Market Track’s Actionable Insights
Monitoring the Online Marketplace
Developing a plan to stay on top of fluctuations in products and pricing online
Key Questions
• Do you know how your products are priced relative to competition? Do your promoted prices optimize lift? Are you changing your price points regularly enough to remain competitive? Are you monitoring your MAP policy across all your online retailers?
• Is your entire product assortment stocked? Do you know which new products your competitors are stocking? Do your competitors vary their product assortment by region?
Do you know when your retailers are running low on stock?
• Are you effectively addressing showrooming? Are your in-store sales suffering due to showrooming?
Market Track has years of experience solving for the top business problems facing retailers and manufacturers in the online marketplace. In this edition of Market Track’s Actionable Insights, we not only provide the information needed to effectively manage your products and prices online, but also provide best practices and success stories from leading retailers and manufacturers in the industry.
About Market Track
Market Track is a market intelligence firm dedicated to increasing our customers’ returns on their promotional investments. Through innovative technology and marketplace expertise, we monitor and analyze over 200 U.S. and Canadian markets for every channel of trade in order to provide retailers and manufacturers with superior tools to monitor promotional activity, support dynamic decision making and turn information into market intelligence.
ffectively monitoring your products and prices in the online marketplace is an arduous, time-consuming process. Retailers may change the products they feature on their websites and the prices for those products multiple times throughout any given day. During key event periods when basket sizes are larger and shoppers are actively seeking out the best prices, it’s important to understand the role pricing plays and how online price transparency facilitates price comparisons from the shopper’s perspective.
Creating a winning pricing strategy that demonstrates value to your shoppers while still achieving sales objectives requires a concerted effort and consistent monitoring. With online prices changing several times a day and sometimes even by the hour, it has become necessary for retailers to rely on science and computing power to collect real-time data on competitors’ prices, calculate sell-through and margin implications of pricing changes, and update their prices on the fly.
Market Track’s online pricing solution, PriceVision®, allows retailers and manufacturers to quickly and efficiently monitor changes to their products and prices by capturing up to 30 unique data elements in real-time from over one billion buy pages from 4,000 global merchants. In this issue of Market Track’s Actionable Insights, we will discuss a variety of different functions within PriceVision® that have helped improve the online price tracking process for retailers and manufacturers.
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Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) is critically important for manufacturers that want to maximize the distribution and sales of their products without compromising their brand equity, jeopardizing their relationships with their retailers, losing margin, or wasting their trade investment. In recent years, manufacturers have struggled to maintain their MAP policies due to the emergence of seemingly limitless numbers of retailers in the online marketplace. These resellers—often smaller businesses that acquired product without the manufacturer’s knowledge—price and sell products without regard for MAP policies. This has created a number of problems for manufacturers, problems that if ignored, could jeopardize MAP policy and severely hurt sales numbers for thousands of manufacturers. These problems include:
• Loss of future margin
• Loss of product or brand equity
• Damaged relationships with retailers who abide by your MAP policy
• Loss of return on trade investment
Many manufacturers do not have the bandwidth to address these problems themselves, and therefore rely on Market Track’s online pricing intelligence solution, PriceVision®.
To successfully enforce your MAP policies, you must know where your products are priced, and when a price changes (particularly when it falls below MAP), you need to know immediately. The Instant Alert system allows clients to set a threshold price alert for each individual product, which will send an email to you and your team whenever MAP on that product has been violated. To create the Instant Alert, simply select the product to monitor, and set the threshold price, alert type, alert frequency, and distribution list (see Figure 1). Once the alert is set, there is no need to check on it again
until it expires, solving for the bandwidth problem many manufacturers face. This alert system can be used for any price change—not just MAP violations—and many of our clients rely on this functionality to keep an eye on the price movement of their top products both in-the-moment and over time.
After the alert goes active, Market Track continuously crawls your merchant list, capturing pricing throughout each day.
If a price falls below your determined threshold, our system will immediately send an email alert, as shown in Figure 2.
The email will contain all the information the manufacturer needs to hold their merchants accountable for the violation, or to identify unauthorized merchants, including a picture of the product page, a time and date stamp for when the violation occurred, plus the old and new price to show the extent of the change. The alerts are then stored within our online price tracking system for future reference and reporting.
With an effective process for monitoring the price of your products across the online marketplace, enforcing MAP policy becomes easier to tackle. Manufacturers can quickly identify violations and reach out to their retailer partner to correct them, or negotiate additional product placement on the retailer website to offset the trade funds already invested. This helps preserve good relations with retailer partners that abide by your MAP. With consistent enforcement, your prices will stabilize across the online marketplace, which will help
Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) Compliance
Figure 1: Setting an Instant Alert
Figure 2: Instant alert example Continuous product level price
monitoring across all merchants, with instant alerts when/where
MAP violations occur Continuous product level price monitoring across all merchants,
with instant alerts when/where MAP violations occur
Product, time stamp, old and new price all included in alert email Product, time stamp, old and new price all included in alert email Screen shot of product
page taken at the time of MAP violation Screen shot of product page taken at the time
of MAP violation
It is the responsibility of the sales and product teams at manufacturing companies to ensure their territories are consistently stocked with product, and when inventory is running low, to make the call to their buyers. The online marketplace has made this responsibility much more difficult for sales representatives. On the one hand, the increasing number of online retailers provides manufacturers
opportunity to increase distribution and sales. On the other hand, a limited number of sales and product managers now have to keep track of an ever expanding supply chain. If stock and availability are not monitored consistently, there is a risk that manufacturer accounts could run out of supply before it can be replenished. As a manufacturer, this hurts both your trade investment and sales opportunity, as shoppers may see your item on the product page, but cannot transact on it.
