What Goes into Online Pricing Intelligence?

In the last few decades, chess software has gone from a far-off dream to beating grandmasters. Empowered by AI, computers today can far outperform any human player at chess and help improve a player’s gameplay. Like in chess, your company can take advantage of AI and get the most up-to-date data you need through tools like online pricing intelligence.

Online pricing intelligence not only helps provide the essential information that companies need to stay competitive but also uses AI profit optimization to help companies find unbeatable strategies.

But what exactly does online intelligence pricing mean, why do you need it, and what are its components? We answer those three questions to provide you with a complete picture of everything that goes into online pricing intelligence.

Key Takeaways:

Online pricing intelligence tracks, monitors, and analyzes competitor pricing data.
Companies use online pricing intelligence to receive up-to-date pricing information that they can use to make informed decisions.
Hypersonix’s profit optimization platform can help you get the most out of your competitor pricing data.

What is Online Pricing Intelligence?

There are three components of online pricing intelligence, and the clues are in the name: online, pricing, and intelligence.

“Online” means that this pricing intelligence uses online sources to find information about your competitors. This is important because it expands the amount of information you have access to, while also converting that data to a digestible format so you aren’t overwhelmed by a plurality of data sources.
“Pricing” means that this online intelligence is related to your competitors’ prices and how you can best position yourself relative to your competitors. Online pricing intelligence isn’t just a list of data, it also includes actionable recommendations based on your own pricing strategy.
“Intelligence” has two implications: First, this online pricing includes actual data. While a businessperson’s intuition and understanding of an industry are important, online pricing intelligence gives you the added benefit of seeing the actual information that your competitors are publishing. Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, this means that your online pricing intelligence is analyzing data to glean insights and create recommendations.

In a nutshell, online pricing intelligence is the ability to track, monitor, and analyze competitor pricing data so you can make more informed decisions regarding your own prices. Much like the game of chess, AI and specialized platforms can drastically boost your performance. But unlike chess, pricing intelligence is more than a game, and nobody is playing it for fun. Online pricing intelligence can help give your company the advantage it needs to thrive, even in difficult markets.

Why Do You Need Online Pricing Intelligence?

In today’s messy market, you need online pricing intelligence to help you reign in the chaos of the modern abundance of prices and sources of data.

Mom-and-pop shops were plentiful around the turn of the 20^th century. Back then, there was no internet, phones were a rare commodity, and horse-drawn carriages were the most common form of transportation, so most businesses competed primarily against the other businesses in their local neighborhood. Businesses may have had one or two competitors, and to find the prices, they simply had to walk across the street.

Today, the business landscape is unfathomably complex, many retailers have shifted to a digital-first model, and nearly every business faces hundreds – if not thousands – of competitors. Tracking prices and gleaning insights from that data is more complicated today than it ever has been.

In the face of these new challenges, online pricing intelligence gathers data from a variety of competitors using automated software. One of the challenges of gathering this data is simply sourcing it. In what would take humans hundreds of hours, web scraping software searches a long list of websites for pricing data, gathers it in one place, and transforms it into actionable insights in the form of spreadsheets and other documents.

This is useful because it not only saves enormous amounts of human labor (by far the largest expense for most businesses) but also because it provides real-time, up-to-date intelligence on the pricing of all of your competitors.

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What are the Components of Online Pricing Intelligence?

Online pricing intelligence is indispensable to any modern business that wants to optimize its profitability, but it’s also a complicated endeavor. The good news for your company is that software can remove some of the most challenging parts of gathering and analyzing this data, but this process happens in stages:

1. Identify

While software is a powerful tool for unearthing competition, this process has to start somewhere. The first component of online pricing intelligence is identifying competitors. You can approach this component in a combination of several different methods:

Online search engines like Google or Bing.
Networking (both social networks and in-person professional networking)
Word of mouth (consider asking your customers what competitors they’re aware of)
Keyword research
Online communities and forums

Ancient writer Sun Tzu said, “If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained, you will also suffer a defeat.” Knowing your competitors is essential to turning data into action.

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2. Acquire

In this component, your online pricing intelligence truly begins to shine. Scraping the web for data is one of the tasks at which AI can far outperform human workers, so once you’ve identified your data sources, your online pricing intelligence software will monitor these sources to create an up-to-date collection of information.

3. Analyze

Knowledge is power, but only if you know how to use it. Once you’ve acquired data from your competitors, profit optimization software can help you turn that data into actual insights that can help inform your decisions. This software identifies trends and patterns and recommends real-time pricing updates – something that’s especially important in today’s rapidly changing business landscape.

Profit Optimization with Hypersonix

It’s been over 20 years since the first time a computer beat a world champion at chess. As technology becomes more sophisticated, the most profitable companies are using it to their advantage.

Hypersonix is one of the innovations that can propel your business to success. Enabled by powerful AI and connections to existing business systems, Hypersonix identifies pricing and inventory opportunities to minimize risk and maximize profitability.