One of the other data sources we allow you to get into is something called category monitoring. On a weekly basis, or several times a week if you choose, we can go out and monitor down to the market level where prices have changed and report that back to you. You can run a report that lists the price changes of your items, and items from competitors similar to what you sell, in the past seven days on a zip code level. You can also look at a map that shows the geographical spread of where prices have raised and where they have lowered, to give you a quick take on the big picture. You can turn these views into a comp shop report. This helps you figure out if you are overpriced in a particular market, by quickly comparing your item’s price to your competitor’s item’s price. We also store those historical prices for you, so you can see how the prices change over time. Sometimes being able to understand what the competing retailer is doing can do a lot to keep your merchant happy and patient to let the promotion continue without immediately moving down in price. In other cases, your product may not be selling well, and it may be because it’s sitting next to a competitor’s item that is ten bucks cheaper and you gotta do something about it because the product has been there forever. So this report is a high level comp shop, it shows you the pricing vs the lowest price of any of the items that you say are competing. It’s often the case where there may be multiple items that are competing and if there were, you can get into the details by drilling further into the report, so you may find that the cheapest item may be ten bucks cheaper, but your competitor may have four different, competing items, where only one item has been placed on sale for ten bucks cheaper, so you may choose not to going to do anything, because there are three other items that are priced on parity with your competitor’s other items.
You can also set notifications, for instance if an item moves more than X%, you can get a notification so you don’t have to proactively run and pore over the reports to stay abreast of what’s happening. The system tells you rather than you having to watch. One thing we allow you to do is, rather than looking at straight up comparisons, sometimes it may be that one retailer has the same item, but it has a different finish, we will still allow you to categorize relationships between items on a number of different factors. You can actually define the relationship more richly, so you can run a comp shop report that looks at direct substitutes, even if it’s a different color, finish, size or other facets you are able to define as something that is competing against you. It can get as complex as you guys want it to be.
Insight Panels covered in this documentation section include: