Here are 7 most essential things to keep in mind while choosing a pricing intelligence tool vendor for your business:
Price
Price forms one of the prime consideration while selecting the right pricing solution provider for your business. During the days gone by, the companies used to pay a huge amount for collecting the pricing data of the competitors, manually or through basic data scraping tools. In today’s techno-commercial world, the cutting-edge automated pricing intelligence tools have not only made pricing data collection easier than ever, but has lowered the costs to a great extent.
Coverage
In this world of technological tug-of-war, it is not enough to only keep an eye on the competitor’s prices. It is also very important to compare the prices by matching your competitor’s products with your own. The better the intelligence tool, the better gets the ability to track competitor’s products and prices. This is what refers to coverage. Make sure that the pricing tool you choose, provides you with the highest levels of possible coverage. This way you will never miss out on the vital data ever.
Technology Proficiency
As the websites today differ significantly in terms of the product information they provide and structuring, pricing intelligence is surely not an easy task to perform. These differences put forward a various challenges related to extraction, data analysis and crawling. Choosing an inefficient pricing intelligence tool can lead to inaccurate and incomplete data extraction. Hence, it becomes truly important to have technically proficient team, so as to be able meet all such challenges.
Guarantee of Quality
Monitoring pricing data is all about accuracy. There can be no room for mistakes as any error directly affects the business. Even when the pricing intelligence tools are automated, manual quality checks must also be done on regular basis, so ensuring and verifying data accuracy.
Integration
It is very important to carefully check and negotiate on the customization of data formats provided by the vendor, so as to allow the easy integration with the back-end systems.
Flexibility of the Contract
While choosing a pricing intelligence tool provider, don’t get carried away with a long contract. There is usually no such complicated contract to be signed. Most of the pricing tool providers today offer an option of subscribing to the services and paying on monthly basis. One can also avail some discount for making complete payment at a time. This is commonly known as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model of subscription. This will allow the business to start with a small amount of money and a comparatively lesser number of competitors to track.
Scalability
In most cases, the companies wish to start with tracking fewer number of competitors and products and then scale up with time. As they scale up, it is important that the tool provider scales up the operations without compromising the performance and quality. Keep in mind to never take quality and performance for granted, thus never compromise while choosing a pricing intelligence tool provider.
Some Last Words
The online businesses are faced with a number challenges and nobody wants to be left behind in the race. It is hence very important to use the service provider that will help you in having a competitive edge over the other. We at ITSYS Solutions, offer a SaaS based web crawling service at less than $5/day*, that allows you to scale up as per your requirements. Our dedicated team of programmers are able to customize the output data formats so as to allow easy & quick integration with your existing back-end solutions. For a free consultation and a demo, visit us at www.website-scraping.com or call at +1-(518) 481-3433
