As retailers have been working to find the best way to leverage their websites to boost profits and sales, consumers are also often comparing prices in stores and online. As consumers are finding a discrepancy, retailers are losing the trust of their shoppers and so are now moving towards a single pricing structure. Many retailers are finding a simpler pricing approach works best.

With this single-priced model, there is even more reason for store-based retailers to use online competitor price monitors, such as PriceTrac, to generate reports used to help drive sales and increase profits.

Managing markdowns and the pricing lifecycle effectively requires a reliable competitor price monitor. Watching and trending the promotions and discounts offered by your competitors helps you to react in the moment and also trend and forecast for the future. To protect margins, retailers do not want to discount too early, but to promote sales, it is important to ensure your pricing is competitive.

Ugam Interactive’s PriceTrac competitor price monitoring solution provides guaranteed accurate competitor pricing, promotion, and assortment reports that fully integrate into your own system. Because of its proprietary product mapping system, it also allows you to monitor similar and private label products.

1. Finding Your Products

Setting up a strong taxonomy and properly cataloging products ensures that consumes can find your products when:

• doing an internet search
• using the search button on your site
• following the taxonomy to the products.

A second part to this is ensuring your page has been properly optimized for search engines. This includes using keywords, meta data, and providing volumes of data (buyers guides, complete product information, blogs, videos, etc. ). All of these will increase the likelihood of ranking higher on search engines for specific product search terms.

2. See the Product Information

Ensure your products have complete information including:

• Descriptive titles
• Short descriptions
• Long descriptions
• Attribution
• Images
• Reviews

The more product details you display, the easier it is for the consumer to confidently make a purchasing decision. Ugam Interactive has an experienced site merchandising services team that can ensure your product information is posted quickly, completely, and accurately.

3. View and Compare Prices

Make sure your prices are easy to see and understand. Let the shopper know the price with and without shipping and taxes. Unless their is a very high level of trust and loyalty, consumers will almost certainly compare prices. Ensure your prices are competitive by using a competitor price monitoring solution such as PriceTrac which allows you to compare prices with and without shipping/taxes and to compare not only products that are identical to yours but those that are similar (including private label items.

Providing customers with an easy and comfortable shopping experience helps shoppers find your products, stay on your site, and make a purchasing decision.

The Website Internationalization team at Ugam Interactive sets up products in a large variety of languages. We can create an international online catalog from scratch for retailers in almost any language or we can translate the items you currently sell and ensure they are described in a culturally relevant way.

Learn more by reading our case study, German Product Content Internationalization.

To best price your products you need the complete picture. PriceTrac can tell retailers what original price their competitors are listing individual products at, what the sale price is, and what the deep discount is. Pricing is shown with and without shipping and taxes, helping online and offline retailers compare the final cost to the consumer. With this complete picture, that can be viewed any time from anywhere with internet access, merchandisers are able to make instant pricing decisions.

Often retailers cut prices to stay competitive, but don’t change them back once their competitors adjust their prices back up. PriceTrac has a Watch List feature that allows merchandisers to receive alerts when changes happen to key products. That way you can quickly adjust prices up or down at the right time, then change them back quickly when prices go back up. This can save days of poor margins.

Another surprising thing that retailers often discover when using PriceTrac is that they lower their prices more than is necessary to compete. Using PriceTrac helps you stay as competitive as you need to be, while still protecting your margins as much as possible.

Some of the effects on retail pricing will include

• higher prices due to fuel
• higher transportation costs for online retailers (expect delivery companies to increase prices or add fuel surcharge)
• lower prices on cotton
• consumers having more money to spend as will spend less on groceries

With all these variables, retailers will have several decisions to make on pricing and margin. Prices are sure to adjust, but how? To maintain your current market position it is important to keep a close eye on the decisions made by your competitors and track the pricing decisions they make. PriceTrac provides accurate pricing reports at a high level and down to a product level. Retailers will also need a pricing solution, such as PriceTrac, that factors in shipping costs, which are sure to be adjusted with rising gas prices.

When choosing websites consider that you want to generate links from high quality websites. This is usually a better use of your time than generating a large quantity of low quality links. Partner companies can often help you not only write articles, but know the best places to post them.

When creating the landing page, ensure it adds value to the reader and that you direct them, clearly, to any actions you want them to take. Actions might be “contact us for more information”, or “get a quote”, or ” buy now”.