PricesTracker - Price monitoring
This module allows for competitive intelligence dramatically reducing the workload because it automatically retrieves information on the websites of your competitors. This system is the only one to offer this service without subscription! The majority of competitive intelligence services cost 50-100 € / month, so this addon will be profitable very quickly. More, it is suitable for e-merchant with no technical expertise.
The module is in three parts:
1) "Analysis" will launch a Java script that runs on your computer (not to slow down your server). It searches for your competitors' products on their sites and takes their prices. It will also consider the textual proximity of product names with your products through an AI algorithm to facilitate matching.
2) "Matching of products" to associate your products with competitors' products. This step is the most time consuming but you do it once. Several tools are available to simplify the task: sorting by proximity of product name, sorting by closest price, searching by string. You can associate sevral competitor's products with the same product .
3) "Price comparison" allows you to compare prices recovered with yours and adjust your price accordingly. A color code indicates if your price is higher or lower than the competitor. You monitor some products more than others by adjusting the frequency of updating and using favorites that allow you to group products for example in a favorite "T-shirts with a price which often evolves". You can also apply pricing rules to send alerts or automatically change your prices according to those competitors.
MEGA version provides you what is more evolved in terms of pricing benchmarking. The main dashboard is a powerful tool to measure the competitive forces present in your market. It shows a graph with the number of products where you are more expensive and cheaper than your competitors. A color gradient informs on the degree of competition (price difference higher than 2%, 5%, etc.). You also have average price, weighted average value of sales (to give more importance to your most wanted products in analysis) and their evolutions.
Filters are available on all displays to show only data specific to a brand, a category, a price range, a competitor, a favorites ... This is particularly useful for the analysis of a segment in dashboard. Many shortcuts and One-click features are also available to simplify the tasks.
The version provides prices of major marketplaces and Rapid Pricing section allows you to estimate the price of a new product based on those available on the marketplaces (used and new).
MEGA version also improves matching with two options: the association by proximity to automatically associate your competitors' products with yours thanks to rules on many criteria and Google Matching with which you can search a competitor's product on Google with one click and associate it with your product through a Firefox extension.
The extension Stats allows you to analyze prices data with PivotTables in Javascript. For example, you can compare the average prices between you and your competitors for each brand by filtering on a particular category. With this method you can discover competitors' strategies.