Competition-monitoring tool for online retailers

Take data-driven decisions by monitoring assortment and pricing of your online competition.

About the client

The client is a fast-growing webshop selling easy-to-compare goods. His ambition is to become the European leader in his respective market.

In order to achieve this goal, the company is investing in capturing substantial amounts of data and using them intelligently. The captured data includes customer data, transaction data and market data.

The company’s strategy for using this data intelligently ranges from basic insights through dashboards to highly advanced predictive models. Supported by Crunch Analytics, the customer developed a prioritized list of valuable use cases and decided to start with the one described in this case study.

Challenges

An essential component of running a retail business is making decisions on assortment and price.

The good thing in online retail, certainly when products are comparable, is that the assortment and prices of one's competitors is openly available. Hence these can be used to inform the decision-making around these topics.

In practice, using this available assortment and price information is not as easy. Firstly, using this available information is time consuming and hasslesome. Think about having to compare prices of hundreds of products, in multiple countries, with multiple competitors' offering.

Secondly, the information is continuously changing. So yesterday's decisions might be wrong today, if the situation has changed. The result of this is a loss of revenue and margin.

Key Challenges Solved

  • Making decisions on assortment and price quick and easy
  • Using the available information of competitors
  • Continuously processing the ever-changing information

Solutions

For this customer we developed a competitor-pricing and competitor-assortment application. This application provides the company on a daily basis with the right, actionable insights in the prices and assortment of his competitors, in a given set of countries.

1. Compare your pricing with the competition

When deciding on what pricing to apply, the company can see its prices of the different products alongside the pricing applied by a competitor in the different countries, and how these evolve over time. This makes it easy to set prices, spot price movements of competitors and update pricing based on these movements.

Additionally, the competitor pricing data gathered over time (e.g., discounts for certain periods) can be used in negotiations with suppliers.

2. Compare your assortment with the competition

In terms of assortment, the company can again easily compare its assortment with the one of its competitors in different countries, and how these evolve over time. This enables the company to discover which products are sold and introduced by competitors and see which items the company lacks in its assortment (and the inverse).

This information can be used to guide decision-making on which items to introduce next.

Results

  • Client reported a 30% uplift in margin after updating its prices based on the insights of the competition monitoring application.
  • Time required to set prices and response time to competitive price / assortment changes were substantially reduced, leading to reduced costs and increased revenue.
  • Negotiation position towards suppliers significantly improved due to view on competitor pricing history, leading to reduced costs.

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'Category Management in Retail

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