitoring system also includes an enforcement component – is a smart strategy.
We’ll also assume the primary reason you’re considering a price monitoring system is to protect your company against retail price erosion. We completely understand and agree with that impulse. Price erosion can lead to some terrible things for manufacturers and brand owners: shrinking margins, loss of credibility with key retailers (who find themselves being unfairly undersold), and eventually damage to the brand’s reputation. Consumers like bargains, but if a brand’s prices fall too much, and stay there for too long, those same consumers will start to question the brand’s value.
And while we wholeheartedly endorse your plan to deploy a price monitoring solution, we also want you to know that if you sign up for the right service, you’re likely to discover other benefits to your business, benefits that go well beyond protection against online price erosion. Here are a few of these nice surprises.
1. New Sales Opportunities from Increased Market Visibility
When you deploy the right price monitoring and enforcement platform, that software will do far more than just compile the millions (or even billions) of continuously updating records of your products’ retail prices across the Internet. The right platform will also be recording – and organizing and analyzing – a wealth of other data to provide you and your team with increased market visibility and actionable sales intelligence.
For example, your price monitoring system’s online dashboard will allow you to easily identify which of your retail partners are selling only a portion of the products in your line. That can give your sales organization an opportunity to reach out to those retailers and let them know about your other products, which they might not have realized are available.
And because this system will be scanning the entire Internet at all times for your products’ presence, it might also help you discover marketplaces or online channels your team wasn’t even aware of. Maybe one retail partner is selling your products at an online marketplace you didn’t know existed – but now that you’ve discovered it, your team can now review the other retailers on that site and decide which ones are worth contacting about representing your brand.
Market visibility dashboard available from TrackStreet
2. Actionable Intelligence via Customer Review Tracking
Another advantage of deploying the right online price monitoring system is that such a solution will also automatically record, aggregate, and analyze all customer reviews and star ratings of your products across all online marketplaces and eCommerce sites. This continuous customer review tracking can generate several forms of important business intelligence that you might have no other feasible means of obtaining.
For example, by setting alerts for specific content in customer reviews, your team can identify potential issues early – before they grow out of control and become a threat to your brand. If several customers leave similar comments in their reviews about packages arriving late, you will be able to trace the source and find that the problem is with one of carrier in particular.
Moreover, if these customer reviews exist across several different online marketplaces, you might never have had a way of spotting the pattern, and it might have taken a lot more late-arriving packages (and upset customers) before you were able to take corrective action.
3. Enhanced Reseller Relationships with Authorized Dealer Badging
Considering that preventing online price erosion was your team’s initial catalyst for implementing a price monitoring solution, this third unexpected benefit should be particularly welcome.
The right price monitoring platform will also make it easy for you to help your legitimate retail partners distinguish themselves – by giving them an authorized dealer badge or trust icon that they can place on their websites or anywhere they sell your products online.
This authorized dealer badge, which your resellers can easily add to their sites with just a single line of code, will help your authorized retailers demonstrate to shoppers that they are in fact officially recognized representatives of your brand, which they will appreciate. At the same time, it will make it more difficult for unauthorized resellers – gray marketers, counterfeiters, and other shady retailers – to dupe unsuspecting consumers into buying your products from them, thereby protecting your company’s brand in the long run.
As you can see, when you choose the right price monitoring system, you’re actually signing up for a price monitoring, policy enforcement, sales intelligence, market visibility, review tracking, and dealer management platform.
So choose wisely. Let us show you how.
