The definitive guide to automated competitive and supplier price monitoring

The dynamics of online commerce  are changing quickly. You need the best data and automated price comparison solutions available in order to keep up with the times.

•     For retailers, that means gaining access to competitive intelligence about products and prices.  

•     For purchasers, this means having real-time insight into supplier pricing, inventory, and shipping to optimize your supply chain, keep your business running and reduce unnecessary expense.

Not all automated price monitoring solutions are the same.  Learn the critical differences to help you choose the best solution for your needs.

  The Definitive Guide to Automated Competitive and Supplier Price Monitoring White Paper Untitled Document  10 Critical Questions to understand when choosing a solution Competitive Price Monitoring and Supplier Analysis in the Age of Web Commerce Web transactions for B2B and B2C commerce continue to increase rapidly every year. Businesses and consumers are buying at record rates online and large enterprises now routinely examine supplier pricing and availability by analyzing web data. United States e-commerce and online retail sales for B2B and B2C are projected to reach 173 billion in 2010, an increase of 7 percent over 2009. The same number is expected to grow to 250 billion by 2014. At the same time, customer loyalty to specific suppliers and stores (both online and off) is decreasing. Purchasing departments and consumers comparison-shop online, constantly looking for the lowest price to save money. There s very little fear of ordering online. Actually, online shopping and procurement is often seen as the most convenient way to purchase. Retailers and suppliers are, in fact, pushing their customers to buy online as the cost per transaction is cheaper than in-store or even by phone or fax, which require human engagement. Many businesses now offer discounts over the weekend to those willing to order online (when the call center is closed). Customers are learning, too. With smart phones, laptops and Wi-Fi networks at the ready, they have unparalleled, transparent views into competitor pricing. All these developments indicate that power has shifted away from the retailer and to the purchaser. In fact, the conditions for a sale are often in the purchaser s hands. Retailers and suppliers are in a difficult situation especially if price is a significant conversion factor. Monitoring and understanding your competitor s pricing is now ultra-critical, and ignoring pricing dynamics day-to-day and hour-to-hour can be a deadly gamble. e-Commerce Leads to Increased Commoditization of Goods In the days of brick and mortar retail, merchandising was critical. Product shelf placement, end cap displays, packaging, in-store promotions, and samples significantly impacted sales velocity. All the attention was focused on those physical spaces. Untitled Document  With e-commerce, things have changed. Low price is now king, and merchandising factors have transitioned from that old physical realm to a new, social, word-of-mouth, URL-linked world. MIT researchers predicted this back in 1999. They observed that e-commerce would create a harsher ecology for companies with the acceleration of commoditization of free-standing basic products. Prior to the Internet, consumers and corporate purchasers had a hard time figuring out if they were getting the lowest price in their neighborhood or market, let alone their city or state. Nowadays, with just a few clicks, they can be fairly confident they re getting the lowest price in the nation. That is a quantum leap. Once a customer decides they re going to purchase something, price becomes an important factor. Of course shipping costs, delivery times and retailer reputations play a role. Yet, if they re comparing apples to apples, then price is where all the focus lies. In markets with high price elasticity, even miniscule differences in price can sway purchasing decisions. This is a problem, because many retailers have spent decades building up loyalty in the physical world. As more companies move online and this pricing dilemma evolves, any sense of personal connection between customer and seller erodes. There s another layer at work, too. Product aggregation websites allow customers to compare prices across multiple vendors without opening a bunch of separate browser tabs. Robust Analytics and Automation Now Required Smart e-commerce vendors recognize these realities and have focused a lot of their attention on the apples-to-apples competitive pricing game. Since pricing on a wide range of competitive goods changes dynamically throughout the day, it s now critical to implement robust analytic capabilities and automate price monitoring solutions. Dell, for example, is known for changing prices throughout the day to maintain revenue levels. They may cut prices 10% or give away a free printer at a specific time if they know they re below daily revenue targets. eBay retailers use various auction and non-auction formats that move pricing dynamically. Prior to the advent of pricing automation tools, sellers had to manually parse a competitor s website to track pricing. Those manual processes required time and resources, thus limiting the number of websites you could track and the detail you could drill into. And, with the web, consumers and purchasing agents are buying 24/7. If your price is out of line for seven days, for example, a manual analysis process could spell disaster for your company. Plus, manual analysis introduces much more human error. Untitled Document   Keys to Effectively Implementing Automated Competitive Price Monitoring Process automation is the key. You want to collect competitor product and price information then compare that to your internal prices. Whether you need to monitor publicly viewable consumer facing e-commerce sites or password protected supplier sites, there s plenty of opportunity to use advanced web technologies to carry out these tasks. Automating this process provides a huge competitive advantage. But finding the right solution is more complex than it may seem. When evaluating potential vendors and solutions, consider the following critical questions to ensure your business chooses the right solution. The future of your business may depend on it. Question 1: Can the Solution Go Deep? With product purchases so sensitive to price, it s important to have a solution that can automate any task a human being can perform on the Internet. Sometimes, for example, prices aren t available for certain products on websites until they are added to a shopping cart. Your solution should be able to perform these human-like actions. This might include entering a credit card number, making a purchase, or removing an item from a shopping cart after adding it to reveal its current price. You also might want to have the solution automatically enter addresses and zip codes from a variety of locations to show shipping costs. A deep solution should also evaluate the multitude of prices associated with a single product, including quantity discounts, and prices based on unique characteristics such as size or color. Like the location and data entry processes described above, you should be able to automate this.  Question 2: Can the Solution Normalize the Data from Multiple Vendors? Different online vendors display different product information in varying ways. And while the same product characteristic might be called something different on a website, any solution that s automating the extraction of data should be able to normalize this data. That information needs to be displayed in a unified format under a unified data model. If this cannot be done, then no accurate comparisons can be made. For example B2B retailers like Staples, Office Depot, and Costco may have different SKUs for the same product. Or they might have slightly different descriptions. The solution should be able to identify like-for-like products despite these differences. Question 3: Is the Solution Flexible Enough to Accommodate Different Search and Input Methods?  