The price is right: How in-store price validation can help your business
Being able to put your pricing strategy into action in any retail environment is an essential ingredient of success.
Whether you want to be viewed as a premium or bargain option in your market though, you first need to have a clear view of what your competitors are doing so you can price accordingly.
Otherwise? Reduced margins, inconsistent messaging to consumers and a flagging bottom line.
Our clients in the supermarket sector recognise this, and regularly call upon Informed Sources us to improve their visibility of the competition and ensure they can put their strategies into action.
This task is complicated when there are often significant differences between online prices, the in-store price and the promotional or “special” prices in both.
We recently performed a major project providing competitor pricing data to one of the largest supermarket chains in Malaysia. Our client needed a complete review of the prices of thousands of products on the shelves of its main competitors, one of whom had recently launched a large promotion.
Supermarket pricing in the Malaysian context is highly competitive. The promotional and in-shop prices are extremely fluid – changing multiple times per week. The ability to supply a steady, uninterrupted stream of pricing data was therefore extremely important to our client.
Informed Sources was able to devise an ingenious solution to deliver this – based on speedy analysis and tight coordination between our field and office staff.
To source online prices (regular and promotion), Informed Sources first obtained open-source pricing data from competitors’ websites.
We then immediately sent field staff into the stores across the country to cross-reference the web price against the in-store price for thousands of individual items.
The project was made more difficult due to the dynamic nature of the competitors’ promotions. We would typically only know each morning how many items would be on promotion and would have to be collected. This made coordinating field staff to ensure valid comparisons an extremely complex exercise.
All prices obtained via both methods outlined above were immediately checked for accuracy using our automated inbuilt validation algorithms. To provide an extra level of validation, we also mobilised a team of auditors to recheck the prices of random items.
This validated data then flowed into our databases before being quickly and seamlessly delivered into the client’s pricing systems via an API call.
Armed with this constantly updated stream of competitor pricing data, our client was able to enjoy the benefits of an accurate view of the market.
Improved knowledge of the discrepancies in price between online promotional items and in-store items enabled them to be better attuned to the nuances of its competitors’ promotions. This allowed them to remove the guesswork from their pricing decisions and enact their strategy with confidence.
To learn more about our price collection services, book in a session with one of our sales consultants today
