Best Price Comparison Software for Competitive Insights
Smart businesses know that price comparison software isn’t just an advantage—it’s a necessity. Why? Because your customers are already comparing. A staggering 83% check prices across multiple companies before deciding to buy. If you’re not tracking and optimising your pricing, you’re leaving revenue on the table. Your task is to appear competitive when your customers conduct their price checks.
Your price comparison tools help you monitor competitor prices, allowing you to optimise your prices and improve profitability. Think of competitor price comparison software as an essential tool for your business. It helps you build pricing strategies based on the accurate data they collect from your competitors, making your pricing more competitive. Your question is simple: How do you find the best price comparison software for retailers and other businesses?
What is Price Comparison Software?
A good price comparison software combines dynamism, real-time tracking, and the data you need to analyse market trends and their impact on your business. Most operate online to provide regular pricing data updates designed to drive your commercial growth. The extent of those updates – and what they incorporate – varies depending on the software you choose.
A truly dynamic pricing tool provides daily updates from online data, often segmented into regions, companies, and categories, to provide real-time insights. You may also find automated price comparison solutions that send alerts to your inbox and deliver data based on your predetermined conditions. That data lets you generate reports your business uses to tweak its pricing campaigns. The result is the ability to build flexible pricing practices for your company. That is especially handy for those in the fast-moving consumer goods FMCG sector. FMCG brands’ price-monitoring tools allow them to quickly change pricing based on the market, ensuring they keep their competitive edge.
The same applies to retailers and manufacturers, both of which engage in constant battles with competitors to provide the best prices to increasingly educated consumers.
Key Features to Look for in Price Comparison Software
A competitive price analysis software must have the following key features before you consider it a potential option for your company.
Real-Time Tracking
There is little point in having price comparison software that delivers updates that are days behind the market’s trends. Consider the likelihood that most of your competitors are tracking (and tweaking) prices based on their research. Price tracking is a market already worth £1.21 billion per year and is expected to grow to £4.11 billion by 2030. Consider this an indicator that your competitors use these tools, with most having real-time price tracking software in their suites. You need the same, to ensure that your data is timely and so you can make instant adjustments to your pricing strategy based on your competitors’ moves.
Automated Alerts
A good price comparison software will deliver alerts whenever changes that affect your pricing campaigns occur. It will also allow you to set the criteria for these alerts – such as the specific data tracked and how often you are notified – so you are constantly tracking pricing thresholds. Newer AI-powered pricing tools can even combine these notifications with automated adjustments to your pricing, again based on your criteria.
Competitor Benchmarking
Benchmarks allow you to compare your company’s success and practices against others. It is a form of analysis in which reasonable data-driven price optimisation solutions specialise. Your software must have strong competitor analysis features that include standard price tracking and suggestions on how to gain an advantage over other businesses. For instance, your software should be able to identify when your key competitors overcharge for a product, allowing you to fill a market gap with a less expensive product.
Strong Reporting Capabilities
Reporting will always be a key feature of price comparison software because you need to understand how the data you receive applies in the context of the broader market. Visual representations of data via charts, tables, and graphs make it easier to identify and adapt to pricing trends. Your software has to provide those types of reports.
How Price Comparison Software Helps Businesses Stay Competitive
Visibility into competitor pricing is key to remaining competitive in your industry. If you do not know what your competitors charge, you have no benchmarks against which to compare and tweak your pricing. That visibility comes from price comparison software, which helps keep you competitive. How? You can optimise your pricing based on the real-time information gleaned from this software.
Price comparison software allows you to be reactionary and proactive simultaneously. You can react to competitors’ price changes while using broader trend data to ensure your prices always stay within industry benchmarks. Speaking of being proactive, do not underestimate the historical pricing trends your software will reveal. Do your retail competitors offer discounts during certain times of the year, such as Christmas?
Your competitor’s price comparison software reveals the answer. The same applies to manufacturing, empowering you to create a dynamic pricing structure that you can adapt based on historical trends.
Choosing the Right Price Comparison Software for Your Needs
By now, you have the gist of how to track competitor prices online – you need the right software. Choosing that software is your challenge, and these tips are designed to help you make that choice.
Check for Scalability
The size of your business today may not be its size in a year or five years’ time. Any price comparison software you choose must grow with you if you intend to grow. For instance, we assume you have a small business operating in a single region. What happens when you expand beyond that region? Your software has to be able to scale up accordingly by providing pricing information for each new region you enter. If you are restricted solely to the region where you started, you are not getting an accurate picture of the pricing landscape.
