Monitoring competitors' prices on the Internet "Helecos"

What can guarantee a high level of sales and maximize the revenue component of the business? - Of course, its competitiveness. And here it is primarily a question of the chosen pricing strategy and a competently constructed offer to the buyer. To make it possible, it is important to understand exactly where, how and at what price the product is sold in the market. And there are only two solutions:

1. Independently allocate a couple of hours to dig through the price lists of competitors online.
2. Use the system to automatically monitor all the competitors with instant notifications of departures from the price list + adaptation of the price lists of your products to market trends without your participation (after adjustment).

Over 85% of retailers and practically all big manufacturers have nowadays abandoned manual analysis because of its low efficiency in favor of automatic monitoring.

By systematically tracking your competitors in terms of pricing, timely and accurately adjusting your offer you will always be "on the crest of a wave" constantly increasing your turnover and profit.

Deliberate dumping are those Internet stores that know exactly the established RRPs for the goods sold. It should be noted that the reduction of the price tag below the recommended values negatively affects the market, and if this trend will have an uncontrolled nature, all participants in the selected commodity segment, up to the manufacturer in time can forget about the earnings.

The main motives of dumping and the role of competitor price analysis with Helecos

1. Entering the market. Artificially lowering the price tag is a favorite pastime of "pioneers" (newcomers). Often such players do not have the goods or even the contacts of the suppliers on hand. There may be several points of interest here:
   • Suppliers themselves get in touch with these marketplaces and try to "build bridges" for cooperation.
   • The interested consumer places a shopping cart with one product and ends up with an offer to buy another (more on this below).
2. Discounts and specials - price reductions from experienced sellers. We are talking about another method to stimulate sales, which has the right to exist without harming the market (with a reasonable approach). We are talking about the following steps:
   • Free delivery with a shopping cart of a certain amount.
   • VIP discount for regular and large orders.
   • Seasonal discounts and sales.

Both young and experienced marques can have their own storage space and hanging inventory items in stock - this is another motive for organizing a dumping model. This will allow them to:

• Clean out the warehouse by getting rid of stale products.
• Unfreeze working capital.
• Get rid of seasonal goods at the end of the season, etc.

Playing with the cost of goods in any of its manifestations affects customer behavior! That is why every online store should have a possibility to analyze quickly and automatically the prices of its competitors.

Helecos is an automated collection of information about your competitors' prices and special offers. The result will be an opportunity for you to make timely decisions on optimizing your conditions and to keep high sales always!

Advantages of using a program to monitor your competitor prices

Some more often or some less often but nowadays every salesman looks through the prices of the sold goods. And it is done in order to:

• Does the chosen product deserve your attention - should it be purchased for further sale? If the answer is yes, then what should be the optimal value in the purchase.
• Pricing your product range depending on the competitors' strategy.
• Evaluating the competitiveness of the established price tag of the goods.

It is also important to keep in mind that all these questions must be constantly monitored to make the customer buy your store's offer exactly!

More about the advantages of the automatic price monitoring

1. Helps you choose the right pricing strategy. A good pricing strategy must take into account the offers of competitors! It then depends on your business goals: maximum budget price, average price list with a high level of service or the most expensive offer.
2. Improves the profitability of the business. If you operate with information about price changes of competitors, you can set the most competitive price for each of your products. This will not only attract new customers and increase sales but have a direct impact on profit!
3. Effective management of goods turnover. Based on the results of competitor monitoring you will be able not only to get information on prices, but also define a group of goods with low competition globally for all your stores. This will give you the opportunity to further analyze the level of sales for specific items and re-evaluate them according to the system's recommendations. Competent assortment policy = store leadership in the race against competitors.
4. Maximum advantageous purchase of products. Reducing costs at this stage, you increase the profitability component fundamentally and in the long term!
5. Organizing dynamic pricing. Automating price changes on your products based on fluctuating price offers on the market. This way you can sell more and earn more, excluding seasonal sales downturns and other factors of decreasing demand.

