Regardless of a business’s popularity or the quality it delivers, achieving strong customer loyalty ultimately depends on offering the right product price. While cost analysis has a major say in price determination, thriving in the market requires much more. Comparing competitor strategies, studying market trends and analysing historical pricing patterns help businesses deliver prices that fit the customers’ needs and pockets.
The pricing intelligence platform is capable of managing all the tasks and much more. But the real challenge lies in choosing the right platform that aligns with your business needs. Beyond the optimal prices, several other factors influence the effectiveness of such tools. Here we break down the key considerations to help you make the right choice.
Understanding Pricing Intelligence Platform
Businesses ensure competitiveness by maintaining consistency in the prices for the offered products or services. It is a data-driven process that involves the collection, tracking and analysis of competitors’ price movements in real-time. The obtained insights are used to strategically determine the optimal price, ensuring profitability for both the business and value for customers.
The mentioned process is best performed with the help of software. Employing data mining and artificial intelligence, these softwares are referred to as pricing intelligence platforms. They use market data, competitor prices and customer behaviour to provide relevant insights to the business. They use the data for making informed and data-driven pricing decisions.
Factors to Consider to Choose the Pricing Intelligence Platform
The previously mentioned detail offers quite good insights into what features to look for in the pricing intelligence platform. Let’s have detailed insights into the same:
Data Collection
The overall concept of pricing intelligence is based on data. The decision-making relies on data collected from the competitors and the market. A software that is capable of collecting data from all the competitors, of all the competing products and in real-time is a worthy option to proceed with.
The accuracy in ensuring the collection of the data of the right products is mandatory to ensure the correctness of the insights and effectiveness of the decisions. Ask about the discovery or match rate of the software to ensure making the right choice. The discovery or match rate refers to the percentage of products found by the pricing intelligence platform between your business and competitors.
Pricing Analysis
While pricing analysis is an important factor, it is not limited to the existing price. The pricing intelligence platform must be capable of performing historical pricing analysis. It eases and enhances the accuracy of price prediction through the availability of more data, which subsequently helps to understand the patterns. The other essential variables should also be taken into account while performing the analysis for correct interpretation.
Business and Industry Type
The choice of software is influenced by the scale of the business. The capability to handle voluminous data for a globally operating company in different time zones would be a necessity for the enterprise. However, the small-scale business in a new field would have minimal needs such as simple reporting updates, basic competitor tracking and others.
The pricing intelligence platform requirements are distinct among industries too. While one industry may need the software that offers real-time pricing updates, the other may depend on bulk data analysis. There can be other requirements as well. Hence, exploring business and industry-specific choices is essential.
Update Frequency
Certain industries witness changes in product prices multiple times in a day. The pricing intelligence platform must offer an update frequency that is specific to your industry.
For instance, industries such as travel, FMCG or electronics often experience rapid price changes throughout the day. However, the sectors like furniture or heavy machinery may only need daily or weekly updates. Hence, software must accordingly capture and reflect these shifts in real-time.
Data Beyond Prices
The software should not stick to only pricing details for analysis. The insights into intriguing offers, promotions, loyalty programs and discounts from the competitors must also be taken into consideration. The customer reviews, details about stock levels and the competitor strategic details should also be provided.
The data can be used by businesses to capitalise on the opportunities of customer demand when customers face shortages. It can also be used to plan proactively based on trends and patterns.
Customisation
The business needs and scale changes. Pricing intelligence platforms must adapt to these changes, plans and strategies. The features to look for include:
- Ability to customise the data dashboards
- Set industry-specific metrics
- Define custom filters for competitive analysis
- Provide region-specific data
- Configure algorithms for unique product matching
- Customise data feeds.
This adaptability ensures the tool supports evolving strategies of the business and aligns with long-term business objectives.
Cost
The evolving market and associated requirements add to the monetary burden for businesses. However, the right choices have the potential to enhance the profit by multiple times. Ensure that the pricing intelligence platform adds to the boon by offering quality return on investment (ROI). It should add long-term value to the business, and the insights are enough to make a difference and deliver results.
Conclusion
A well-chosen pricing intelligence platform enables businesses to transform raw market data into actionable insights. It helps them benefit from smarter pricing strategies, earn high profits and gain strong customer loyalty.
All of this is possible by selecting a platform that aligns with the business model, industry requirements, changes in business and long-term goals. Focus on factors like data accuracy, update frequency, cost, and customisation options to make an informed decision that ensures the specificity of the tool to your needs.
