How To Research Competitive Pricing To Level Up Your Brand

Building your online business can lead to a huge increase in sales and a great brand footprint, but there is so much competition these days. Even if your business is amazing and has a great product, there could be hundreds of copycats or a bunch of companies mass-producing an inferior product that drowns out your great one. In order to boost your business, you should find a method of competitive pricing that works for you.

Competitive pricing can be a hugely laborious process, but it doesn’t have to be. Web scrapers can do all the work for you, and let you use the data to analyze competition as quickly as possible. You can more easily and quickly institute new prices based on your findings and get your work out there faster. But it’s not just about undercutting the competitors—you can find out a lot more about a target consumer base and how much they’re willing to spend on products.

We’ll go over competitive pricing strategy and how to use software to make it easy for you. You can click around the table of contents to find the solutions that work best for you.

Table of Contents

1. Competitive Pricing Definition

2. Tools for Competitive Pricing Analysis

3. Advantages of Competitive Pricing

4. Best Software for Your Competitive Pricing Strategy

Competitive Pricing Definition

Building competition is essential for a thriving marketplace of businesses and their associated products. Competitive pricing works better for products, as services tend to be priced pretty differently based on a lot of different factors. Products are more easily comparable. Competitive pricing comes into play when you’re comparing the benefits and features of similar products, and then using those findings to price your business’s products relative to the competition.

When gathering data for competitive pricing analysis, consider both direct and indirect competition. Direct competitors manufacture the same products as you do, and therefore are in consideration when a customer is looking for that product. On the other hand, indirect competitors offer products that overlap with yours but aren’t exactly the same. The reason you should consider even tangentially related products is to get as much data as possible for competition based pricing.

Before we get into data collection, there are three main strategies for competitive pricing. You can price below your competition, equal to them, or higher above their prices. There are advantages to all three methods. If your profit margins are good and you’re able to undercut a competitor’s prices, customers interested in saving money will be able to find you.

Pricing a product exactly the same as a competitor’s is a good strategy as well, especially if you’re able to demonstrate why your business’s product is superior. Finally, pricing above the competition works for certain products that consumers think are investment items and will feel the need to spend more money on them. To learn which method will work for you, you have to collect a ton of data and start doing research.

Tools for Competitive Pricing Analysis

It’s possible to do competitive pricing data collection manually by making a list of all of your competition and copy/pasting all of the information you wanted to gather into a document and doing your own analysis. However, in all likelihood, that method of data collection will limit your abilities a great deal. A web scraper for competitive pricing can do that work for you, while also potentiating new ways to collect and use data more effectively.

Web scrapers

A web scraper is a software program, basically a bot, that you can set to run and grab a bunch of data and organize into a spreadsheet for you. Businesses and marketers use web scrapers for a variety of reasons in addition to competitive pricing analysis: SEO/keyword research, customer review research, and general research on what the competition is doing. Outside of the competitor’s website, you can do indirect consumer research on social media websites.

Since all of the data from the web scraper will be in an Excel workbook or a .CSV file, you can quickly get through all of the data and organize it to gain insights. If prices are falling across the board, you can determine why this is happening (maybe a holiday-related sale) and institute a sale that sounds appealing to the customers. Competitive pricing strategies work really well for businesses when they’re backed up by strong data analysis. A web scraper allows you to collect a ton of data super quickly and institute changes. When prices can change at the drop of a hat, it’s important to keep up with trends and price your products competitively.

Proxies

Web scrapers can do a lot of work for you, but since they’re bots, they’re likely to get banned by websites. Viruses and bad actors on the internet might use similar bots to do nefarious things, so websites are quick to ban IP addresses attached to bots that they believe are attempting something bad.

This is where proxies come in. When you’re doing competitive pricing analysis, a proxy is just as necessary as a web scraper. The proxy provides a different IP address that hides your personal device’s IP address from the website. If your IP address was banned once, you can get around that with a proxy IP address. In addition, using a proxy IP address to do web scraping lets your IP address remain unbanned so you can visit a competitor’s website outside of the web scraping work.

Combining a proxy with a web scraper will give you even more of an edge in competitive pricing. You’ll be able to do a ton of data analysis quickly and be agile in response to changes in competition.

Advantages of Competitive Pricing

There are many advantages to competitive pricing, and it can improve your overall business strategy because you’ll be able to respond to trends quickly.

If you’re worried about profit margins, competitive pricing doesn’t mean always undercutting your competition. Pricing above your competition is a move that works for luxury brands. People who want to spend a lot of money on a particular item will not be dissuaded by a few extra dollars on the price tag. Customers will pay more for a product that you can guarantee will last for them or work the way they want, so it’s also important to use web scraping for data collection to understand how consumers talk about your competitor’s products and what they’re looking for.

Return on investment

Collecting data for price analysis is also an incredibly simple process. Making sure your pricing is dynamic and responsive is an easy strategy to fold into your digital marketing department, especially if you’re able to use web scrapers and proxies. Keeping on top of competitive pricing trends will give your business an edge in the incredibly crowded online sales market.

Since all of the prices from your direct and indirect competitors are out there, you don’t have to have any qualms about collecting those prices and analyzing them. If you’re a small business going up against big competitors, it makes sense to do some data analysis in order to compete effectively. Pulling a bunch of publicly available data is a common business strategy, and it’s been made even easier by the technological innovations of web scrapers and reliable proxies.

Making your small business a leader in your field means understanding the competition and using important tools like price analysis to get the edge.

Best Software for Your Competitive Pricing Strategy

If you have a good web scraper, you need an equally high-quality proxy to get the job done. There are free, public proxies that you could test to see if they work. Unfortunately, free proxies generally don’t have the benefits of a paid proxy because there are a lot of people on the same proxy IP address. This means network speeds will be slower (nullifying the usefulness of your web scraper), and the IP address could be banned from a variety of websites due to the actions of another user.

At Rayobyte, we have a variety of proxy options for individuals and businesses. You can also sign up for a one month plan to see if it works for you, but you’ll have all of the benefits of a proxy with security, faster network speeds, and unbanned IP addresses. It’s likely that you’ll want to get a rotating proxy with your web scraper, which switches out IP addresses as often as you need. This means you’ll always have access to a clean, unbanned IP address with which to do competitive pricing research that’s fast and efficient.

Rayobyte has starter, personal, corporate, and enterprise plans. The corporate and enterprise plans are probably your best bet for using a proxy for web scraping and competitive pricing, and you can get a rotating proxy for as low as $1.98 per IP address. Since we have servers all over the world, you can choose from a ton of countries for your proxy IP address location and have access to 24/7 customer service. We also have end-to-end control of our hardware so we’re able to address any security issues or network issues that might happen.

Proxies and web scrapers are the best way to level up your competitive pricing game, and you should get the best products for you so it can be a nearly automatic process.

Final Thoughts

These days, online marketing is more competitive than ever. Everyone is trying to stand out, so you have to find all the tools you can to pull ahead and get your products in front of possible customers. So many businesses have great products and get buried because they don’t have an interest in competitive pricing. It’s all about pulling together data so you can get your products in front of the people who need them, and making the data collection as simple as possible.

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