The holiday season is crucial for every online business, specifically eCommerce, to increase sales and maximize profit. One effective way to achieve this goal is to monitor competitor prices on Amazon, which helps to improve sales, build effective pricing plans, and gain a competitive edge in the sector.
Marketplace competition reaches its peak during any holiday season. Making data-driven decisions during Black Friday, Christmas, New Year, and other festivals ensures progress in product sales and enhances the consumer shopping experience.
This blog will explore the most effective ways to track competitors’ prices on Amazon, understand price fluctuations, and adjust your pricing strategy to boost sales and profitability.
Why is Monitoring Amazon Prices Important During Festival Seasons?
Monitoring Amazon prices during festival seasons is crucial for both customers and sellers. Let’s understand the primary reasons:
- Be Competitive in an Aggressive Marketplace
Amazon is a giant player in the eCommerce world, known for providing the best deals to customers with ever-changing product prices, especially during holidays. Amazon alters the prices based on product demand and competition in the sector. Tracking competitor prices on this platform assists in making your product prices highly competitive throughout the festive days.
- Maximize Profit Margins
Tracking price trends can help you adjust your pricing to maintain profitability while staying competitive. Tracking real-time prices enables you to identify opportunities to increase prices when a product is in high demand, which results in more profit.
- Gain Insights into Competitor Strategies
Analyzing how competitors adjust their prices during sales events can help predict future price trends and formulate more effective pricing strategies.
- Improve Buy Box Winning Percentage
Winning the Amazon Buy Box is critical for increasing sales. Since competitive pricing is one of the key factors, monitoring competitors’ prices allows you to set optimal prices to maximize Buy Box ownership.
Best Ways to Monitor Competitors’ Prices on Amazon
When adjusting Amazon’s pricing, monitoring competitors’ actions is crucial. This helps them adapt their strategies and leverage their market potential. The following are the different ways to monitor the prices of competitors on the Amazon platform:
- Utilize Automated Price Monitoring Tools
Automated price tracking tools assist businesses in monitoring competitors’ prices in real-time without requiring manual effort. The following tools provide instant alerts and information on price alteration.
- Keepa – Helps to track historical price data.
- Camel – This delivers comprehensive data on past price history, charts, and notifications.
- RepricerExpress – Assists brands in automating product prices to gain a competitive advantage.
- Custom API – It becomes beneficial in monitoring prices and analyzing competitors per business requirements.
- Set Up Price Alerts
Most price-monitoring tools empower companies to establish alerts to be notified of competitors’ price increases and drops. This information allows them to make swift changes to pricing plans to stay competitive during festival seasons.
- Use Amazon API for Price Monitoring
Amazon provides data APIs that can be used to scrape pricing information from competitor product listings. Amazon Marketplace Web Service (Amazon MWS) and Amazon Selling Partner API become handy while automating the pricing data collection process to perform competitive analysis.
- Web Scraping Services for Price Monitoring
Web data extraction services like Amazon price scraping can help obtain live price data insights from Amazon product listings. Custom web scraping services and data tracking solutions fulfill business requirements.
- Analyze Historical Pricing Trends
Identify how competitors kept product prices low during past festival season sales. This information can be essential for making future pricing predictions. Tools like Keepa and CamelCamelCamel deliver accurate historical pricing movements, which can be leveraged for better pricing decisions.
- Monitor Product Availability
Maintaining the inventory level is very important for impactful pricing strategies. You can earn more profit by leveraging product prices when competitors run low on product availability.
- Utilize Repricing Strategies
Repricing strategies help maintain competitiveness and increase profitability. Let’s get familiar with some proper repricing strategy.
- Rule-Based Repricing – Align predefined product pricing regulations by monitoring and analyzing competitors’ prices on Amazon.
- AI-based Dynamic Repricing – Utilize advanced AI and ML algorithms to enhance pricing in real-time based on market situations.
- Time-Based Repricing – Alter the product prices at specific times based on demand trends or special days.
Real-Time Use Cases of Price Monitoring on Amazon
Use Case 1: Dynamic Price Adjustment for Electronics Brands During Black Friday
One of the major electronic goods brands adopted real-time price monitoring to increase the sale of wireless headphones and storage devices on Amazon during Black Friday. This process allowed the brand to track and monitor competitor prices in the same product category.
Using an AI-enabled pricing adjustment tool, the business could optimize prices automatically every 15 minutes. The tool executed the script to monitor the decrement in competitor prices and automatically optimized headphone prices. With this solution, the brand remained a great deal provider while maintaining the profit margin. As a result, the brand gained more customers and enhanced sale by 48%.
