Competitor price monitoring service

Competitor price monitoring - tracking pricing and price changes of competitors in fully automatic mode (with the help of special software). The system independently collects, processes and converts the information into a convenient format.

What other methods are available for monitoring prices on the Internet?

1. Parsing is a system of automatic collection of large amounts of textual information from analyzed resources. In this case this module has several key remarks:
   • The effectiveness of parsing is noted only when the range of products is stable and there are no dramatic changes in the market.
   • The data collected need to be periodically checked manually (in order to be updated).

2. Monitoring in 1C accounting systems. The development of such a plan can accommodate several methods of data collection - from manual method to parsing. In this case, for the correct operation of the system it is necessary to manually search for correspondence on each item on the Internet before monitoring.

3. On-line services. Such resources provide access to the prices of competitors 24 hours a day and do it in a fully automated mode, notifying them about the changes.

Helecos - a service for automatic price monitoring.

Parser of competitor prices - should I write or use a ready-made one?

Price monitoring service will give you the same as parsing only with a larger list of services. And it's up to you to decide how to monitor your competitors' prices:

• put a manager for this work on a full-time basis
• write a parser yourself or hire a programmer to do it for you.
• use a desktop program
• or contact a specialized company and order professional price monitoring through a service.

There is a rule "if you want to do something well, do it yourself. But it is not always true. The fact is that you need to consider the specialization. Even if you apply in these fields, do you have experience in writing such a program. It will take time to learn the basics. For the further implementation of the acquired knowledge even more time. And the development of the Internet does not stand still. Every day there are more and more online stores and wanting to sell in them. This is due, of course, to demand. Today it is easier for people to order on the Internet and go to the new post office to pick up, than to run to physical stores in search of their goods.

Ordinary stationary parsers are limited in the analysis of the data obtained and this part is put on the shoulders of the user. Their interface rarely contains analytical data and basically the user has to work with dry data unloaded into a file. In this case online services offer additional options for analyzing the received data, visualization and accumulation of historical data.

An important moment for writing a parsing and creating a service for monitoring prices is the availability of technical specifications in full? As practice shows, all the subtleties and nuances can be learned only in the process. Without starting to work, you will not know what kind of system setup is required. Specialist price monitoring service is a fully automated system, which takes into account all the settings:

• Checking assortment and stock availability.
• Price analysis and revaluation.
• Notification of dumping.

How do online stores protect themselves from monitoring?

Moreover, large sites have learned to protect themselves from the parsing of prices and conventional programs will not be able to collect information. At least you will need to buy proxies, so that your ip-address is not banned. Other methods of protection include:

1.     There are systems that recognize the collection of information and replace it with knowingly false information. Thus, sites of competitors allow you to monitor their prices, but they will be deliberately corrected. Sometimes prices are not set randomly, but deliberately, so that you inflate yours.
2.     One of the possible defenses against "robots" for websites - is the introduction of intelligent detection of real users based on their actions and behavior on the site.
3.     It is also possible to place special fictitious elements, which ordinary users ignore, but are always activated by automatic mindless parsers.

So, analysis of competitors' prices is not as easy as it may seem:

•     It can change in the program code of the competitor's site
•     The work of proxies in general should be constantly monitored
•     Sudden appearance of captchas at a competitor's site can be a surprise
•     Requires a separate server to allow resource-intensive parsing.

Thus, regular tuning of price analysis systems is required. The Helecos system takes into account most of the existing "protections" and regularly updates the functionality to meet the needs of new customers.

Analysis of the obtained data and guidance for further actions is the main component of the monitoring service

The data obtained after a competitor analysis is only half the battle. The main goal is not just to collect the data, but also to analyze it and draw conclusions for further tactics. Using parsing or homemade programs, you get information in the form of the usual "dry" tables. A specialized service gives you a wide range of possibilities:

• Analysis of the current assortment of goods on the market
• definition of promotional items
• standardization of information from different sites
• revaluation
• send notifications to dumpers

Let's look at a concrete example. Suppose you have five products and five competitors. You'll need to compare your competitors' prices with the prices on your site, taking into account the purchase price and the necessary markup. Next, you will need to replace all the prices on the site with the new prices. It is also worth bearing in mind that prices may be in different currencies. Competitors may appear and disappear. Goods may be in stock or not. So for 5 products and 5 competitors manual or parser analysis looks quite realistic. Now imagine if you have thousands of products and hundreds of competitors. How much time would you need to gather the information, analyze it and implement the results? Well, the service Helecos does it all automatically in minutes (the exact time depends on the amount of data).

