Automated retail pricing is a pricing model that uses metrics to allow the company to control and maintain pricing, extracting the highest levels of sales and profitability possible. This is done with software that can analyze countless amounts of data, pricing models, predictions, and more in order to gain total control over how pricing affects your top line and bottom line.
Automated retail pricing through performance metrics is an ingenious method of removing the complicated equations and spreadsheets from the pricing process. It offers an alternative to legacy tools, allowing management and optimization of your prices in a fraction of the time, gaining the upper hand and modeling market and consumer trends ahead of the curve.
For companies to survive and thrive, this type of automated pricing solution has become the most important lever in today’s world of online shopping. Customers are more educated, and have more opportunities to find a product that fits their needs than they ever have before. With that in mind, it is absolutely crucial to be able to offer the most logical pricing that customers and prospects anticipate.
Prospects in today’s E-commerce landscape take a myriad of paths in their journey to a purchase, including but not limited to Google and Amazon. Each of these behemoths offer an enticing view of multiple retailers selling the same or similar products. Consumers have looked to Amazon for a trusted standard, but that has been changing rapidly with the flood of sellers who mask their locations, hide their true stock levels and other practices. The landscape is changing and consumers who purchase from Amazon and Google are becoming more concerned with other value-drivers besides price alone.
With experience, consumers now compare not just price points, but also branding, quality, convenience, reputation, warranties, location and speed/accuracy of delivery across multiple websites. The days of matching price at all costs are over. The race to the bottom has resulted in profit losses and business failures, mistakenly assuming the lowest price (which may or may not yield more sales) is the best price.
With so many opportunities in front of consumers today, automated retail pricing solutions are a mandatory requirement in order to maximize profitability and customer satisfaction on each transaction.
What Can Automated Retail Pricing Solutions Do For Small-Medium Sized Retailers?
Every business of every size has some strategic advantage. For example, smaller organizations can use their size to market more personalized service and often have the ability to react quickly to changing conditions. Larger companies may move more slowly but will utilize their scale and sheer size to their advantage in other ways, such as marketing and purchasing power. For those who make use of their size, be it large or small, there is a customer for everyone. Your overall strategic advantage can and should be combined with a pricing strategy which is a recipe for continuing success.
To take advantage of size, scope and scale, you must be able to leverage the large volumes of data that are readily available. Data floods retailers at unprecedented rates, and manually keeping up with the amount of information a company generates or acquires is nearly an impossible task. Recent breakthroughs in automated retail pricing software solutions now offer your business the same features and tools that Fortune 500 companies use to determine their pricing, and are now exceedingly affordable. In a market where misunderstanding the competitive landscape or how your customers perceive your pricing for even the shortest periods of time can result in a significant downturn in sales. Automated retail pricing software is the solution needed to allow retailers to compete around the clock with optimized pricing models, leapfrogging the competitor and directly understanding how your customers view your pricing through product performance metrics. The days of ‘set it and forget it’ static pricing are long behind us now; today’s pricing models require an adapt-or-die strategy, and that has never been easier than it is with new automated pricing software.
What Is Considered With Automated Retail Pricing Solutions?
Automated retail pricing solutions take a number of factors (customer-driven, supply chain-driven and market-driven) into consideration in order to determine the most effective and profitable price points for your business. Take complete control of your data with pricing software designed specifically to analyze hundreds and thousands of scenarios and price points in order to optimize results. Retail pricing software should seamlessly integrate and access data from your ERP. Your products can then be clustered within the pricing solution based on multiple product behaviors and specific attributes.
In addition, companies need smart price management solutions. These will allow you to apply any number of rules to your aggregated data in order to focus on multiple performance metrics. This in turn allows small to medium sized retailers to run effective A/B, or multivariate, price tests and react to changes in the market on the turn of a dime. Never fall behind the trends again. With advanced retail pricing software, any retailer has the capability to compete with even the most established Fortune 500 companies in their space.
Request Your Demo Today
Interested in a demonstration of an automated retail pricing solution in action and gaining an understanding of what it can do for your business? Schedule a demo with our team and we will be happy to help take your business to the next level. APL is committed to bringing superior price optimization tools to the SMB market, allowing them to compete effectively with the largest organizations on the planet!