Price monitoring is one of the most excellent tools, which serves as a powerful weapon in the arsenal of suppliers (manufacturers) and sellers. The market of modern trade increases not only volumes, but also has an accelerated dynamics of changes, which generates extremely high competition. This moment makes all kinds of parsers to monitor prices relevant today.

Trumps competent price monitoring. Why is it so important?

1. The creation of a unique pricing strategy. The Helecos system allows you to follow all the events and market changes. It gives you the room to maneuver and allows you to form your strategy basing on the experience of other sellers.
2. Your participation in the process of dynamic pricing is minimal. At the stage of setting up price monitoring with Helekos you will be able to prescribe algorithms to automatically change price lists on your site depending on the behavior of your competitors.
3. Minimization of errors in price formation. Automatic monitoring completely eliminates the human factor! Besides, while the manual analysis of your competitors may take up to several hours, the process here takes only a few minutes.
4. Possibility to make maximal operative reaction actions. In some segments of trade the price change can be continuous with a certain time step. Properly organized price monitoring will accelerate the procedure of price reassessment, which will give you a significant competitive advantage.
5. Time is money. Manual monitoring is not only inefficient today, but also very labor-intensive! For a complete analysis of your competitors, you hire a separate person who spends several hours a day on this issue. It's not about the costs that follow these steps, it's about how much this contribution will match the results you get.  

Price monitoring with access to automated analysis systems from the Helecos range is not only an effective, but also a cost-effective solution for timely identification of dumping, as well as the correct response to competitors' violations.

Online price monitoring is a fully automated process of collecting information about your chosen competitors! It can be about individual online stores or price aggregators, or even about large marketplaces like Rozetka or similar.

Any well-written parser can collect prices from thousands of product pages in a few minutes, which saves time and allows you to make timely decisions on optimizing your price list!

Ways to monitor prices in online mode:

• Write a parser yourself and place it on hosting purchased from a reliable provider.
• To use a specialized program with ready-to-use functionality and proven operation.

Monitoring prices online using your own software

You will definitely be interested in this option only if:

1. You have the appropriate qualifications and experience in writing TOR of this plan.
2. There is a precise understanding of what information you need the program and in what form it must be provided for analysis.
3. You have a staff of proven testers and developers who will not only support your project, but also develop it.

In addition, you need to take into account a number of other factors that require constant intervention and technical support (when administering the system by yourself):

• Changes in the source code from which monitoring is done.
• Proxy, whose normal operation can be disrupted at any time.
• Changes in the policy of the resource selected for parsing. For example, during analysis captchas will "get" or type of captchas will change for which your software is not designed.
• Will not cope hosting, as it is quite a resource-intensive task.

Online price monitoring using ready-made programs like Helecos

The main advantages of such software are:

1. Maximum ease of use. Proxy purchase, technical support, complicated configuration - all these tasks have already been solved by the programmers. The program is equipped with an intuitive interface and high functionality.
2. More power is realized here to solve a variety of tasks. For example, the service "will not lie", even if there is a need to monitor the prices of 1000 + products!
3. There is a possibility of automatic dynamic pricing. Helecos allows you to automatically change the prices of your products depending on the behavior of your competitors (the algorithm of changes is chosen by you at the software setup stage).

How often do you recommend monitoring your prices?

And what do you think: with what frequency should you resort to analyzing the market and nearest competitors in particular? - Everything is strictly individual and depends on a number of factors, the key ones being the volume of your assortment and the specifics of the goods themselves. Practical recommendations on the frequency of monitoring:

1. Depending on the scale of sales:
   • Small and medium stores - once every few days or on a certain day of the week.
   • Large retailers and online venues with high turnover - daily!
2. Based on the current exchange rate. Depending on the importance of this issue, you can set up automatic revaluation of your commodity positions (you will only need to change the exchange rate). In this case the monitoring can be carried out at the next jump of currency in the market.

The optimal option for any online store is to use specialized software for constant monitoring (based on the Helecos principle). In this case your participation in the process is almost completely unnecessary (only at the stage of system debugging and for prescribing the algorithms of automatic pricing).

