Monitoring the competition prices

What should we bear in mind when it comes to monitoring our competitors? There are many issues to be taken into account when designing a price tracking strategy. In Minderest we are going to give an answer to the main variables:

Guidelines to choose the competitors:

- What is your client´s target? We will choose those company which are aiming the same target. We can use Alexa and its audience metrics ( gender, age, etc.) We can use El Corte Inglés as an example. Do our e commerce metrics coincide with those of El Corte Inglés? We will carry out this first analysis in order to filter our potential competitors.

- Visitors entry keywords. Very important to use similar tools to Alexa in order to measure which are the keywords by which our potential competitors are receiving visitors. A direct measure of competitiveness is the key words coincidence. In other words, there could be a web site addressed to our target and with very similar products, but its positioning in search engines is no good, reason for which the clients are not ending up purchasing in his web.

- From the above competitors, which ones serve their products in the same regions or countries that we do? We will not take into account those who operate in different areas or which only share unimportant areas for our business

- What are their delivery times? If we deliver in 24 hours the great majority of our catalogue, we will compare ourselves with other competitors with similar delivery times. The great majority of clients that search for 24 hour delivery times, will not buy in other e commerce who´s delivery times are several days.

- What % of products does our e commerce share with the competition? Let´s make a selection of products in our shop, the 30 top sales for instance and let´s look for this products in those potential competitors. What is the % of products that we find? The greater the % the greater the competitiveness rate.

Once we have applied the above filters, we will have a very good selection of which are our direct competitors. Finally, there is only one more question we should look at: how much time and resources do I have to monitor my competitors? In other words, How many competitors am I going to be able to handel? Even though a competitor´s price monitoring software easies the task, I am still going to have to review each product price. For this reason, we will order the competition by % of shared products in order to choose the amount of competitors we will be able to handle. Generally this number will be between 3 and 6 competitors.

If we the above job has been carried out well, we can be sure we will control our target market, differentiating our company from our competition.