Use Case 2: Stock-Based Price Adjustments for a Fashion Retailer During Winter
A big fashion retailer brand utilized competitor stock monitoring services to enhance the sale of winter coats during the winter holiday season. The retailer kept an eye on the competitors, and when they went out of stock, the business increased the prices by 20%. This technique helped them maintain stock levels, enhance sales, increase revenue, and fulfill customer requirements.
Use Case 3: Competitive Pricing for a Toy Manufacturer During Christmas
A well-known toy manufacturer uses an automated price monitoring solution to monitor price fluctuations for products in demand during the Christmas holidays. During sales, when competitors offer discounts or limited-time offers, the company is alert and can tackle the competition by providing additional discounts on its products.
This helped them to remain competitive on the platform, enhance conversion by almost 32%, and earn more profit.
Use Case 4: Avoiding Price Wars for a Health & Wellness Brand
A known healthcare brand providing vitamin supplements tracked Amazon’s competitors, who are aggressive players in slashing prices during the holiday season. They didn’t lower the product prices but utilized historical pricing data and customer buying patterns. The company made its listing better by adding more information and attractive images. This helped increase consumer engagement and sales by 25% in Buy Box over Amazon.
How to Upgrade Your Pricing Strategy During the Holiday Season
Retailers can set prices on Amazon based on the specific season, festival, or holiday to attract customers and maximize sales. Various approaches help enhance the pricing strategy and boost overall revenue.
- Pick Out Key Competitors
To maximize holiday sales, it is advisable to identify key competitors well before the season starts. Identifying competitors selling the same products on Amazon, having a high consumer base, and receiving positive reviews help improve your product listing.
- Monitor Lightning Deals and Discount Coupons
Many sellers offer flash deals, offers, and discount coupons to attract more buyers. Monitoring these strategies allows you to make pricing adjustments, optimize marketing plans, and fill gaps in product listings.
- Utilize Psychological Pricing Techniques
- Charm Pricing—Use attentive product price endings, such as .91 or .89. This helps attract users and makes products look affordable.
- Bundle Pricing – Presenting product bundles with marginally discounted prices helps to enhance overall order numbers significantly.
- Limited-Time Discounts—Showcasing time-bound offers or deals creates a sense of urgency among buyers, helping drive more sales quickly.
- Consider Different Pricing for Different Periods
Altering prices at different times significantly impacts product sales. Based on the scenarios below, product prices should be changed to combat battling during festive sales.
- Pre-Holiday Sales (Early November) – Changing prices during this time will make prices competitive and profitable.
- Peak Shopping Days (Black Friday, Cyber Monday) – Dynamic pricing to capture high sales volume.
- Post-Holiday Sales (January) – Clearance pricing to sell excess inventory.
- Test Different Pricing Strategies
A/B testing different pricing strategies can help determine the most effective approach for maximizing conversions and profits. Adjusting prices based on demand patterns can significantly impact overall sales performance.
Ethical Ways to Monitor Competitors’ Prices on Amazon
While monitoring competitors’ pricing on Amazon during holiday sales is vital, it is also crucial to execute this process ethically and comply with legal guidelines related to data protection. Here are some essential ethical aspects that you should pay attention to.
- Respect Amazon’s Data Policies
To protect the data, Amazon follows a robust set of rules related to the automated price tracking process and scraping the information. Product sellers must monitor and collect data with genuine tools and APIs, such as the Amazon Selling Partner API.
- Stay Away from Unauthorized Scraping
Price data scraping needs to be done responsibly and per data compliance and Amazon’s terms and conditions. Illegitimate or forceful data extraction can result in a ban or legal aftermath.
- Provide Respect to Competitor Data
Conducting the price monitoring process using only publicly available data is advisable. Collecting prohibited or personal information is considered unethical.
- Maintain Fair Competition
Businesses should avoid anti-competitive practices such as price fixing, collusion, or unfair undercutting. Ethical pricing strategies help build a healthy, competitive market.
- Prioritize Consumer Interests
Price monitoring should be used to offer fair pricing and improve customer satisfaction rather than solely focusing on undercutting competitors. Ensuring product value and service quality should be a top priority.
Conclusion
Monitoring Amazon prices during the holiday season is essential for staying competitive, earning more profits, increasing sales, and enhancing consumer experience. Automated price monitoring tools, authorized Amazon Pricing APIs, web scraping services, and dynamic price optimization procedures can help brands stay combative and achieve defined business goals.
Tracking prices in real time, analyzing historical pricing insights, and calculating pricing reconciliations help brands make their products popular compared to competitors and keep profit margins intact. Carrying out the strategies mentioned above during the holiday season assists companies in getting more customers and outnumbering the marketplace competition.
✯ Alpesh Khunt ✯
