Competitor monitoring is the process of tracking competitors' prices, products, and strategies. It involves browsing competitors' websites, matching their product listings, continuously monitoring for price changes, re-browsing for new data, and reporting findings. Doing this comprehensively across thousands of products would require immense time and resources. PriceComp automates the entire competitor monitoring process through its platform, allowing clients to effortlessly gather and analyze competitive intelligence without dedicating significant staff time. It has thousands of clients ranging from small businesses to multinational corporations.

1. Competitor Monitoring
By Koutsoudopoulos George
Co-Founder & Client Services Director of PriceComp

2. What is Competitor Monitoring?
Competitor Monitoring is a segment of a
bigger process called Business Intelligence.
Based on
“Business intelligence (BI) is the set of techniques and
tools for the transformation of raw data into
meaningful and useful information for business
analysis purposes. BI technologies are capable of
handling large amounts of unstructured data to help
identify, develop and otherwise create new strategic
business opportunities. The goal of BI is to allow for the
easy interpretation of these large volumes of data.
Identifying new opportunities and implementing an
effective strategy based on insights can provide
businesses with a competitive market advantage and
long-term stability.”

3. What are the steps of Competitor Monitoring
• Step 1 Browsing ->Find and browse website that sell your products
• Step 2 Matching ->Match different products in entities
• Step 3 Monitoring ->Monitor these data 24/7/365 for changes
• Step 4 Updating ->ReFind, ReBrowse for new data
• Step 5 Reporting ->Report data via analytics console and exports

4. Step 1 Browsing
For an average competition of 6000 products,
given an average of 15 competitors per product
we can easily do the math and see that we have
to Find and Browse about ~90.000 Web Pages.
Yes 90.000. Even if we had 10 employees , 10
lighting fast employees that could non stop find
and browse webpages in a rate of 3 pages/
minute / person. That would resolve to 50
working hours.
So we would need 10 super fast employees,
working for a week , non stop 8 hours/day only
on this project.

5. Step 2 Matching
So, in order to deliver quality data from the browsing process
of step one, you also have to have rules for matching as
products come in different colors/bundles/pair or single etc.
You have to either divide the browsing results of a product in
different product entities, for example (one entity for the
black colored product and one for the white) or during the
browsing you must record small description for diversion in
order to later be able to sort those diversions and compete
only with the ones you need.
Of course such a task is not eligible in a 3 pages/min rate .
Match them
if you can!

6. Step 3 Monitoring
Even if we acknowledge that you manage to
deliver the tasks of step 1 and step 2, you
delivered it in a week via 10 employees.
Prices have changes thousand of times up
and down during this week that as soon as
you deliver the first two steps, its data is false
and trash.
You would have to be able to monitor these
data in a rate close to “live” in order to be
sure that the pricing decisions you take are
based on present data and not past.

7. Step 4 Updating
Ok, so you hired 10 employees, they worked for a
week , you got your data, and somehow in a
magic way you were able to monitor these data in
a close to “live” rate. Is that enough?
Nope. Cause during the week of browsing, there
were stores that did not sale your products first
but now they do. Or new stores selling your
products arrived in the market. Or the stores that
you recorded selling your products now have
removed them.
So even if you came this far.. that I doubt you did,
how are you going to win the battle of
REbrowsing and updating your recorded data?

8. Step 5 Reporting
Don’t forget. Steps 1-4 are just to be able to
find the data, match it, monitor it and
constantly update it.
Reporting step is considered to be hardest
that all the previous steps combined. Because
now you have to take these raw data and
transform them into tools that managers and
price decision makers can use in order for you
effort to have a cause.
You have to create automated charts,
historical tables, competition matching
reports and much more to deliver your data
into the hands of those who really know what
to do with it.

9. How does PriceComp handle these Steps
PriceComp delivers all the steps needed to complete competitor monitoring in a
faster, better way that you could even do it, without you doing anything along the
way.
It is able to find and browse all the stores that sell you products online, match them
and divide them into different entities with descriptions like “BLK”, “SLV”,
“BUNDLE” etc with a proven matching error percentage of less than 1%.
It monitors these data 24/7/365 based on a sophisticated importance distribution
system that updates prices in a close to live rate. It constantly updates these data
ensuring that the monitored data are present.
Finally via a state of the art analytics console with graphs, live price change logs,
historical data and excel reports that blow the minds of even the best sales
managers, enables you to always be ahead of your competition when you make
pricing decisions.

10. Who uses PriceComp
PriceComp is not a fresh technology. It has been around for several
years serving customers from small web shops to huge Ecommerce
channels of Multinational Companies.
PriceComp clients come from two sections. First are the competitors,
web shops and ecommerce channels that need to constantly have data
and analysis of their competitors pricing strategies and movements.
And second come manufacturers of big brands, that monitor prices of
their distributors in order to keep the market into the MAP prices.

11. What’s the leverage of PriceComp
Competitor monitoring platforms in the scale of PriceComp can be
finger counted. Even in these small marketplace, PriceComp is the only
platform that delivered all 5 steps of competitor monitoring without
using even 1 minute from the client.
PriceComp ensures that your time will be spent only on reading
reports, graphs and exports, processes that will make you money via
better profit margins without wasting your time.

12. The End
Thank you for reading, for more information you can visit the official
webpage of PriceComp at www.pricecomp.eu or send and inquiry to
the support team at info@tgn-solutions.com.