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For retailers, selecting a tool that meets their pricing and benchmarking needs is often challenging due to the wide variety and diversity of available solutions. As a retailer, you face a wide array of tools, each serving distinct objectives. With similar names often used interchangeably, it’s easy to get confused. Let us help you untangle the complexities! Pricing tools, also known as price optimization tools or revenue management tools, are designed to enable retailers to proactively adjust their prices based on factors like demand fluctuations, consumer behavior, or competitor pricing. These solutions primarily rely on two approaches: Such tools are crucial for retailers to stay responsive to market changes while maximizing margins. Among these solutions, PricingHUB stands out by combining the rigor of rule engines with the predictive power of AI. This solution allows retailers to set prices based on defined policies while dynamically adjusting them in real time, thanks to consumer behavior analysis and market fluctuations. The pricing tool market is highly competitive, with traditional rule-based players facing off against modern solutions utilizing AI and machine learning for pricing recommendations. Here are a few key questions to ask your pricing tool provider: This approach formulates highly accurate price recommendations for each product by analyzing consumer behavior changes in response to price adjustments, using price elasticity calculations and machine learning. Due to its complexity, this approach is offered only by a select few solutions, including PricingHUB. Rule engines, commonly used by traditional tools, allow retailers to create and follow business-specific and strategic pricing rules. PricingHUB goes a step further by incorporating AI to calculate product elasticity based on historical data. Performance measurement is a crucial factor when selecting a pricing tool. Understanding the evaluated KPIs and being able to measure ROI is essential to justify the tool’s value. At PricingHUB, we assess performance by comparing optimized product groups to control groups. Optimized groups include products and periods where PricingHUB’s recommended prices were applied. In contrast, control groups consist of products and periods where “Customer Legacy Prices” were used—prices manually set by the pricing teams according to their usual processes, without any intervention from us. In a highly competitive sector like retail, knowing competitor pricing and adjusting your own accordingly is a significant advantage for your pricing strategy. In addition to these questions, here are other factors to consider when selecting your pricing tool: To ensure long-term continuity, it is important to understand how your pricing tool will evolve over time. Upcoming developments and their associated timelines are key factors to consider, as they will help you ensure the tool continues to meet your needs in the future. Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) is now essential for retailers aiming to optimize their commercial performance. Beyond automatically adjusting prices based on consumer behavior, machine learning offers a wide range of pricing use cases. It enables the measurement of price elasticity, identification of relevant control groups, suggestion of optimized pricing rules, and improvement in product matching. These solutions, combining efficiency and precision, are powerful drivers for enhancing both commercial performance and productivity. Having a powerful and comprehensive tool is an excellent starting point, but it is not enough. It’s essential to ensure that you can use the platform seamlessly to meet your specific needs. This is why support from a pricing expert is indispensable. Whether it’s onboarding with the platform, ongoing project and needs monitoring, or guidance on pricing strategies, the success of a pricing project relies as much on the quality of the tool as on consistent and personalized support. Benchmarking tools, also known as competitive intelligence tools, are essential solutions for retailers aiming to adjust their prices in line with the competition. By providing an overview of market pricing, these tools enable retailers to assess the competitiveness of their offerings and deliver benchmarking data. When combined with a pricing tool, they can help retailers optimize their prices based on competitive insights. In a competitive environment where prices constantly fluctuate, the primary challenge for retailers lies in making informed pricing decisions. Benchmarking tools address this challenge by providing comparative data on competitor prices. This allows retailers to adapt their strategies with agility, adjusting prices at a frequency that aligns with consumer expectations to respond effectively to price increases or decreases. In this way, retailers can fine-tune their pricing strategies, maintain their market position, and align price change frequency with consumer preferences. These tools also play a crucial role during the launch of new products, where setting competitive prices from the start is essential. By accessing in-depth comparative analysis, retailers can strategically position their products while considering market trends and consumer expectations. The challenges associated with using benchmarking tools include the ability to interpret data accurately to avoid incorrect conclusions and the necessity of using a pricing tool to automate price adjustments at the desired frequency, ensuring a competitive edge. Retailers must also ensure that the data is reliable and representative of the market to enable effective decision-making. An important clarification: the term “benchmarking tool” encompasses two key functionalities that address specific needs—scraping and matching. To make the right choice, it is crucial to differentiate between them and select the appropriate tools accordingly. Some of the most well-known benchmarking tools