In today’s article we are going to reveal the four fundamental keys to build a competitive catalogue in ecommerce, it is as important to know our competitors offers as it is to know their range of products.
One of the most useful tools in the competitive watch is a catalogue intelligence service that allows us to know in depth the complete range of our competitors’ products, to see what products they have and their availability. It is very important that this information is up to date, truthful and reliable. So for a catalogue intelligence service to be useful it must include the following four keys:
1. Know what we don´t sell but our competitors do. We could detect products that would be interesting to include in our catalogue, not forgetting that the first step to selling a product is the availability. Doing this task on a daily basis and by hand would be impossible if we didn’t count on a tool.
2. Analyse the availability. Although it is impossible to know the stock count of each of our competitors we should know in a determined times space whether the article is available or not. We could even estimate a delivery time if the seller informs of it.
3. Detect range growth. We should have a global vision of our competitor’s catalogue and be able to analyse this graphically when a competitor is growing at a certain time. This is very useful to detect possible tendencies in product and category brands.
4. Discover price strategies. We will get to know the global price strategies that competitors use over time. Know what our competitors do with their prices at the start of the Christmas campaign, during sales or any other concrete dates, and it will help us greatly decide how to design our own pricing strategy using our catalogue intelligence.
Lastly, a functionality that is necessary in catalogue intelligence software is having a configurable alert system, so that when a certain competitor is out of stock on a product r when they have included a new article in their catalogue, you receive an alert direct to your email.
Remember: keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.
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