Competitors' prices change every day. Someone makes a point discount on a marketable product, someone rewrites a whole category, and someone launches a promo for one day. If you notice this once a month from memory — you have already lost in the speed of reaction.
The problem for most companies is not that they don't want to monitor the market, but that price monitoring exists as a chaotic habit of one manager. I went to the competitor's website, looked at it, and closed the tab. A week later, I forgot what I saw. A week later, I saw that the prices in my own storefront were no longer relevant. The result is lost margin, suboptimal purchases and controversial decisions at the management level.
In this article, we will analyze how to turn price monitoring into a managed process: who is responsible for it, how often to check the data, what reports the buyer and marketer need, and how to replace endless tables with automatic monitoring in Telegram.
Why "see prices from competitors" does not work as a process
In small businesses, monitoring is often done on a residual basis. The purchasing manager scrolls through the sites when there is a minute, the marketer enters the competitors before the meeting, the owner — when he sees that sales have subsided. This approach has three systemic weaknesses.
- There is no regularity. Decisions are made on the basis of outdated data, sometimes two to three weeks ago. During this time, the market could have already changed twice.
- There is no single format. One employee looks at the product cards, another looks at the main page, and a third looks for it in the search. It is impossible to compare such observations with each other.
- No responsibility When monitoring is the default task, it is not clear who is to blame for missing an important adjustment. As a result, there is no blame, and the margin is melting.
For monitoring to become a tool rather than a formality, it needs to be formalized as a process: with an owner, frequency, data format, and clear reports.
Who in the company should be responsible for monitoring prices
Here it is important to separate two different tasks: see prices And respond to them. They are usually mistakenly hung on one person.
Purchaser is responsible for input prices and assortment matrix. He is interested in wholesale prices of suppliers, conditions on volumes, balances, terms. Monitoring for him is the input for negotiations and purchases.
Marketer or Category Manager is responsible for the retail storefront. He is interested in the prices of competitors in terms of categories, promotions, positioning. Monitoring for it is the input for pricing and shares.
Owner or Commercial Director is responsible for strategic decisions: in which categories to play at the price, in which — by the service, where to raise the margin, where to keep the low price as an advantage.
In practice, the scheme works well, in which there is owner of the monitoring process — typically a marketer or analyst, — and consumers of reports: Buyer, Commercial Director, Marketer. The process owner is responsible for ensuring that the data is collected regularly, in a uniform format, and reaches the right people on time.
How often to check competitors' prices
There is no universal answer, but there are working guidelines that can be adapted to your niche.
- once a day For highly competitive categories with a short sales cycle: electronics, clothes with a change of collections, products with active promos. It is important to catch instant discounts and special offers here.
- Once a week For most categories of online store: household appliances, household goods, cosmetics. Weekly rhythm is a balance between the relevance of data and the time spent on analysis.
- Monthly For categories with a long decision-making cycle: furniture, sophisticated equipment, seasonal goods out of season. Here, sharp fluctuations are rare, it is more important to track the trend.
An important point: the frequency of verification should be different for different categories. Hot goods — every day, rare items — once a week. When monitoring is in automatic mode, this frequency difference is easily adjustable.
What reports does the buyer need
The buyer needs data to help make purchasing and supplier decisions. Not "just prices", but specific slices.
- Dynamics of input prices by key suppliers. Whether there is a tendency to increase or decrease, which of the suppliers is more stable, from which it is more profitable to buy now.
- Comparison of the current purchase price with the market. Understanding whether the company is overpaying compared to competitors who purchase a similar product.
- Signals on competitors' promotions for analogues. If a competitor sharply lowered the price for a particular model, this is a signal that the supplier now has favorable conditions or there is a sale of balances.
- Report on products that are not available from competitors. The ability to redistribute demand for your storefront and adjust purchases in favor of these items.
Ideally, the buyer receives these reports in one format, for example, as a summary in the Telegram chat with the ability to quickly open the details.
What reports a marketer needs
A marketer thinks in terms of categories and a storefront. He needs other slices.
- Position in the category. Where we are priced relative to competitors in each key category: above the market, in the market, below the market. Without this, it is impossible to talk about price positioning.
- Changes in competitors' prices for the period. What grew, what fell, what did not change. It is useful to see not only the current values, but also the dynamics: the competitor raised the price twice a month — this is a signal of an increase in demand or an increase in the input price.
- List of products where we lose on key queries. That is, positions where our price tag is noticeably higher than that of most competitors. This is a direct list of the risks of losing traffic and sales.
- List of products where we have the best price. These are potential traffic drivers that should be promoted in advertising and in the storefront.
A good monitoring report is not “all prices of all competitors”, but a short summary with specific conclusions and a list of actions.
Automation instead of manual tables
The classic scenario "lives" in most companies to this day. The manager opens Excel once a week, manually crawls a dozen competitor sites, copies prices, inserts them into the table, and counts deviations. It takes several hours, sometimes a whole working day. And in a week everything repeats.
This approach has three obvious problems:
- Labor amount. A few hours a week for a routine that can be completely eliminated.
- Errors. Human factor: typos, forgotten items, different units of measurement.
- Delay in reaction. It will take several days for the data to reach the buyer and marketer. Decisions are made on outdated figures.
Automatic price monitoring solves all three problems at once. In our studio, a product has been developed for this PriceTrack is a bot and мини-приложение in Telegram that monitors the prices of competitors for the desired products and categories and reports changes automatically.
How PriceTrack monitors work
The scheme of work is simple and transparent:
- You add a list of competitors and categories to track.
- PriceTrack regularly checks prices in the right products — with the frequency you set for each category.
- If you make any changes, you will receive a notification in Telegram: what has changed, who has it, and by how much.
- A showcase with current prices and a history of changes is available in the mini-application — you can also generate a report on the desired slice there.
As a result, the buyer and marketer receive not "sometime within a week", but at the moment when the change occurred. This changes the quality of decisions: you can adjust the purchase or promo on the day of the event, and not in a week.
How to start implementing monitoring as a process
If the company does not yet have system monitoring, you can follow a simple sequence.
- Identify the owner of the process. Most often, this is a marketer or analyst. It is important that he has an area of responsibility for the regularity of the data.
- Select 3–5 key competitors. You don't have to try to track everyone right away. Start with direct competitors that have a comparable assortment.
- Highlight key categories and products. As a rule, this is 20% of the positions that give 80% of the turnover. It is them that it is critical to follow in the first place.
- Set up regular reports. A daily summary report on changes and a weekly summary report on the position in the category and trends.
- Enable automatic monitoring. When the data format is clear and it is clear what reports are needed, manual collection becomes a bottleneck. Here it is logical to proceed to the automation tool.
As a result, system monitoring
When price monitoring ceases to be a personal initiative of one manager and becomes a process, the business receives several specific benefits.
- Скорость реакции. Changes are visible on the day of appearance, not a week later.
- Conscious pricing. Decisions about prices are made based on the current picture of the market, and not on feelings.
- Saving employees time. A few hours of routine a week returns to the main job.
- Clear area of responsibility. A missed change is not “no one noticed”, but a specific failure of the process that can be disassembled and eliminated.
If you recognize your current workday in this description-with manual spreadsheets, site crawls, and “who should have noticed” arguments-it's worth discussing the task. Our studio develops Telegram bots and mini-applications for specific business processes, including automatic monitoring of competitors' prices. Tell us about your situation — we will find a solution for your niche and scale.
If the topic of price monitoring is relevant to you right now — check out the product PriceTrack on pricetrack.botservice.biz. And to discuss the individual task of automating business processes in Telegram, leave a request for botservice.biz.