Working with products during competitor price monitoring

Process of downloading products for their further analysis

You can perform this task manually, adding all the items from your site one by one (copying links) or use the services offered for automatic transportation of product groups (mass download by Helecos).

After the end of the download procedure, select the products that you want to track in this session and start the monitoring process.

It should also be noted that manual labor is required here only at the initial stage - during the configuration of monitoring parameters and loading goods for tracking. Further the process will be automatic, including adapting the prices of your online store to market changes.

"Commodity feed" and its importance in the process of competitor price monitoring

The product feed is one of the ways to automate the process of uploading products to the service for further competitor price monitoring. With the help of the feed you will be able to minimize your manual work at this stage and upload a list of products in XML, CSV, XLS and some other formats.

Advantages of a commodity feed (a file with goods) for online stores:

• Saves time - the need to upload commodity items one by one disappears.
• With the update of the feed all your product data is updated with prices, descriptions, photos and other information.
• Quickly create adverts for each item in the price list.

How does the price monitoring service for your competitors work? Basic questions on the subject

Simply put, this "scheme" is as follows: first, a link to feed (a file with products to track) is uploaded, then comes the search of similar products on the Internet according to established algorithms, the markup of relevant products and, finally, the formation of a price comparison table with the results. The practical aspects of this process are described below.

What is the average duration of price monitoring in online stores?

Product markup is the most time-consuming process. Its duration may vary from several days to weeks. The key factor determining this moment is the number of items prepared for monitoring. What's next?

• A few hours a week for the analysis of the collected information in the process of automatic monitoring of competitors, even if it is a matter of thousands of items!
• Minimal time for adapting the pricing policy of the store to market trends. In addition, Helecos offers you the possibility to automatically adjust prices depending on market fluctuations (without your involvement at all!).

The monitoring process itself takes up to 10 minutes depending on the number of selected competitors.

What is a comparative analysis of your competitor's prices?

It is data on your products structured in a special table with key indicators for further competitive pricing.

Competitor benchmarking takes into account the following indicators:

• The total number of selected competitors prepared for monitoring.
• Their chosen pricing strategy (price proposal).
• The average price tag of the product in the whole thematic market.
• The difference taking into account your prices and the maximum prices.
• The percentage of minimum and average cost of the goods.

This functional range can be expanded and preprogrammed according to individual needs!

In addition there is an individual recommended price indicator for internet store owners - especially important for those who do not want to go deep into the process of monitoring and analyzing the information they receive about the prices of competitors while maintaining the highest possible level of sales and income.

Competitive pricing is the process of forming the price list for a number of offered goods/services, which is based on the pricing policy of the nearest competitors.

How to organize competitive pricing correctly? What to analyze and what data is important?

Basic steps on the way to competent pricing for your assortment:

1. Monitoring of data on nearest competitors. Not only price tags are taken into consideration, but also promotional offers of opponents, terms of purchase, bonuses and discounts for regular customers.
2. Analysis and decision making.

In the second step, it is important to investigate several points:

• Price Index. This index vividly illustrates the price positioning of your market in comparison with other representatives of the market in a particular segment. Here it will be possible to estimate which of your competitors has the greatest influence on sales per unit of time. As a result it will be possible to understand which positions can be overpriced and which should be underpriced.
• Promo-activity of competitors. According to world studies, more than 70% of customers look for promotions and discounts before ordering anything. It's important to always stay on top of all of your opponents' bonus programs in the marketplace. This way you can ensure that you are optimizing your offer as accurately as possible.

When pricing competitively, you should also evaluate the availability of items in an online store with an identical assortment.  If you notice that an item is out of stock, make your decision according to your previous pricing tactics.

Helecos is an innovative solution for smart pricing. With this service you automatically adjust your prices to the changes made by your competitors. You will make your offer always more profitable on the market for the consumer!

Competitive pricing by constantly lowering prices below your competitors is an ineffective solution!

For rational pricing that will lead to brand growth at the finish line, you should consider not only your competitors' rates, but also the factors that make the customer order.