The stock and availability problem is more often than not a question of bandwidth. Market Track’s online price tracking also monitors stock and availability on a continuous basis. Figure 3 below shares a view of Market Track’s watch grid, which has a number of color indicators, one of which identifies which of your merchants are running low on stock. The parameters for this indicator can be customized to suit your sales and
product teams as well. Many of our clients will set the low stock indicator to go active when stock levels are down to two or three products, rather than waiting until the merchant is completely out of stock. This provides runway for your sales team to reach out to the particular merchant and make their sale before the merchant ever runs out of the product.
Of course, simply tracking stock levels would still necessitate that our clients check the PriceVision®
system day-to-day to make sure they stay on top of the updates.
To provide time savings back to manufacturers, the same alert system used for capturing MAP violations in-the-moment can also be used to send stock alerts (see Figure 4). Market Track will automatically send an email to your sales and product teams with the specific merchant, product, and stock trigger value. This removes the time-consuming process of monitoring availability manually, and keeps sales teams up to speed on sales opportunity across all products and merchants within their territory. Any triggered alert is also stored within our online pricing database, and over time, patterns can be discerned to help sales teams understand how often and on what cadence they should anticipate products to run out of stock at specific accounts. The entire process is automated—all that remains for the sales team is to make calls and execute on sales.
Stock & Availability
Figure 3: Watch Grid with Stock Indicators
Track where your products are out of stock, have delayed shipping, or are running
low on stock Track where your products are out of stock, have delayed shipping, or are running
low on stock
Alerts can also be set for stock/availability so you know in-the-moment which
accounts are OOS Alerts can also be set for stock/availability so you know in-the-moment which
accounts are OOS
Figure 4: Stock and Availability Alert Menu
It is standard practice for retailers to vary their product assortment based on what their competitors are stocking at different times of the year, and in different regions throughout the US. Retailers will also factor in buying patterns from period to period and from region to region to understand which products are selling and which are sitting. Regular monitoring of product assortment at your stores and your competitors’ stores is needed to ensure you are stocking the right product mix to attract shoppers.
Product assortment varies at bricks and mortar locations month to month, but in the online marketplace, assortment can vary from day-to-day. Similarly, where bricks and mortar assortment may vary from region to region or state to state, assortment in the online marketplace can vary by zip code. Whether you are a retailer in the department, grocery, or the electronics channel, effectively monitoring online product assortment across a long list of competitive retailers and e-retailers, and an even longer list of states, regions, and zip codes is a near impossibility, particularly if done manually. It is an important task, however, to ensure your online marketplace attracts your target shoppers.
Leveraging a solution that continuously monitors any product and SKU number sold online, across any merchant who sells the product can save considerable time. Through a series of easy-to-read grid views, our retailer clients can quickly reference a watch folder filled with their products, stock levels, and current price. Figure 5 gives us an example of how the watch folders can be created to file products by category, so each merchant responsible for a certain category can monitor their products without additional noise from categories outside their responsibility. The grid format of each watch folder will tell you which competitors are stocking your products at the current time, and by clicking on an individual product, you can call up the stock and price history for that product across all competitive retailers. This system automatically handles the difficult process of tracking products are stocked, when, and where.
For retailer companies who struggle with regional variances in product assortment, our solution provides data on product assortment by region as well. Particularly when tracking competitive product assortment by zip code, we can use a product map to plot the different product groupings for one or all of your categories. Using a map view, as shown in Figure 6, merchants can make quick decisions on which product assortment is best suited for each state, region, or zip code, depending on the level of specificity needed. Taking an organized, data-supported approach to determining your product assortment can provide
Product Assortment: By Competitor? By Region?
Figure 5: Watch folders show what products are stocked
Arrange watch folders to monitor your competitors’
product assortment compared to your own Arrange watch folders to monitor your competitors’
product assortment compared to your own
Figure 6: Product map Are your competitors
varying product assortment by region?
Quickly ID variance in assortment by zip code,
state or region Are your competitors
varying product assortment by region?
Quickly ID variance in assortment by zip code,
state or region
In the early days of e-commerce, shoppers often researched products online, found the product they wanted, and then went to the store to make their purchase. Bricks and mortar retailers did not immediately feel the effects of the e-commerce threat, as they were still getting the sale. However, the growing use of the online space among shoppers created not only a more informed, educated shopper-base, but also gave way to thousands of online retailers targeting those shoppers.