Prioritise Ease of Use
Most companies have not adopted hard-to-use software. If it is not abandoned, it certainly is not used as effectively as it could be – Deloitte finds that 80% of small businesses are not taking full advantage of the software in their suites. Prioritise ease of use. Take time with the demonstration version of the software, checking its features and how they work to determine if your people can use the software and if those features fit into your current workflow.
Ensure Data Accuracy
It is not difficult to determine general data accuracy for price comparison software. If the software tells you that a competitor is selling an “x” product for a “y” price, a quick check of the prices online shows you whether the information is accurate. Data accuracy becomes harder to track when you compare prices across massive numbers of companies and categories. Researching the software provider and the consensus around its product’s accuracy is your better choice here. Check reviews before you invest, explicitly focusing on comments about data accuracy.
Always Consider Costs
As with anything else you invest, your choice comes down to the ROI your price comparison software delivers. Paying for software that tracks thousands of competitors at its base tier means you are wasting money if you have a small business with only a handful of competitors, for instance. Think about the size of the plans on offer – and whether they are relevant to your company – along with whether you will need all of the features the software offers for its price.
Case Study: How Assosia Supports Businesses with Price Comparison Solutions
Not all price tracking is done online. When an Assosia client commissioned the company to handle “offline” tracking across various retailers and categories, we took a manual approach. Our objective was to visit several retailers each day of the week, generating reports on our client’s priority categories in the process. Assosia assembled a field team that covertly entered the stores of our client’s target retailers, recording pricing and promotional details for all relevant products. Photographs of displays were captured, too, with all data returning to Assosia and passing through our internal validation processes.
Following verification, the pricing data was passed to our client, along with photographic evidence and logs of revisits and phone calls to stores to confirm pricing. How did our client use that data? They used it to react to price differentials, giving them a benchmark on which to base their pricing. Clear “on the ground” insight at the store level also gave our client insight that was not typically available via online price comparison software. You can read the full case study on the Assosia website.
Future Trends in Price Comparison
Just as using real-time price tracking software allows your business to remain competitive in your industry, understanding the trends in this software ensures you make the right choices. Three key trends in price comparison to look out for include:
- Dynamic Pricing: Adjusting prices dynamically based on data and demand is controversial, though we are starting to see it at organisations such as Ticketmaster and Uber. Look for this trend to expand into the wider market, with the key to successful dynamic pricing being human guidance to ensure no outliers.
- Predictive Modelling: Using historical pricing data, modern price comparison software can indicate when peaks and troughs – i.e. full pricing versus sales pricing – occur in your market. Combined with data demonstrating demand during different periods, you can use your price comparison software to create predictive pricing models.
Conclusion: Why Investing in Price Comparison Software is Essential
The sheer size of the price comparison software market and its predicted growth, as illustrated earlier, demonstrate why this software is so essential. Many of your competitors are already using it to gain an edge. You must do the same, choosing software that offers real-time pricing data and enables predictive modelling so you are never caught “short” on your pricing. Data-driven solutions – such as Assosia – are the key because they allow you to base your pricing decisions on real information rather than guesswork.
FAQs
1. What is price comparison software, and how does it work?
Price comparison software allows you to track your competitors’ prices and the real-time market trends influencing those prices. Using that data, your business can optimise its pricing strategies via easy-to-read reports.
2. Who can benefit from using price comparison software?
Practically any business that sells a product, specifically retailers, manufacturers, FMCG brands, and marketing professionals, benefits from data-driven price optimisation solutions.
3. What features should I look for in price comparison software?
In the article, we explain the key features of good competitor price comparison software. To summarise, look for real-time price data, automation, simple integration with existing systems, scalability, and data accuracy.
4. How does price comparison software help increase profitability?
You receive real-time pricing data that allows you to adjust your pricing strategies dynamically. Optimisation of your promotions becomes easier, and you are less likely to lose customers to companies that offer cheaper prices.
5. How does Assosia’s price comparison solution support businesses?
With Assosia, you can access price and promotion tracking solutions tailored to your needs. That customised approach gives you a competitive edge powered by accurate data insights. Assosia also provides “offline” price comparison services – as seen in the case study in the article – that complement and reinforce its online solution.