You should not confuse programs like calculator with price monitoring service. You can order a unique calculator for your website from any programmer on the Internet. And writing a specialized program to analyze the prices of competitors is not appropriate, because of the dynamism of the Internet. There are as many competitors as there are different requirements for collecting data from their resources. Let us assume that the program will work, even stably and will give results - prices. But what to do with these results, how to analyze and implement the objectives of revaluation and changes in the vector of financial investment in goods and advertising?

Price monitoring program - manual collection in the past!

The price of the offered product affects the success of advertising, it has a key influence on the customer's decision to buy. Competently set price will give you an advantage over your competitors and allow you to better manage your turnover.

Monitoring the price policy in online stores is relevant both for dealers and manufacturers and for customers. And if, for the latter, the search of low price - it is the purpose, for the first - the competitor's understated cost below MRTs - it is a loss for sales.

How much is the consumer ready to pay for the product? This is the first question which can be answered with a well-developed price monitoring service for Internet stores. Buyers have many times more opportunities to find a bargain on the Internet, and a difference in price of several hryvnias can dramatically affect his choice!

Service for price monitoring. Why not manually?

Manual analysis of competitors is relevant if you have 1-2 products that need monitoring. And even then70% of your efficiency is lost for reasons:

• Even if you go through all the competitors in a few hours, there is no guarantee that in the next 20 minutes the prices will not change on these resources! Control should be constant and automatic, and in case of violations there should be an instant alert - this is how the service to monitor prices works.
• The economic component. Allocate equipment for employee's work, "put him on the payroll" with all the ensuing - it certainly can not be cheaper than the automatic monitoring system of the market.
• There is no way to get information about the market here and now. Manual analysis will result in unreliable data! With monitoring software, on the other hand, the entire process takes a few minutes.

Checking prices in online stores for the customer. Motives, tools, methods

The main and almost the only task of the buyer is to find the desired product as cheaply as possible. In the present question, there are 2 ways:

1. "Dig through" the entire search engine output in search of the right marketplace.
2. To use services that have already done it for you and offer all prices in one place.

Hotline, E-Catalogue - selling sites, created on the type of online store, including products from different representatives of the market. How the search works:

• Choose a product group.
• Determine the product.
• Click on the button "Comparison" and evaluate the price offers from different stores on one page for a particular item.

Checking prices in online stores for dealer and manufacturer

Statistics show that about 30% of sellers on the Internet market lower their price tags below the RCS, thereby violating the price policy set by the supplier. Price monitoring is the only solution to detect these violations.

There are 3 ways of solving this problem:

1. Purchasing already prepared reports, which contain already prepared monitoring results. In this case, the data on prices are transmitted to the vendor no longer relevant and are essentially useless, because they are studied with a delay.
2. Hire a programmer and develop the software to check prices by yourself. This way you will get a service that is as responsive as possible, but it can take a disproportionate amount of time and money!
3. Using solutions that already exist and are in use. This is the most practical option for automating monitoring. It will only take you a few days to fully synchronize your business with such a program!

Facts about automated price checking and why it's better than manual analysis:

• 90% labor savings!
• Full automation - the system looks for irregularities and sends notifications when they are detected.
• 1.5-2% - margin of error of the final data.

Anti-dumping is a necessary solution not only for internet stores but also for suppliers! It is a loss of margin for the former and devaluation of the brand for the latter!

Helecos offers you a solution against dumping: a fully automated search system with instant notification of pricing violations.

Manual collection of price information vs. automated monitoring

"You want to do well - do it yourself" - this saying does not work in our case for several reasons:

1. The current pace of development and market change is beyond any one person's ability to keep up. Or will have to devote to the process of monitoring pricing policy around the clock.
2. The man is not a machine and there is a probability of error. Its importance in the matter of price formation and monitoring of dumping is too high to take it!
3. A human search for competitors is limited to Google. An automatic monitoring system does it by keyword all over the web.

Manual collection of price trends today may be relevant only in the "offline" mode, when trading is not only on the Internet, but also at physically established points. Techniques for analysis in this case may include:

• Calling competitors on behalf of the buyer.
• Visiting sales outlets on your own to collect data.
• Communication with competitors' clients if you have such contacts.

