Retailer Price Monitoring: A Comprehensive Guide

Finding an advantage can be difficult, especially in competitive retail industries with many players. That means there’s no such thing as too much information, particularly as it relates to the prices of your products and those of your competitors.

Knowing current retail prices can give you a better idea of where to start when selling your own products and services. Leveraging retail price monitoring solutions like Visualping allows you to determine the best pricing strategy and how to implement it to gain an edge against your competitors.

What Is Retailer Price Monitoring?

Retailer price monitoring refers to the continuous monitoring of third parties that resell your brand’s products. This process is intended to ensure that specific resellers maintain compliance with your contractual pricing agreement.

Retailer price monitoring should only be a single component of your larger retailer monitoring strategy — competitor promotion monitoring, hiring monitoring, and sales monitoring are also important. By building out intelligent price management systems, you can streamline the price management process and improve ROI.

The Challenges of Selling via Third-Party Retailers

Selling your products via third-party retailers can offer additional income and allow you to quickly extend your brand to more customers, but there are some things you should watch out for if this is the route you decide to take.

Allowing third-party sellers to sell your products can have some unwanted effects since you’re allowing resellers to represent your brand. Problems such as bad customer support, unscrupulous pricing, and faulty products will degrade your brand, so it’s important to ensure that resellers are meeting the terms of your agreement.

You can keep an eye on third-party resellers and maintain brand consistency by watching their item listings. Visualping can help you manage everything from price tracking to updated terms and conditions.

What Elements Should You Be Monitoring?

Maximizing your sales by working with with resellers is a good strategy, but it can backfire if you don’t know what to monitor.

Resellers can easily break the rules you’ve put in place. Formulating a plan of action ahead of time will allow you to respond swiftly and ensure that your brand’s reputation isn’t damaged.

Tracking the most important elements of your resellers' item listings lets you focus your time and resources where they matter most. E-commerce monitoring tools can be useful for tracking these elements.

Pricing Pages

The most important element to keep track of is reseller pricing pages.

Getting an overview of what items third-party sellers are offering and how much they’re charging for them will give you some idea of whether term obligations are being followed. Map monitoring, for example, can help you get a hand on whether minimum standards are being met.

While manual checking can work if you’re just watching a page or two, this method is virtually impossible with larger agreements. Luckily, tools such as Visualping enable you to track prices as they’re updated. That way, you can be notified about price cuts, increases, sales, and discounts as soon as possible.

Stock Levels

You should definitely consider monitoring your resellers' stock levels to ensure that they have a full range of inventory to meet customers' needs. By learning about out-of-stock products quickly, you can immediately act to refresh their stock, or resolve any other issues.

Reviews

Another great way to get a handle on third-party sellers is to look at consumer reviews.

Reviews give you important insights into how customers feel about third-party resellers, including their attitudes about pricing and how satisfied they are with their purchases. Visualping can also notify you whenever new reviews are posted, giving you some much-needed insights into reseller behavior.

While checking reseller product listings to see what people are saying about them can be useful, it offers a somewhat subjective view, so be judicious about any conclusions you derive.

How to Use Visualping to Keep Tabs on Third-Party Retailer Pricing

Although monitoring the elements of third-party sales is essential, it can be difficult to keep up when things are changing quickly. Visualping was designed to dynamically monitor, track, and notify you of changes so you can focus on core business tasks.

You can use Visualping to monitor multiple reseller listings for changes and keep up with all your agreements in one convenient hub. If you need to be updated immediately about updates to a page or section of a page, Visualping will let you know the instant changes are detected.

Getting started couldn’t be easier. Here’s how.

Step 1: Copy the URL of the Reseller’s Listing for the Product in Question or Category Page Featuring a Selection of Your Products and Their Prices, Then Paste It into the Search Field on Visualping’s Homepage

The first thing you need to do to keep tabs on third-party retailer pricing is to find the product page you want to track and copy the URL. Then, head to the Visualping homepage and paste the URL into the search field. The page will load in the tool, allowing you to select what you want to monitor.

Step 2: Select the Part of the Page You Want to Monitor

Next, choose the part of the page you want to have Visualping scan for changes. During this step, you can also refine your notifications so you only get messages for important updates.

Step 3: Decide How Often You Want Visualping to Scan the Page for New Changes

Once you’ve set Visualping to track a page, your next step is to let it know how often it should check back. Depending on your needs, you can select a period as infrequent as once per month or as frequent as once every five minutes. Just remember that receiving updates more than once per day will require a paid subscription.

Step 4: Enter the Email Address Where You Want to Receive Retailer Price Change Alerts

You're nearly finished setting up your account — the platform just needs to know where to send notifications. You can choose any communication channel to receive messages, but for now, you must enter a valid email address. Make sure you provide an address you check regularly to ensure that you don’t miss out on important updates.

Step 5: Check Your Email to Complete the Signup Process

To finalize the setup process, open your email and locate the message sent to you by Visualping. Clicking on the included link will take you back to your Visualping account for verification.

Once that’s done, you’re all ready to go. Visualping will send you a notification anytime a third-party retailer changes the prices of their products, meaning you’ll always stay in the loop.

Visualping Lets You Make the Most of Your Retailer Price Monitoring

Retail price monitoring is essential for businesses that contract sales to third parties, but ensuring that all the relevant terms and conditions are being followed to the letter can be difficult without the right setup.

Fortunately, selling via third parties doesn’t have to be complicated. With Visualping, you can monitor the pricing of your brand’s products and maintain consistent quality across retailers.

News alerts, social media monitoring, and report generation are just a few of the benefits of using Visualping for your retailer price monitoring needs. Visualping keeps track of all changes so you can focus on doing what only you can do.

We’re dedicated to making the internet work for everyone, which is why we’re trusted by Fortune 500 companies worldwide. Deploying Visualping for your website detection, monitoring, and alerts will make it easier to stay on top of any price drops and promotions.

Try Visualping absolutely free today to see how it can help you stay on top of ecommerce monitoring and third-party sales.