Lengowhave added competitor monitoring tool within their solution for e-retailers. The new feature enables you to monitor the price of your competitor’s products across Marketplaces and Comparison shopping sites.
The monitoring of competitors’ e-shops is made via URL crawling: Lengow does not use any information provided by the merchant to track prices. To make it work, merchants place their competitor’s URL in front of their product. Then, a robot picks up all the information of the product description, including the price.
Each e-retailer is able to watch their competitors’ prices and to do the right adjustments on his campaigns according to the results. This way, they only send their products which have the most competitive prices on comparison sites for example”, explains Mickaël Froger, Lengow’s co-founder and CTO.
This makes sense, there’s no point paying to advertise a product if your competition is way cheaper than you. However it’s also worth remembering that price isn’t the only reason that buyers will choose to purchase from you. If you offer faster and/or free delivery, have better service such as no questions asked returns, or simply have a better website or professional online listing you can still win without necessarily being the cheapest.
However the new tool will enable you to see where a small price change can make you the most competitive and you’ll know if a product isn’t selling that it’s your price that’s the issue. If you can’t be the cheapest and it’s affecting sales then you can consider added value by increasing your price but bundling extras such as a free carry case with a laptop or rechargeable batteries with a camera.
There’s always more than one way to win in online retailing and it doesn’t have to be by being the cheapest. However tools like Lengow’s competitor monitoring tool will at least give you a heads up when you need to take a look at your pricing strategy.