on the French market include RetailShake, Paarly, and BrandQuad. Although the term “scraping tools” is often used, there are no standalone “scraping tools” per se. As mentioned earlier, scraping is actually a functionality integrated into benchmarking tools, much like matching is. These benchmarking tools collect pricing data using a technique called “scraping,” which automatically extracts information from competitors’ websites. Through price comparison analysis, retailers can then leverage a pricing tool to adjust their own pricing strategy, staying competitive while maintaining optimal margins. This ability to quickly react to market changes is particularly valuable in environments where price fluctuations are frequent and directly impact market share. However, data collection via scraping presents certain challenges. Some websites restrict access to their information, which can limit the quality of the data obtained. Additionally, frequent website updates can introduce errors into comparative analyses. Promotional strategies such as bundles, discounts, or special offers can also skew results by presenting specific or temporary data. Despite these challenges, scraping tools remain essential solutions for refining pricing strategies based on market and competitor trends. The use of such tools also helps retailers better understand regional pricing trends, by store or surface type, enabling them to adapt prices locally, thereby improving their responsiveness and ability to meet consumer expectations. Meet one of our Pricing experts Scraping and matching functionalities work hand in hand, playing a vital role for retailers in gathering and analyzing competitive information. Scraping is the first link in the chain: it involves automatically extracting data on prices, descriptions, and product features from competitors’ websites. This raw data, often disparate or varied depending on how each site presents the information, must then be processed and organized. This is where matching tools come in. While scraping focuses on data collection, matching harmonizes the data by identifying correspondences between products. These solutions align similar or identical products, despite differences in descriptions, technical features, or titles. The goal is to ensure that price comparisons between your products and those of competitors are accurate and relevant. By combining scraping and matching functionalities, benchmarking tools provide retailers with a clear and precise market overview, enabling consistent price comparisons with truly equivalent products. This helps avoid errors in price adjustments that could arise from comparisons based on poorly matched products. Together, this tandem not only delivers data but also reliable insights for pricing decisions. The challenges of this combination include managing large-scale data and addressing the variability in product descriptions across different platforms. Matching algorithms must be robust enough to handle this complexity, while scraping tools need regular updates to adapt to changes in the structure of competitor websites. For retailers, this complementarity between scraping and matching ensures precise comparative analysis, which is essential for adjusting prices based on competition and maintaining a strong market position. Often, scraping tools also serve as matching tools, offering product matching capabilities. However, what these tools never do is optimize prices based on product matching. That role falls to pricing tools like PricingHUB. These tools leverage extracted and matched data to apply pricing rules (e.g., setting prices X% higher) to help retailers maximize their strategies. For retailers striving to remain competitive and maximize margins, selecting the right pricing and benchmarking tools is crucial. Distinguishing their roles is essential: By strategically combining these tools, businesses can monitor market trends, react swiftly to competitive changes, and optimize pricing to remain attractive while preserving profitability. Meet one of our pricing experts The Best Pricing and Benchmarking Tools for B2B and B2C Businesses
Under the label of “pricing solution,” numerous tools address specific needs, making it essential to understand their purpose to make informed strategic decisions that maximize both competitiveness and margins. Types of Pricing Tools
Pricing tools, price optimization tools, scrapping, and matching tools… While these terms are often used interchangeably, they serve complementary roles, making it essential to differentiate them. Understanding each tool’s role ensures you choose the one(s) that best meet your needs. Pricing Tools
Definition and Objectives
These tools analyze large volumes of data to provide pricing recommendations based on parameters such as stock levels, historical purchasing trends, seasonality, and competitive data. How Pricing Tools Work
By continuously optimizing prices, they help strike a balance between competitiveness and profitability—key to thriving in competitive markets. The Best of Both Worlds with PricingHUB
PricingHUB also ensures data security and offers a scalable solution that adapts to evolving business needs. How to Choose the Right Pricing Tool
1. Can I tailor my pricing using a consumer-centric approach?
2. Can I define my own pricing rules?
3. How is performance measured?
4. Can I align my prices with my competitors?
Most pricing solutions allow for competitor price alignment, but this adaptation can be achieved in different ways: either by integrating the data yourself or by using a specialized solution. In the case of PricingHUB, we have chosen to partner with several specialized experts in the field. Other elements to consider
Roadmap:
AI Capabilities:
Support Services:
Benchmarking Tools
Definition and Objectives
Challenges with Benchmarking Tools
Scrapping tools
Discover the benefits of Machine Learning in our Pricing strategies
Matching tools
Conclusion
Assess the potential of price elasticity for your business
