You’ll probably recognize this: you had a great idea, a webstore, you started working on it, but now you find yourself overloaded with all the work. To many, running a webstore seems the ideal job. You build the webstore once and it’ll just run all by itself. Nothing could be more wrong. The marketing, expedition, monitoring the market, managing supplies and suppliers…
You want to use your webstore as the most important platform for selling your products. But you’re working on the administration, sales, shipping, analyzing, developing and marketing from the early morning up until late at night. You literally have to have knowledge about every aspect, unless you don’t outsource some activities. Outsourcing is definitely something we advise! Many of our clients outsource those activities that take a lot of time and energy, like the expedition. It takes an investment, of course, but it usually returns itself in time and energy you can than invest in creating more revenue. Or invest in familytime…
To make it all a little easier, we’ll provide some tips in this article about the competitor analysis and the usage of a pricetracker, that will help you generate more revenue.
Prices from competitors
As the owner of a webstore it’s very relevant to be able to track the prices from your competitors. The prices from your competitors can greatly influence the prices you use for your items. You can, by utilizing the right pricing strategy, respond to the prices your competitors use and thus influence the market. Make sure you’re being noticed. This can be achieved by being the cheapest, offering more service or guarantees or maybe by profiling yourself as an exclusive business with qualitative products, for which you ask a higher price.
You can track the prices from your competitors by simply googling your biggest competitors and manually browse their products and note their prices. However, depending on your market position, you might not in the first place be competing with the giants on the market. Those giants are usually not the cheapest, but they achieve a large turnover just by being well known. Their clients go directly to their webstore. You probably compete more with the smaller, lesser known webstores that are cheaper. Your clientage might be looking for the lowest price, or maybe the most exclusive product, and doesn’t want to buy from a giant that is more expensive or less exclusive. Anticipate!
But how do you find out the prices of competitors that are lesser known? Easy, there is software for that.
A Pricetracker
With a pricetracker, you can easily track the prices of your competitors. By entering the EAN or GTIN codes of your products, the internet will be scraped for suppliers of the same products. This will provide information on prices also. This way, tracking and mapping your competitors and their prices is easy, and, since you immediately receive the URL’s to their sites, you can also monitor their SEO strategy.
A pricetracker takes a lot of work out of your hands, especially in looking for the prices from your competitors. Just as outsourcing the expedition or administration, this leaves you with more time to invest in strategy, optimalization and growth.