However, practice shows that 95% of physical stores have their own website and sell on the Internet, which makes manual monitoring a thing of the past.

The economics of manual price monitoring and automated program collection

The cost of package for online monitoring on the Internet (automated) starts from 450 UAH per month (Helecos as of winter 2021).

How much does it cost to collect manually?

• Allocation and arrangement of a working place (once) - UAH 5000.
• Salary - 5-7 thousand UAH.
• Lunch breaks, meals, sick leave, vacations.

In this case, "sitting on the rate," a person is able to check a limited number of sites and a small list of products. The productivity of the program is 100 and more times higher, with a maximum percentage of information reliability.

Helecos is a program for monitoring the prices of competitors on the Internet, which works in fully automatic mode.

The main methods offered by the service of competitor price monitoring

1. Price formation taking into account the competitors' price lists. Modern parsers are capable of unloading products from a competitor's website and then analyzing their prices. On the basis of the received data the optimal price list for your assortment is offered.
2. Arrangement of the catalog - customizing the desired order of the sparred product items at your discretion.
3. To get the data on the results of the monitoring you can in different formats. These are csv, yml, xml, xls (Excel based).
4. Analysis of promotional goods. Almost every online store includes this section in its menu. As a result of parsing this part of the site it will be possible to evaluate the popularity of certain catalog items.
5. Revealing of optimum price for growth of sales.

How does the service to monitor the prices of competitors work?

There are several methods of detecting and extracting information which can be used in such systems:

• Systematically used phrases. Such sets of expressions are used during pattern search during HTML information processing.
• HTML analysis. Involves examining the web pages of a site. In the course of this method page code is converted into a tree-like structure, which can be navigated using selectors such as CSS or XPath.
• DOM analysis using browsers.
• Information extraction using artificial intelligence. This is the most advanced technique, which can scan multiple sites simultaneously that meet the established requests.

The main task of monitoring is to obtain exploratory data. Any of the presented parsing methods guarantees the desired result!

Helecos is a service for parsing competitor prices in fully automatic mode! You will be able to see the results of the software just a few minutes after launching it!

The price monitoring system serves to analyze all the subtleties of the thematic market. Its correct use will allow you to identify price fluctuations of competitors, as well as to monitor the situation at rest. Calculation of margins, determination of pricing policy, selection of general work strategy - that's what is expected in the end.

Once a month or daily? - How often can a price monitoring system be run?

Such a schedule simply does not and cannot exist! There are a number of factors that can influence this figure:

1. The specifics of the business line.
2. Competition in the market.
3. The number of items that need to be monitored.
4. The general economic situation in the country.

If for some commodity items the price increase can be slow, for others it will fluctuate depending on seasonality and inflation.

That is why the system of price monitoring is demanded in the daily mode, because only in this way you can insure yourself against the uncontrolled dumping on the market.

What to do with the data obtained by the price monitoring system?

After collecting all the necessary data and compiling reports, the stage of making a decision on the global change or correction of the chosen course of action follows. We are talking about the following possible solutions:

•     The price tag has been unreasonably low and the assortment is awaiting a price increase.
•     Lowering prices that have been the cause of low sales compared to competitors.
•     Adding special discount programs. The main goal is to demonstrate to the client the full benefit of the purchase and add popularity to seasonal products.
•     Possible changes in the strategy of working with supplying companies.

A price monitoring system will help the business owner gather information about competitors. At the same time all the data collected should be applied with an obligatory glance at the specific situation!

Whether you work in the low price segment or sell apartments on the real estate market - the price monitoring system will definitely be relevant in the context of the current development of online sales. The program needs only an initial setup and then works off-line alerting its owner to any irregularities.

A competitor price analysis program is not just a system that allows you to quickly obtain information about dumping in the ranks of your competitors. We are talking about multi-functional software capable of solving a number of tasks!

