You may have already read about it in the tabloids, or heard a report on it during a national news segment. It’s more than likely that you’ve already had speculative conversations with your closest friends and family about it. If somehow you have managed to dodge all the usual forms of communication and missed it – QL2 has officially launched Price Alerts into their suite of competitive intelligence products!
If you aren’t fortunate enough to live in the world of pricing and merchandising 40 hours a week (see my other blog describing a glimpse into that realm) this announcement may not seem like much. But if pricing is on your professional mind whenever you walk through an aisle at Target or browse the unending search result pages of Amazon, then the launch of Price Alerts is as big as it gets.
It can be described simply as a way to narrow the vast amounts of competitive intelligence information into its most acute point – to sieve results into exactly the product prices that an analyst would want to make pricing decisions on.
The Nuts and Bolts
By using alerts tailored to either an individual account or an entire organization, Alerts ensure that relevant category manager knows immediately when their competitors have set prices that jeopardizes their pricing strategy. The category manager is then able to take action in response.
First, a category manager would identify the subset of SKUs that they are most concerned about. It could be because those are the most profitable products, or those with the tightest margins, or even just to see how their prices line up against their competitors. Once that list has been identified, they would then assign pricing alert rules to that segment, dictating rules like “if this competitor is 15% cheaper than me on these products” or “if any of my competitors are ever at price parity with me”. An alert can be as broad or exact as a category manager wishes.
The alert triggers an email push that directs back into Opti Price, QL2’s state of the art product matching tool, so that pricing actions can be taken immediately without the need for exhaustive matching validation.
In Opti Price, each product that triggered an alert based off of pricing changes is displayed for analysis. Think of this as the short list of products that a category manager would want to update prices on for a given day. While they may manage thousands of unique SKUs, using product alerts to get notified on their top 100 ensures that the important prices get updated first.
Why Do You Need Price Alerts?
While there aren’t any geo-political or economic implications of this massive product drop, it’s sure to shake the foundations of retail pricing practices worldwide. In the beginning, competitive pricing intelligence was collected the same way crops were harvested in the dark ages – by hand. Manually scrolling through websites and recording dynamic prices in a spreadsheet – as if those prices weren’t going to change the minute you closed the tab.
Then, data collection at scale became available, so bots were able to crawl websites to retrieve all the product pricing information their virtual bodies could hold. But analysts and category managers still had to filter that information through spreadsheets, creating no end of pivot tables, vlookup commands and document versions.
But with the advent of Price Alerts, monitoring the day to day price of important products AND updating the prices on those products has never been easier. Are you a brand looking to monitor the Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) that your distributors are pricing at? Easy. Are you a mid sized speciality retailer watching Amazon like hawk to make sure they don’t price you out of your own market? Accomplished. Are you looking to build the foundations of your pricing strategy by building an analysis of your mountain of competitors? Mountain conquered.
QL2’s Price Alerts can help retailers save time, drive revenue on your most important SKUs, and potentially establish world peace (untested). Keep the link to this blog handy because when your uncle brings up Price Alerts at your family reunion this fall, you’ll want to be prepared.
Contact me today at cschneider@ql2.com to talk more about how Price Alerts can cut through the noise obstructing your pricing strategy.
Helping product/merchandising teams identify pricing gaps to maximize sales and profitability.