Price & Inventory Monitoring Service :: To Maintain / Grow Revenues

The Business Need: Better Pricing to defend / build Market Share

With the increasing trend of online product catalogs / stores, customers can access more choices and product / pricing information online (going beyond the usual geographical areas they may have focused on earlier). To continue to maintain & build your revenues, it is vital for your business to keep an eye on the competition, especially their pricing strategy and price movements. While competitive pricing is not the only way to achieve competitive differentiation / market share, it is certainly a key element to consider in your Pricing Strategy and Pricing Decisions.

Monitoring these online prices is a fairly complicated and time-consuming endeavor. There are various operational challenges including: different website formats; pricing basis; ongoing structural changes to product pages; availability of new tools / software for easier and better data collection and analysis.

As a result, this valuable activity is often deferred or performed at a less than ideal frequency or rigor - resulting in a lack of timely & thorough information for critical pricing decisions (both up and down) and consequently, lost sales & revenue opportunities.

The SAMS Solution: Easy Setup, Cost-Effective, Powerful

SAMS Price Monitoring Service is designed as an easy-to-implement / high value (ROI) solution - providing your marketing and sales team with timely, valuable information on the state of the market / competition. Given our focus / specialization on the associated processes and software, we are confident that our services will be much more cost-effective when compared to the costs of doing it in-house (direct / indirect costs as well as opportunity costs).

We can also monitor the inventory levels of your competitors to determine out-of-stock situations.

Quick and Easy Setup

• Provide some basic inputs
  • List of Products (Manufacturer Name and Id/SKU)
  • List of competitor sites & frequency of monitoring
• SAMS sets up a customized Price Monitoring service for your specific needs
• SAMS delivers detailed Pricing Data and Pricing Analysis.
  • Receive the results (data files) via e-mail.

Pricing Analysis - not just Data

• SAMS delivers detailed Pricing Data and automated Pricing Analysis.
  • Highlighting trends / exceptions (based on client specified rules.)
• Focus on actionable information rather than just tons of data.
  • So your staff can quickly go beyond reviewing data to performing Pricing Strategy analysis and Pricing decisions.
• Eliminates reasons to put off this vital strategic activity (monitoring competitors) - by making it easy, fast, and cost-effective.

Powerful & Flexible

• Can deal with various source website formats (static / dynamic sites).
• Verify source sites and review their product page structure & pricing basis - to correctly map product and price.
• Manual checks prior to periodic runs to handle any source site changes.
• Results viewable / accessible easily.
• Track changes / trends over time. (Price movement history.)

Cost Effective - High Business Value

• More cost-effective than in-house processing - when all costs are factored in e.g. staff processing time; software acquisition; software installation and business process setup; staff training time & expenses; taking time & focus away from other valuable marketing & sales activities i.e. opportunity costs.
• Staff can focus on core marketing and sales activities / decisions rather than overcoming technical hurdles of data gathering / data analysis.
• Business Value / ROI not only from lower operational costs but more importantly, from the potential impact on revenues from improved merchandising / pricing decisions.

With sufficient investments of time & resources - and learning from errors / experience, any organization can eventually achieve efficiency and effectiveness for their price monitoring processes.

First, what are some of these investments? In addition to staff processing time, there are: software acquisition costs; software installation & customization expenses; business process setup costs; staff training time & expenses; ongoing software updates / maintenance; quality control processes to ensure data quality.

Given all the investments listed above and the low frequency of these tasks (e.g. quarterly / semi-annually) - most organizations find that it is a sound business decision to go with a well-designed Price Monitoring Service like SAMS.

Our clients appreciate the time and effort put in by SAMS to develop the specific skills, know-how and infrastructure - that reduces processing times & costs while giving due attention to data quality. By entrusting this work to SAMS, they can focus on more strategic marketing and sales activities. ( i.e. the opportunity cost angle.)

This is the classic "Make or Buy" decision in business management. Performing the usual cost-benefit analysis for such "Make or Buy" decisions clearly supports the approach of partnering with a reliable service provider like SAMS that specializes in these processes.

We take the time to understand your specific needs and then deliver cost-effective, high quality price-monitoring solutions - that help you make timely & smart pricing decisions to maximize your revenues.