Competitor Price Analysis - All about the Q&A

1. "Does the CC legislation violate the program for monitoring pricing policy of websites? Information about prices, promotions and discounts is publicly available and is not secret. Parser only speeds up data collection and systematizes it in a single report!
2. How to understand from what resource to collect data for analysis? First, it is important to determine the purpose of monitoring. Then enter a search query and choose among the leaders on the page of results. It can be:
   • lead generation;
   • tracking dumping;
   • Seo-optimization.
3. Does the resource have an API? If a competitor offers an API, data can be collected directly from that platform. This will greatly simplify and speed up the analysis.
4. How much is the price of the program for the competitor's price analysis? If you have a minimum quantity of products (1-2) you do not need to use any paid resources! If we are talking about dozens, hundreds or even thousands of product pages - you should use paid services! Monthly rent of such program may vary from 500 UAH to 20000 USD or more (depending on your needs).
5. Your IP is blocked. What's to be done? This may be caused by too frequent visits of your parcel to your competitor's site. The system will automatically track your IP and block it. Solution: slow down the frequency of the monitoring as much as possible.
6. In what format are the results of price analysis presented? Helecos offers you several report formats at once! It can be an Exel file, a CSV file or you can use the API to upload your data.
7. What should you do with the received prices data? The monitoring stage should be followed by analysis of the information at your own discretion and searching for solutions to fight possible dumping and violations from your competitors.

Helecos is a multifunctional program for analyzing prices in online stores with a possibility to test the service for free.

How to choose a service to monitor prices in the internet

Having the latest and always up-to-date information about the market will allow you to react on your competitors' steps correctly and in time! Establish a competitive price for goods, calculate dumping, determine which competitors are working in bad faith, offering additional discounts and promotions on purchase - all these tasks can be solved by the service to monitor prices on the Internet.

Who needs price monitoring and under what conditions is it recommended?

• Your goal is to increase the efficiency of your staff.
• The level of competition in your segment is classified as medium or high.
• There is a need for regular revaluation of commodity items (depending on currency exchange rates or other factors).
• There is a need to optimize the work with high data flow.

Gathering, processing, saving and visualization of data is the key task of price monitoring system. What other features must the software have? How to choose?

The first step is to determine the list of those systems that offer a trial version for testing. The next step is to pay attention to:

• The presence of the service in Ukraine. The head office of the company or at least a branch should be present for constant communication with the support service.
• Performance and functionality. The average speed of analysis is up to 10 minutes (it depends on the number of monitored goods and the number of competitors).
• Informativeness of the report and format of its presentation. The most convenient system for perception, from practice, is Excel, but it is good, if the result can be received in several formats.
• Price for usage. All available automated services for monitoring prices on the Internet assume payment. The average cost of a month of using such a resource is 100-300 Euro or more (depending on the expected functionality).

Of course, in Ukraine there is an opportunity to choose a free service to monitor prices such as Hotline, E-Catalogue or others, but no one can guarantee the relevance and reliability of the collected information. In addition, we are not talking about full automation here, of course.

Helecos - a service to monitor prices on the Internet, available around the clock and has zero error in the results (fully automated).

Competitor price analysis service. Who benefits from regular control of competitors prices?

Analysis of competitors price behavior is necessary for competent construction of one's sales strategy and reaching the leading position within the market! In this regard, the value of software that automates and speeds up this process is hard to overestimate.

Areas and professionals for whom competitor price analysis is a necessity!

Sales manager - maximum time and money savings for price analysis

• Pricing information obtained will maximize sales and revenues.
• Reasonable repricing.

Product Managers - perfect comparison of product offerings in the marketplace

• Monitoring not only the price fluctuations, but also the range of competitors. Identifying new growth opportunities.

Marketing managers - creating a competent advertising campaign

• Calculating the right period to launch promotions and discounts (based on the activity of competitors).
• Identification of weaknesses in the price offer of competing stores in order to form a more favorable offer.

Brand managers - guaranteeing brand safety and recognition

• Protecting brand value by identifying dumping or other irregularities in one or more of your sales channels.

Financial director - increasing store profitability

• The service allows you to optimize your pricing strategy to retain old customers and attract new ones.
• Management of financial indicators with an assessment of the most current information on the market situation.

Marketing director - formation of the most complete and profitable assortment offer

• Creating an understanding of the competitiveness of the product. Reducing customer abandonment rates and improving the offer.

Optimization of internal processes of your on-line store and timely reaction on price plays in other markets in your segment will allow you to get competitive advantage and always stay ahead in the race for the client and sales!

Helecos is a recipe for maximum productivity and effectiveness of your activity. You can evaluate the internal quality of the service, the speed and the peculiarities of the work by using a free usage period.