Parsing and monitoring of competitor prices

Monitoring competitors' prices is one of the most responsible stages of pricing in the market. Everything is important on the way to obtaining the necessary information:

•     Speed of analysis. This directly affects the relevance of the information obtained.
•     Frequency of monitoring. The modern market is characterized by maximum activity, and the product which was worth 100 rubles an hour ago, now it may be sold with outright dumping!
•     A way of studying the prices of competitors. It is important to note that when it comes to pricing it is important to rule out the possibility of error as much as possible. Therefore it is better to exclude the human factor here. Trust the automated software.

Online stores are the main audience for competitor price monitoring software. Where else should the software be used?

Application of this marketing weapon is reasonable wherever pricing is characterized by maximum sensitivity!

Rational use of the price monitoring software in your on-line store will allow you to maximize profits and provide stable sales for a long period of time!  How? - There are 4 complementary scenarios:

1. Price increase. As a result, increase the margin received from the sale of a unit of product and as a consequence, your profit from each transaction. However, and significantly exceed the RRP in this case is not worth it, as proposals from competitors "cut off oxygen" to your market and sales will fall to a minimum.
2. Decrease of cost. Have established the price of the product with the maximum benefit to himself, but there are no sales? Chances are your competitors are selling identical products for less. Monitoring the prices of competitors will allow you to detect dumping in the network and "prompt" the optimal price of goods to increase sales.
3.  Analysis of competitors' assortment for availability. Parsing your competitors will allow you to maneuver the cost based on this parameter as well! Are you the only online store with availability of waterproof wireless headphones with bluetooth function, for example? The cost of goods in this case may have an inflated value!
4. Study promotions and special offers of competitors. This is not necessarily a cost reduction, but also possible gifts to the amount of the check, etc.

Manual or automated competitor price parsing? Conclusion on efficiency

Monitoring prices is a must when building an effective sales business - we've got that sorted out. However, the question of the parsing methodology at this stage remains open! There are several options:

1. Hiring a programmer who is responsible for the range of work. Until recently this solution was the most justified, but today it is associated with the following problems:

• It is necessary to organize a workplace for the employee. We are talking about the purchase of equipment and furniture and the allocation of workspace.
• Paying a not insignificant salary, from which you also have to pay the treasury to the national budget!
• There is the human factor. A man is not a machine! No matter how professional the specialist is, the probability of error will always be there.
• Low monitoring speed. The market activity today is too high for parsing by hand! The relevancy of the resulting data is equal to no more than 40%.
• Low productivity. Studies have shown that the average person can process 50-80 requests per working day in manual market analysis. If we are talking about an automated system, this figure is increased by hundreds of times, with a guarantee of maximum efficiency.

1. Purchasing a stationary software. In this case we are talking about a significant simplification of the process of controlling RRP and MRPs of competitors, but there are also negative aspects of this solution:

• There is a need to systematically update the installed stationary software.
• Updates can be carried out with a long delay, which explains the irrelevance of pricing policy information.
• Direct human involvement will be required in the monitoring process. There are a number of operations that can only be performed manually. Among the complicating manipulations: preparing a file with products and characteristics in the required format; uploading information to the server (in order to upload product data to your site, it also needs to be adapted to the internal format of the software).  

1. We use the cloud service Helecos - provides full integration with the site and guarantees the exchange of data in a fully automated manner (without user participation) after setup.

Helecos is an automated competitor price monitoring system. Advantages and characteristics of the system

In addition to fully automated operation, this system of competitor price monitoring has advantages:

1.     Structured and concise final data. You are given only the necessary information, without any "bloat", in an easy-to-understand and easy-to-analyze format!
2.     The relevance of the information is equal to 99+% in a particular period of time. This is ensured by almost instant delivery of parsing results!
3.     Informative report. The result will not only summarize the prices of competitors, but also information about promotional offers, availability of products, etc.

Note to the word about the advantages of Helecos: in the process of monitoring, it is important to analyze the entire Internet, which is what the proposed system is based on! At the same time, most modern stationary programs of similar action analyze no more than 30% of all Internet displays.

You can agree to receive a demo version or ask practical questions about the operation of the program by phone to the manager of the company!