In today’s digital retail space, eCommerce retailers must leverage advanced technologies to stay abreast of trends and remain competitive. This is more important than ever for small businesses who are likely to be eclipsed in a saturated online marketplace.
Pricing intelligence tools are powered by Artificial Intelligence which uses machine-learning-based algorithms to aggregate and analyse large amounts of data at high speed, and provide retailers with actionable insights on the ever-changing marketplace. With these insights, eCommerce retailers can access what their competitors are doing, as well as any trends that are emerging, and adapt their strategies to boost sales and increase profit margins.
Without these insights, businesses may fail to capture trends and pricing fluctuations and risk losing business to competitors.
Why is pricing intelligence so important?
In the online retail space, customers aren’t as loyal as they may be in physical stores. This is because they have a wealth of options at their fingertips, and can explore new options privately and without hassle. Therefore, if a consumer is looking for a particular product and they can find it cheaper on one site than on another, they will most likely buy it for cheaper, even if they do not usually shop with that brand.
Price is the most important deciding factor in online shopping endeavours, and it is therefore essential that brands know exactly what their competitors are pricing their products at, at all times.
This is where AI-powered pricing intelligence tools come in, as it is humanly impossible to monitor, track and analyse hundreds of brands 24/7 to provide accurate real-time data on price fluctuations, but luckily advanced retail technologies can. Therefore, business can adapt their pricing strategies according to trends, to ensure that they are either price matching or price beating their competitors. A tool like this is invaluable for a small business who is not yet well-established.
Keep reading to find out 6 reasons why pricing intelligence is so useful – especially for small businesses.
Pricing intelligence helps to boost sales
In order to secure the business of a potential customer and stop them from buying a similar product from your competitors, you need to offer an attractive price. What’s more, with today’s retail space being so instantaneous, shoppers can easily (with a click of a button) jump from brand to brand until they find an offer that they like.
Pricing intelligence tools can offer businesses real-time insights on how competitors are pricing their stock – as well as identify any deals and promotional offers – so that you can make informed decisions about your operational and marketing tactics in order to secure more sales.
This is useful for small businesses because they cannot hope to compete with larger, well-established brands if they don’t at least match their prices.
Pricing intelligence increases profit margins
Pricing intelligence tools are vital for ensuring that, whilst you are price matching and beating your competitors, you are making good profit margins. These advanced technologies provide accessible insights to help businesses – big and small – sell their goods smartly, and help brands to identify where they can afford to sell products for cheaper and where they should look at offering customers other incentives in order to maximise profit margins.
Pricing intelligence improves product search performance
Just like keyword and content optimisation can help to boost SEO, which can result in better ranking in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and therefore garner more online visibility, pricing is another factor that can help to improve search performance.
Pricing a product cheaply or pushing a sale or discount can help users find your products online, and the more visible your products are the higher your conversion rates will be. Paired with a “Add to cart” button, you will experience a surge in sales.
Pricing intelligence reduces old stock
No business wants to be left with excess stock, and it’s crucial for small businesses to ensure they are moving all of their stock and still achieving good profit margins on products, which is where pricing intelligence can help.
These advanced tools can help to identify what stock is not selling as quickly as it should – or indeed as quickly as it’s selling on a competitor site – which will urge you to come up with creative ways to sell the stock and increase stock turnover. This could mean offering package deals to encourage sales, or even revamping your marketing efforts to increase interest.
Without this intelligence, a business may have a low stock turnover and have to sell excess stock at incredibly low prices, resulting in narrow margins.
Pricing intelligence improves brand reputation
Online shoppers are more and more concerned with the price of products, and in a lot of cases they will abandon any loyalty to a brand if they can buy the same items for much cheaper elsewhere. Therefore, in order to stay competitive and increase customer retention your business needs to be up-to-date on exactly what your competitors are selling their stock for, and make adjustments accordingly. This will result in more sales, better customer satisfaction and an increase in brand awareness – all of which is of critical importance to a small business.
Pricing intelligence is affordable and easy-to-use
Leveraging the intelligence of AI-powered retail tools is a great investment for all businesses, especially small businesses. These tools are mostly affordable and are incredibly accessible and easy-to-use. Not to mention that the insights that can be gained from it are invaluable to the success of a business.
Conclusion
Small businesses can benefit greatly from the intelligence of AI-powered retail technologies. If your business is struggling to compete in the online marketplace, consider harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence today.