Justify the set price to the consumer! With the right approach, manage to stay ahead of the competition without lowering the price tag to a loss-making level. Motivate the customer not only by the price, but also by the service - this will "bind" him to your store, strengthen your brand and stimulate purchases.

Competitive pricing with API - what's the point?

All results of monitoring are summarized in a separate file and displayed in a structured form. You can download the data in a single document in xls, csv or pdf format. You can change the prices on the site both manually and automatically.

In addition, API allows you to unload the data and in third-party services visualization for a more comfortable study of materials.

Comparability of the price of automatic monitoring and its value for business

We are talking about globally available software for both large retailers and very small online stores. The main advantages of the program for business are:

1. Payback is instant!
2. Availability of each check individually!
3. Scale of operation - the service is capable of analyzing hundreds of competitors simultaneously. All you need to do is correctly set a task for monitoring.

As for the cost of the monitoring program, it is in 95% of cases determined by the functionality of the proposal. If the question is only about collecting some individual data, then the price of such software will be minimal, as well as the efficiency.

There are many different programs and services on the market to monitor competitors and they are all good in their own way. However, as practice shows, variety and functionality can far from always be combined with notions of comfort and usability.

Helecos is a recipe for effective pricing to increase sales, control market dumping and save your budget!

What is the right way to start competitor monitoring with Helecos?

It should be noted right away that you do not need to buy a monthly package in order to understand the intricacies of the software and see how easy it is to use! - A free demo version with all the basic features is available.

The software Helecos offers the following algorithm of competitor price monitoring, which consists of 5 steps:

1. We import merchandise items and categories. Load the necessary data in any convenient way: API, СSV file, YML or Google Merchant XML.
2. Add tasks for execution. At this stage you must already understand from which resource you are going to get information about prices, and understand the frequency of data collection. Next it's up to our programmers to write individual rules to process your online store.
3. Linking of products. Linking can be done in one of the ways:
   • All correctly selected links are accepted and the rest are rejected.
   • You yourself add the url addresses required for the analysis sites.
   • The search phrase for the highlighted product is indicated.
4. The process of competitor price monitoring. Depending on the amount of goods to be monitored and the selected number of competitors, the analysis time may vary.
5. All received data is unloaded in the format convenient for you. It can be a document in an "xlsx" file, unloaded to CSV or exported via API.

It is not uncommon that even a minimal difference in price for a product, all other things being equal, can have a serious impact on the behavior of competitors - of course, the customer will order the product he needs from a competitor!

Competitor retail price controls aim first to:

1. Determine a balanced retail product price tag that will be of interest to both you and the consumer.
2. Formulate or coordinate your store's existing pricing policy in your online store.
3. Determine the moment when it is time to bring in the "heavy artillery" - bonuses and special offers.
4. Timely reveal dumping and exert price pressure on your competitors from the first minutes after dumping price is set.
5. Select suppliers, screening out those whose price offer seems less interesting to you.

Considering the demand for price monitoring services, in the first place this question will be of interest for employees of commercial departments of companies, brand managers, suppliers, employees of the department that makes procurements.

How to protect your site from price monitoring by competitors? - 3 ways:

1. Dynamic content delivery through AJAX-requests. The web server (the analyzed site), on an ordinary search query returns a page in the "frame" variation, without data.
2. Analysis and reconciliation of the headers of http-requests, which checks the presence and correct filling of all the parameters (including the string User-Agent). User-Agent is a field in which each browser is "presented" (name and current version).  If these data are missing, the system determines that the request is not performed by a browser, but by a bot, and blocks the user's IP address.
3. Limiting the number of requests by minutes (from the 1st IP address). Thus the systematic "bugging" of the site will be prevented.

It should also be noted that using one of these schemes is not a guarantee against parsing by competitors! There are a lot of ways to bypass these methods of "self-defense".

Helecos is a multidisciplinary marketing tool that solves problems with price analysis, sales planning, and pricing. Together with the capabilities will be somewhat higher in cost, but the payoff is several times higher! More details on the phone: 0730721221.