Category Monitor

Overview

Category monitoring is a premium service which integrates your sales data with our automated marketplace crawling of your items and your competitors items in the marketplace.  The result is a unified view capability to monitor how your items are perceived in the market, the pricing of your items vs. your competitors, how your items are displayed on retailer's websites and which items they compete with for screen space.  Additionally, we also are one of the only services that provide on-the-ground pricing and stocking availability as opposed to Internet only availability.

As part of the category monitoring you can also see which new products have been introduced, which products are identical or similar to your products and more. This ability to keep an eye on the retailer is invaluable. Sometimes, being able to understand what the competing retailer is doing with their pricing structure can do a lot to keep your merchant happy and encourage the patience needed to let a promotion continue without immediately marking an item down. In other cases, your product may not be selling well, and our services can help you quickly discover that it's sitting next to a competitor’s item that is cheaper, prompting you to take the correct steps necessary to resolve the issue. The integrated drill-down features of our online reports helps you delve even deeper to determine the extent of what is going on with your items versus your competitors' items. For example, it’s often the case that your competitor has multiple items that are competing against yours and perhaps only one of their items is marked down. Such information will help you find the best possible way to merchandise and promote your items. 

Sample Features

Historical Pricing Trends

Pricing historical trends is as important as current pricing.  This service makes it very easy to view price channels over time to determine the stability of pricing and to evaluate competitive moves and positioning.  As an example - the screenshot below provides pricing of competing items at several home improvement retailers over the span of the current year. Pricing may vary based on geography, but this view quickly lets you evaluate whether the retailers are aligned in their pricing as well what the trend is.  In this case pricing remained stable throughout the year before some end-of-year changes occurred at Lowe's - after which Home Depot responded and several iterations of pricing adjustments ensued.  Will the pricing re-stabilize?  At which price?  Our service allows you to monitor and easily visualize these types of behaviors. 

Geographical Pricing Analysis

Bricks and mortar retailers often engage in regional pricing and availability to optimize their inventory and supply localized assortments.  As shown above, pricing can be stable or flux - but knowing the channel without the location can leave you with a gap in your visibility of the market behavior.  Our service fills the gap by providing geographical views of pricing a well.  In the map below our services shows your where pricing has changed (up or down - red/green) as well as where its remained stable.  With sortable data at your disposal you can quickly zero in on where the items changed the most.  In this case, for this item at Lowe's there have been substantial declines in retail price in the Central Virginia area and areas South and North along the East coast.  In this case given the volume of decline in one of the areas - this is signalling a clearance cycle and the other areas mentioned seem to have begun as well.  Its this type of additional insight that brings true understanding to what otherwise would look like a massive competitive breakdown when viewed on a time dimension alone.