Price Optimization in Retail Industry: Importance of Analyzing the ‘Amazon Effect’ on Sellers

Shopping is no longer confined to ‘carrying shopping baskets’ and taking ‘word-of-the-mouth’ opinion. Today, the internet has made it easier for consumers to shop for their desired goods and receive them on their doorstep. Noticing the change, global manufacturers, retailers, and suppliers have started considering the changing shopping habits of their online shoppers, when optimizing their pricing strategy.

When it comes to online shopping, Amazon is one of the emerging giants in the retail industry. Today, it accounts for nearly half of the total online retail sales. Therefore, the number crunchers are transforming their pricing models to measure the ‘Amazon effect’ on their products and services. In other words, Amazon.com has surfaced as the key to interpret the differences between the market prices and maximizing revenues, based on the data scraped from competitors’ websites.

Why ‘Amazon’ is the Next Big Thing for Retailers?

For customers, spending 20 minutes on comparing prices displayed on different websites is not a big deal. However, it is difficult for a retailer, who sells a hundred products online, to compare the price of all 100 goods on 100 websites.

Knowing that Amazon guides most retail pricing strategies in the market, organizations can start leveraging the scraped data and use it to their competitive advantage. Here is how they do it

• An automated web scraper (or data extractor) helps retailers capture product price, rating, and review on Amazon.
• The software develops automated pricing reports based on your preferences—yearly, monthly, weekly, daily or ad-hoc.
• The auto-generated comparison chart helps determine the pattern of changing prices and ratings.
• The items vulnerable to market fluctuations and are in great demand are highlighted as ‘priority objects’.
• Retailers can determine what players have been added to or removed from the marketplace in a specific time frame.
• It becomes easier to determine the profit margin, discount percentage and discount offers on specific objects.

Thus, with the valuable data that Amazon and its contemporaries provide, one can easily formulate a competitive pricing strategy, using apt tools to achieve maximum profits and sales. Also, the retailers get to know what competitors are moving up or down in the ranking chart, which helps them understand their customer’s shopping preferences and behavior.