Read below to find Ugam Interactive’s papers covering our competitive intelligence (including competitor price monitoring and competitor content monitoring) and content solutions.
Competitive Intelligence Papers
6 Considerations When Choosing a Competitor Price Monitor
Different size of companies and business lines have different requirements and budgets. This paper provides you with some critical components to consider when looking for a competitive intelligence solution.
Monitoring Competitors’ Shipping Costs to Close Your Sales
Studies show consumers consider shipping fees to be part of the final price, and that the number one reason for shopping cart abandonment is shipping costs. To combat this, retailers need to think like consumers and see how their checkout price, including shipping, compares to the prices of their competitors. To get a picture of how consumers see final product prices, retailers can use a competitor price monitoring solution to gather data comparing product prices with and without shipping costs. This data can be used to develop both product pricing and shipping cost strategies and to ensure that you are truly hitting your desired market position goals.
Getting the Data You Need to Address Consumer Price Sensitivity
Consumer price sensitivity has become one of the major issues facing retailers. The recent RSR report: Retail Pricing in a Post-Channel World: Benchmark Report 2012 discussed many of the top pricing concerns faced by retailers in the upcoming year, including:
- consumer price sensitivity – 67%
- increased price transparency – 47%
- increased promotional intensity of competitors – 22%
- access to robust competitive price data – 32%
This indicates an overall concern regarding consumers’ price sensitivity, competitors’ pricing, and gathering competitor pricing information to address these issues.
Competitor Price Monitoring Approaches: Mapping Versus Crawling
There are two methods used to provide competitor product intelligence, including competitor price monitoring data. The first is by far the most common and involves sending spiders to crawl predefined websites for identical products based on the item name and/or SKU number. The second method is mapping products based on rules and attributes identified by the originating retailer.
The first method, based on automation, is far cheaper, but assumes that all retailers will use identical or similar names for products or publish the manufacturers’ SKU number. As we know, neither of these reliably occurs. What a manufacturer might call a “Brand X Children’s Cuddler”, one retailer may call a “Baby Snuggle Blanket”. Also, most companies provide their own part number, if any, not the part number of SKU provided by the manufacturer.
Manual mapping is far more expensive than automatic crawling, but provides several benefits. First, it can provide more data, more accurately by having products properly mapped. Second, it allows the flexibility to map not only identical products, but any items that a retailer deems to be competing with its products.
3 Ways to Drive Sales Using Competitor Content Monitoring
Providing better online product content than your competitors’ drives more website visitors, increases sales, and decreases returns. Efficient, consistent competitor content monitoring can help you quickly create a superior shopping experience, while also providing you with insights to adjustments in competitors’ strategies.
Continue reading to learn how competitor content monitoring can help you track changes in competitor strategy, drive website traffic, increase sales, and decrease returns:
Five Reasons to Monitor Competitors Prices
You know your strategy and your brand positioning and have a pretty good idea of how you compare to your competitors, so is there a need to monitor their pricing in detail? The answer is almost certainly yes. If your products compete with other companies for the affections of shoppers, you need to know what those competitors are doing and when they are doing it. Regular and accurate pricing, promotion, and assortment monitoring helps you know your competition so you can stay ahead of them when in the planning stage, ensure you are meeting your seasonal goals, and provides you with the information you need to make pricing, promotion, and assortment decisions to achieve your profit goals.
Online Price Monitoring for Store-Based Retailers
All retailers need good competitor pricing intelligence gathered accurately and efficiently. However, the traditional method of having merchandisers gather data by going store-to-store is expensive, time-consuming, and incomplete.
Online product pricing intelligence provides beneficial information to all retailers, whether online or store-based. Store-based retailers have three main competitors: other store-based retailers, online retailers, and online marketplaces. Online pricing intelligence reflects accurate data for all three of these competitors.
Seven Reasons to Monitor Your Competitors’ Content
Competitor content tracking provides you with information needed to meet your overall marketing position and pricing goals by providing you with current and trending data. Read on for seven strategic reasons why monitoring your competitors’ online product content gives you a strategic edge.
Read on for seven key reasons to monitor your competitors’ content.
REVEALED: Amazon Pricing Strategies from the 2011 Holiday Season
It is generally accepted that Amazon provides the lowest overall prices in all categories at most times. This paper uses data to review if their pricing was truly lowest during the 2011 holiday season and if that changed when shipping was considered. The information is broken out by category to better understand where Amazon was most and least competitive. Using price trending charts from Ugam Interactive’s competitor price monitoring solution, PriceTrac, we were able to review the weekly price variances with and without shipping to better understand Amazon’s pricing strategy and how shipping was or was not used as a lever.
To better understand Amazon’s position in the marketplace and to foster insights to other top retailers, Amazons’ data was compared against two other companies: a Top 5 online department store, and a top 25 online discount retailer . All three companies are popular household names known for competing on price.
The comparisons were done at the category and overall level. That is, we compared the average pricing of their products at the category level. They probably did not carry the exact same products, so the trend and the shipping cost factors are the focus in this paper.
Content Solutions Papers
Increase Your Consumer Trust and Loyalty
Fact: Consumer loyalty and trust helps drive sales and boost profits. Devoted customers need little to no marketing to increase sales, while consumer trust can help seal the deal. With rising competition, today’s consumers expect more than a loyalty program and an online payment trust seal to secure their repeat business. Consumers want to know that out of all the choices at their fingertips, your website is the one to go to when they are ready to buy. Read on to learn how to use site merchandising to build a better relationship with your shoppers.
Attribution Equals Sales
Attribution is the process of adding relevant information for items in a catalog. An attribute is anything that describes a product; examples include weight, material, brand, style, and dimensions. Providing more details helps search engine spiders find and categorize your products, online visitors find your products, and then provides shoppers with the information needed to make a purchasing decision. The more complete the attributes, the better the results in each area.
While many companies understand the need for attribution, they are often held up by the amount of time and effort it takes to provide attributes for thousands of SKUs. With the added burden of short selling seasons for many products, especially fashion items, product attributes are often not fully provided to the shopper, resulting in fewer sales for the retailer. Outsourcing the attribution project can lead to better identified attribute categories and more fully complete data within a desired time and budget frame.
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