There are many different ways to find products on a website. Purchasers often search for all products in a particular category (e.g. laptops, tires or batteries), or they search by vendor, Untitled Document  keyword or SKU. Web extraction solutions that automate this process should be able to do the same things human beings can do with a mouse or keyboard. For example, if several product keywords can be used in a search (for comparing competitive and internal pricing), your automated system should be able to read from several different target sources. These might include spreadsheets, databases, and REST or SOAP-based web-service calls (XML). Each company s internal systems are slightly different. Some companies prefer to use spreadsheets while others might use databases. In any case, the technology should not drive the business process: the business process should drive the technology.  There should be no restrictions on how these automated processes are fed. Automated extraction processes should also drill into categories and sub-categories to grab product and price information. Inputs with multiple permutations should also be possible. For example, you might want to automate searches for products and prices over x subcategories of product for y different zip codes (to consider shipping costs). When comparing competitor prices with your own internal prices it is ideal to fetch internal prices and have the automated processes bypass the web and do something instead like query a database behind the firewall to get that information. You shouldn t be limited to web data, and you should have the flexibility to direct your robot to access either type of data. There should be no technical barrier to performing modified searches. Question 4: Can the Solution Flexibly Load Data into Different Target Systems? An automated solution should be able to load data into spreadsheets (or other flat files such as delimited text) and databases. It should be able to express results as XML-accessible web-service calls and return results via API calls into a programming language such as JAVA or .NET (perhaps C#). Different companies have different data presentation needs, so flexibility is crucial. With the right data linkages in place, you can update internal prices in real time in response to competitor moves. Since this is potentially dangerous, safeguards should be in place to ensure safe price floors or limits on the percentage a product s price can be automatically lowered.  Question 5: Can the Solution Gather Large Data Sets in Parallel? Automated data gathering processes are frequently broad and deep in scope. You might decide you want to analyze all of the products and prices from the Staples website for example. Even the fastest solution could process this request for days, so you need a solution that can attack a task like this in parallel. It should be able to execute many instances of a single automated process concurrently (across multiple machines) to ensure rapid completion. Question 6: Is the Solution Flexible in the Frequency at Which it Can Bring Back Data? Untitled Document  Any solution being considered should be flexible enough to run at varying frequencies (with or without manual, human intervention for initiating the automated price monitoring processes). You should be able to execute these processes at whatever frequency desired weekly, nightly, hourly, etc. At the same time, you should be able to run processes in real time when a human being has determined they want a particular set of data back immediately. Question 7: Can the Solution Provide Alerts to Anomalies that Need Immediate Attention in Real Time? You should also be able to set up real-time alerts based on pre-defined, flexible rules. There should be no conceptual limits to such rules. As an example, one rule might say, If the price of a product for competitor x for product line y is 10% lower than our prices, then send me an alert email even if it s three o clock in the morning. Automated solutions should be able to follow this kind of unrestricted logic with various options provided for real-time email, SMS or phone call alerts. Question 8: Is It Difficult to Access Data Behind Advanced Web Technologies? If product and price information resides behind advanced web-technologies such as AJAX/JavaScript, Flash, HTML5, or, less commonly, something like FLEX or Silverlight, this should not be a barrier for access. Your automated solution should be able to collect that data. Question 9: How Easily Can You Build Automated Processes? If it s too difficult to build and maintain automated processes, all of the necessities described above are effectively useless. You need a solution that includes an easy-to-use, visual design environment and the ability to see results in real-time while making adjustments as you test. Question 10: How Easily Can You Build Automated Processes? If there s a unifying theme to all this discussion, this might be it: The ideal web analytics solution must allow you to quickly and easily execute specific business processes without getting bogged down in some technological morass. For retailers, that means gaining access to competitive intelligence about products and prices. For purchasers, this means having real-time insight into supplier pricing, inventory, and shipping to optimize your supply chain, keep your business running, and reduce unnecessary expense. You understand what s happening in the market with respect to customer loyalty, high-velocity price movement, supplier pricing analysis, and product aggregation websites (whether the customer or purchaser is in a physical store or has multiple browser tabs open). Customers are getting smarter faster, and they re rapidly adopting new tools for finding the lowest prices. The dynamics of online commerce are changing quickly. You need the best data and automated price comparison solutions available in order to keep up with the times. Untitled Document  To learn more about Kapow Software solutions for Automated Price Comparison and the unique challenges retailers face, please visit kapowsoftware.com or contact us directly 1-800-805-0828.  About Kapow Software  Kapow provides industry-leading technology for accessing, enriching, and serving real-time, noise-free web data no coding required. The Kapow Katalyst Platform powers solutions in web and business intelligence, portal generation, SOA/WOA enablement, and content migration. Kapow s patented visual programming and integrated development environment (IDE) technology enables business and technical decision-makers to create innovative business applications. With Kapow, new applications can be completed and deployed in a fraction of the time and cost associated with traditional software development methods.  The leader in web data services, Kapow Software eliminates the barriers to accessing, enriching and serving timely enterprise and public web data. The company s Kapow Katalyst Platform is a patented visual development and web data automation platform that enables Fortune 1000 companies to create high-value business applications with no coding required. Kapow currently has 500 customers, including AT&T, Wells Fargo, Intel, Vodafone and Audi. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with additional offices in Denmark, Germany and the U.K. For more information, log on to www.kapowsoftware.com or call toll-free at 1-800-805-0828.