With better consumer tools, increased consumer confidence shopping online, and greater online price competition, showrooming started to become prevalent.
Bricks and mortar retailers exhibited mixed reactions to the emergence of showrooming. Some expressed denial that it was truly a threat, while others spent resources trying to figure out how to combat showrooming. There continues to be general confusion on the part of bricks and mortar retailers competing with the lower prices of their online retail competitors. By holiday 2012, many bricks and mortar retailers seemed to succumb to the influence of showrooming, regularly price matching where they were beat, and generally allowing their in-store prices to be governed by the online marketplace.
However, the implementation of these programs did not always go smoothly as sales associates did not have the tools they needed to effectively implement an online price matching policy.
With years of experience helping clients embrace the challenge of competing against online pricing and showrooming, our online pricing solution allows retailer clients to innovate their approach to in-store pricing, proactively gaining shopper’s trust. For example, an electronics retailer client recognized the growing influence of e-commerce back in 2010. In response, the retailer started to proactively use our online pricing solution to ‘help’ shoppers with their research while in-store. Using a daily competitive pricing feed delivered
to their stores, associates perform an in-person price comparison for their shoppers. They will point out lower prices in the market, and work with the shopper to find a common ground—free shipping, credit for future purchases, etc.—where the shopper feels they received a fair deal, even if it is not the lowest price in the market. This process builds trust with the shopper, and differentiates their in-store experience. They have been actively selling against online pricing for years, and remain a premium brand in the electronics channel.
A second retail client leveraged our online pricing solution to enact rules-based pricing in their store. Starting with a manual process in 2011, the retailer used daily pricing feeds to update shelf labels each day to ensure their pricing was competitive with the online marketplace.
Leading up to holiday 2012, the retailer had completed the digitization of their in-store shelf labels, which were connected to the daily pricing data feed. Based on rules the retailer had set, shelf prices would change automatically each day. The automation saved the retailer time both
in collecting pricing information and making changes to in-store displays, while remaining competitive against their online competitors.
Having access Market Track’s online pricing solution allows your in-store staff to have consistent knowledge of where their products are priced relative to competitors in the online marketplace. Without this data at their fingertips, retailers are risking their customers knowing more than their sales associates.
Showrooming: Friend or Foe?
Figure 7: Dynamic price changes
Perhaps the biggest challenge for retailers—for both the in-store and online marketplaces—is finding the optimal pricing strategy that both aligns with your corporate strategy, and stands up against your competitor’s pricing. Online pricing is especially difficult to stay on top of because at any minute your competitor can change their pricing on any item stocked on their website. Many retailers change their pricing several times over the course of a day, dropping prices on certain items for a few hours to try to spike traffic, only to shoot the price back up a short time later.
It is difficult to find an online pricing strategy that accounts for all competitive resellers at all times. Many of Market Track’s retailer clients struggle with a few key questions around online price tracking:
• Where are we priced relative to competition?
• At what price do we see the biggest lift for my products?
• Should we change our prices on the fly, or in response to competitive price changes?
• How are my products’ prices positioned against comparable products within the market?
To adequately address these challenges, retailers must have an easy way to track where their competitors are pricing like and exact items at all times. Additionally, they must have a detailed source of point-of-sale (POS) information to understand how changes to their own pricing and their competitor’s pricing affects lifts or dips in sales.
Among Market Track’s retailer clients who use our online price tracking solution, those who use the tool for monitoring competitive price trends for key products and tying the results back to their POS data have found the most value. In figure 8, you will see a snap shot of our price history chart for one product across several different online retailers. This view enables retailers to benchmark their historical pricing for the product in question against specific competitors, or against the industry average. After integrating POS information, the green and red arrows signify lifts and dips in sales over the course of the product’s pricing history.
The results of the type of report in figure 8 help retailers understand how movements to their online prices affect their sales, and how movements in their competitor’s pricing affects sales. Depending on the results of this analysis, retailers can determine whether or not it is in their best interest to change prices on products throughout the day, keep pricing consistent over time, or use a reactive price matching strategy in response to competitive changes.
Price Optimization: At what price do I see the biggest lift? Where am I priced relative to competitors? Should I change price on the fly?
In Summary
There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for MAP policy, stock and availability, product assortment, or optimizing online pricing. To have an effective process for managing your performance in the online marketplace, your strategy decisions must be data-driven—the online marketplace is much too volatile to base strategy decisions on anything else. Market Track’s online price tracking and analysis service provides an easy-to-use resource for any manufacturer or retailer facing any of a variety of challenges that come with doing business in the e-commerce space. We encourage you to reach out to your Market Track account team to share some of the challenges you are currently facing in the online marketplace, and let us show you how to use a powerful dataset in tandem with a versatile reporting tool to produce data-driven solutions that will put you back on course.
Figure 8: Price history chart
Sync shifts in online price with POS results to understand at what price your products see lift/dip
Sync shifts in online price with POS results to understand at what price your products see lift/dip
