The ability to compare prices and get the best deals on products is what drives shoppers, both in brick-and-mortar stores and online. However, retail pricing errors and inconsistencies are far too common and cost companies valuable sales. In order to appeal to their target audience and nurture customer loyalty, both manufacturers and retailers need to be constantly on the lookout for the best pricing strategy.
When the retail landscape is highly variegated, and prices differ significantly across stores and regions, having a clear and timely overview of different price strategies is crucial to outdoing the competition.
In most cases, retail organizations consist of a mix of centralized outlets and franchise stores that are independently managed, a combination that also contributes to making pricing less structured and more unpredictable. In addition to facing this “internal” competition, retailers also need to constantly monitor the sell-out prices of direct competitors and hard discounters. The rise of discount retailers, especially in certain areas of Europe, has also increased consumers’ price awareness, forcing traditional retailers to focus on optimizing their price strategy to keep their competitive edge.
Additionally, even centralized retailers have different regional price strategies. Thus, checking a small number of outlets across the country will not provide a representative picture of pricing.
Last but certainly not least, the growth of online FMCG and grocery retailers is also contributing to the need for timely access to reliable price data. With respect to e-commerce, it´s important to know how pricing in the delivery area behaves. If an online retailer cannot provide competitive pricing, there is no reason for consumers to buy online. This has been a factor in the failure of several food delivery services, for example.
In such a multi-layered landscape, constantly monitoring both internal and external competition in both brick-and-mortar stores and online is key to avoiding losing market share and creating an efficient and competitive price strategy.
But retailers are not the only ones directly affected by inconsistent pricing strategies: manufacturers also have a lot to gain in understanding the sell-out prices of their products across stores and different geographic areas.
Continuous monitoring activity can help manufacturers :
- calculate the margins made by retailers and therefore better negotiate further commercial agreements;
- benchmark with competitors and adjust price strategy accordingly;
- understand regional differences according to consumers’ income and needs;
- challenge wholesale partners on pricing; and
- gain an advantage over the competition through pricing
Over the past years, Roamler has led the field in tailor-made price checks across countries.
We provide retailers and manufacturers with a flexible solution that combines the speed and efficiency of crowdsourcing with a completely custom-made approach to price monitoring.
Thanks to a mobile crowd of more than 600.000 shoppers activated on-demand through the Roamler app, specific lists of SKUs can be monitored across areas of all sizes in real time. This allows retailers and manufacturers to keep control over pricing and its developments over time and implement immediate changes to improve competitiveness.
The data gathered by our widespread Crowd is manually checked and made available through custom reports and live dashboards that can be broken down by national, regional, and city levels.
Would you like to know more about how crowdsourcing can add speed and efficiency to your pricing strategy? Get in touch with our team.