Launching competitive price monitoring: the five decisions

Competitive price monitoring is a different job from MAP monitoring, and treating them as one is how both budgets get wasted. MAP monitoring watches how your own products are advertised by your own resellers, and it ends in enforcement. Competitive monitoring watches what other retailers charge for comparable products, and it ends in a pricing decision. The collection looks similar. Nothing downstream is.

If you are starting the second one, five decisions do most of the work.

1. Which categories and SKUs

Start with the products a customer associates with you, and the categories where you have decided to compete on price. You do not need the long tail. A price change on something nobody cross shops changes nothing, and it still costs you a check.

2. Which competitors

Name the retailers a customer opens in another tab before buying from you. That list is shorter than the one your team will produce from memory. A competitor with very little traffic in your category can come off it, because their price is not the one your customer is comparing against.

3. How often

Frequency follows price sensitivity, and it varies inside your own catalogue. The items where a small difference moves the sale need checking on the scale of hours. The rest can run weekly or monthly. Two inputs decide it: how much the sale depends on price, and how often your competitors move theirs. If a competitor reprices twice a year, checking their listing hourly is a bill, not a signal.

4. What counts as the same product

Matching is where these programmes quietly go wrong. If the comparison is between two items that are not the same item, every number built on it is noise.

Write down the attributes that make two products comparable for your customer, per category, before anyone builds the matching. In furniture that might be material and dimensions. In parts it is fitment and the part number, including the numbers a competitor lists under instead of yours.

Then decide what happens when there is no match. A missing comparison is information. Recorded as a zero, it drags the average down and nobody can see why.

5. What you will do with the answer

Decide the rule before the data arrives. Which products get matched, which get held, and who signs off. A feed of competitor prices landing in an inbox with no rule attached becomes a report nobody opens by the second month.

The line you do not cross

Reading a competitor’s published prices is one thing. Talking to a competitor about prices is another, and it is the line that gets companies into serious trouble. Keep the programme to published information, and keep your lawyers close to any part of it that is not. We are not lawyers.

We do not sell competitive price monitoring. Our work is MAP monitoring and enforcement for automotive and powersports brands, which is the first job described here and not the second.