Price comparison tools: Save time, save money, stay ahead
Staying ahead of your competitors in today's fast-moving markets is not an easy job. Your competitors might be continuously releasing a host of better products and adopting the latest technologies and aggressive pricing strategies. In this scenario, your success is determined by pricing intelligence – and this has to be accurate and completely up-to-date.
Online shopping has created a strong sense of consumer empowerment by giving the consumers a range of choices and making it easier to for them to purchase things. Moreover, it has also triggered the trend of comparing the product prices and making the final decision to buy the product on minimal margins.
Compare prices, double your e-commerce sales
Price comparison is an innovative concept that has dramatically transformed the E-commerce industry. Price comparison tools or price crawlers or shopping robots, employ crawling techniques or web data extraction to automatically scan web pages and retrieve the prices of a product. In this way, a price comparison tool helps to fetch a significant amount of product and pricing data and uses Data intelligence to display the data feeds. So what you ultimately get are real-time price updates, helping you stay on top of your game.
Comparison shopping engines: What do they exactly do?
Comparison shopping engines (CSE's) such as Shopzilla.com, Shopping.com and PriceGrabber give ecommerce merchants the opportunity to attract new customers, increase sales, and go head-to-head against the competition. Comparison shopping engines gather all kinds of information about products from the participating retailers including the pricing, which is displayed on the results page when a shopper enters his/her search query. This enables the shoppers to compare the price offered by each retailer and the shipping options and ultimately select the retailer that offers the best overall value.
Benefits for businesses:
Gives your business a competitive edge: Pricing is always the crucial factor in making a buying decision. By using price comparison tools, business owners can maintain a check on prices offered by their competitors. You can even create a promotional strategy such as providing discounts or revalue price points to attract a lot more consumers.
Pricing Intelligence: Price Intelligence offers you greater visibility into the pricing of your competitors as well as the array of products that they offer. It also helps you make significant pricing decisions and building pricing strategies that are lucrative for your business.
Analysis of current market trends: With comparison tools, the current market trends can be analyzed. The positives as well as the negatives can be accurately assessed and improvements can be made accordingly.
Effectively track consumer buying patterns: Price comparison tools can be used to effectively track the buying patterns of consumers. This enables business owners to find out the impact on the existing consumers, how to draw new ones and what is essentially needed to enhance the traffic for their products and categories.
Improved customer services: To stand out in the market, you need to have a better customer service. Using product and pricing data, customer service can be invariably improved.
Benefits for customers:
Whenever you’re buying any product, particularly expensive ones, it’s always best to do a comprehensive research and comparison of prices so that you get the right products at the right price. Price comparison tools give consumers a tremendous amount of bargaining power. Besides, it enables shoppers to get the best deals and save a significant amount of money.
Here's something worth thinking about...
Today, price comparison sites are mushrooming in every nook and corner of the world wide web. So, if you are on the lookout for cheaper products and services, and want to shop pretty quickly, then price comparison tools offer plenty of choices for you. But this is just one side of the coin.
Is it a good idea to display competitor prices on your e-commerce site? Does it involve serious ethical issues? Think before you take the big leap!
Be part of the discussion and share your valuable comments on the same.
References:
How to Save Money With Price Comparison Tools
Five Best Price tracking tools
The 11 Best Shopping Apps to Compare Prices
How do comparison shopping sites make a living? An update
