Competitive pricing
If you are operating in a market where prices tend to fluctuate quickly, it may be beneficial to set your prices on the basis of your competitors.
Price Data
Norce Competitor Pricing is based on a feed with competitor price data. There are several price crawling services available on the market and Norce can integrate with most of them. At the moment the feed has to be integrated by the Norce team.
Once the feed is up and running, you can see an overview of your incoming data at Pricing > Competitors. This overview displays the number of matched products between your catalog and each competitor, as well as the date and time of the last update for the feed.
Setting up a Competitive Price List
For a general overview on how to set up price lists, please refer to Price lists.
Once competitor prices are integrated into Storm, you can create a competitor-based price list by selecting the Competitive price rule. Competitive pricing can be based on both purchase cost and unit cost.
You can set up specific rules for a combination of Category, Manufacturer, and Value Range. If a Competitive price rule is selected, you can set the following parameters:
| PARAMETER | DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|
| Minimum Margin | Refers to the lowest possible profit margin that the calculated price can never fall below. |
| Preferred Position | Sets the desired position compared to the competitors when Norce calculates the price. Default is 1, the best price compared to competitors. If Preferred Position is i.e. set to 2, the calculated price will be the second lowest on the market. |
| Target Margin | The maximum margin if no competitors decrease the price. |
| Limit to Recommended Price | If checked, the calculated price can never exceed Recommended Price. |
If you change the Price rule to Fixed price, it means that the selected Category and/or Manufacturer are not included in the price calculation.
Setting Competitive Pricing on a Category
For each category it’s possible to define how the pricing should be set compared to each individual competitor. It’s possible to do this for each price list that has a competitive price rule.
| PARAMETER | DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|
| Priority | Priority is set as 1, 2, 3… and is used to rank the competitors when calculating the price. As long as the product is available at a higher ranked competitor, that competitor's price will be used for the calculation. If not set, all available competitors will be taken in to consideration when calculating the price. Please see the following example:
|
| Positioning | How your price should be adjusted relative to each individual competitor. Can be set as either a Fixed Sum or Percentage.
|
| Require in Stock | Allows you to specify that a competitor should only be included in the price comparison if they have the product in stock. |
Copying Category Competitors
By using the Copy functionality it’s possible to copy the category competitors to all child categories or to a completely different category.
Setting Competitive Pricing on a Product
You can define a price rule for an individual product, which will override the rules set on the Category, Manufacturer, or Price list level. To exclude a specific product from competitor pricing, change the price rule to Fixed price.
Reporting
It is possible to filter out competitors and competitor prices in the product listing by selecting either the Best Competitor or a specific competitor. Useful fields that can be added to the reporting are:
- CompetitorName
- CompetitorPrice
- CompetitorPositioningType
- CompetitorPositioningPercentageValue
- CompetitorPositioningFixedAmount
- CompetitorAdjustedPrice
- CompetitorIsinStock