Vendor description
PriceCop is a popular and easy-to-use price monitoring tool gathering data from the Internet to provide businesses with up-to-date market data about the particular products in online stores across the market or regions. The product manufacturers usually use PriceCop for the purpose of monitoring how sellers are implementing the Retail Recommended Price (RRP) policies, while retailers are mostly utilizing the price monitoring services and analytical reports generated by PriceCop. That is why the solution best fits the manufacturers or retailers with their own brands distributed across other chains that are challenged with the issue of price dumping. Another client profile that makes a good match with PriceCop refers to the online retailers willing to monitor and analyze the prices for their key value items (KVI) on a regular basis.
Vendor’s solutions
It is worth mentioning that PriceCop’s solutions work best for manufacturers and retailers. In particular, the manufacturers can use PriceCop to monitor the prices of their products by diverse retailers and stores to make sure the requirements, like Recommended Retail Price (RRP), are not violated. At the same time, PriceCop can also be used by retailers willing to track the prices for some of their products also offered by their competitors. In addition, some retailers are also having their own brands which could sometimes be distributed by diverse sellers. For such products, the businesses might also use the data monitoring services by PriceCop.
Advantages of the vendor’s solution
- Most of the users of PriceCop enjoy the convenience of analytic reports generated by the solution. These reports can be customized to the needs and requirements of a particular business. For example, PriceCop can deliver analytical reports at any time convenient for the user.
- The frequency of reporting is customizable.
- Speaking of the scope of the services offered by PriceCop, the three major aspects are worth being pointed out. First of all, PriceCop is most often used for monitoring competitors’ prices. Second, PriceCop is used by businesses for analyzing competitors’ prices and generating analytical reports. Third, the PriceCop is also used to find the price dumpers.
Disadvantages of the vendor’s solution
- It is worth mentioning that retailers using offline or omnichannel sales models may not cover the full spectrum of their needs with PriceCop. For example, if the business wants to align prices in both online and offline stores, it would likely need to look for a supplementing solution to cover the offline segment of the portfolio.
- As it was mentioned already, the monitoring services by PriceCop work best for the KVI products. It means that this solution works primarily for the businesses using market-based pricing, e.g. setting prices for particular products using the other competitors’ prices as a benchmark. At this point, it should be noted that such a market-based approach cannot be effectively applied to all of the products in the portfolio. Moreover, using market-based pricing for some types of products, like long tail SKUs, might even result in significant financial losses.
- The businesses using PriceCop may not always be capable of pricing the entire assortment using the market data being collected. In such a case, a combination of solutions or approaches is required. So, PriceCop would work best for those businesses having a relatively small number of products in the portfolio with a special focus on KVI positions. In contrast, the businesses with a diverse and huge portfolio of products may find some limitations while using price monitoring by PriceCop.
- The other disadvantages of the PriceCop are stemming from the fact that the company does not offer the ability to store the historical market data as well as product matching services. For those retailers willing to switch to more complex pricing approaches in the future, these limitations might become a substantial issue while choosing PriceCop as a data monitoring vendor.
