Pricing is a crucial part of all businesses in all industries. One of the trends we have seen in the last few years is that consumers are getting smarter and looking for any and all discounts they can find. Even before they get to the store, they know the price they will be willing to pay for a particular product. Assuming you have a similar product, if the customer chooses to purchase your product instead of one of your competitors, you will most likely have a better price.

As you can see, price checking is becoming more and more important. So the big question becomes, if your customers are price-checking, why aren't you? The technologies are already in your hands in the field. There are no more excuses for not knowing about your competitor's prices.

One of the main difficulties when you want to implement a price-checking strategy is that there are some industries where pricing can change on a daily basis. With this in mind, you begin to understand why you need to have a monitoring procedure that allows you to know about these changes when they happen. Understanding these pricing changes allows you to adjust your products and pricing strategies to make your business more successful.

While the main reason why price checking is crucial for a business is to increase the business profit, there are other reasons why you need to make sure that you know all about the prices your competitors change:

#1: The competition in retail stores is extremely high:

On some occasions and for specific industries, companies change their prices several times during the same day. Some companies have now gone to change their prices several times a day. Specifically, Nebraska Furniture Mart had implemented specific technologies to allow them to change prices as quickly and often as necessary. So, it's important that you use price checking to see the prices your competitors have for each of their products.

#2: Predicting trends:

You can discover other valuable information when you check your competitors' prices besides their actual prices and changes. Let's say that you decide to lower the price of product A. While you're using your tool to see your competitor’s prices for product A, you'll notice if any of your competitors will lower their prices for this particular product or any others in the same area. So, if you weren't price-checking, you would not know about this potentially valuable information.

#3: Be proactive:

As a business owner, you hopefully have an avenue to reach your customers to let them know about a special discount on a particular product. Either by using email, text message, social media, or any other way, you will inform them that they can get this product from you with a significant discount. Staying ahead of the competition and knowing how long it will take them to respond to your price changes will give you a distinct advantage.

#4: Effective price checking leads to a more efficient pricing strategy:

When you don't do price checking, you typically only have a general idea about your competitor's prices. However, when you start to adopt a price-checking strategy and plan to collect the data, you'll be able to see how they change their prices and understand why they do it. This information will help you learn and develop a more successful price strategy for your business.

#5: You'll be tracking your competitors more frequently:

Even though this may not be entirely accurate (it depends on your industry and location, among others), price checking occurs for most businesses. While your competitors may be doing a price check on you, they will probably be checking out your products more sporadic basis. So when you are price-checking them on a consistent basis, you're gaining an edge that will allow you to be more competitive.

Even though price checking your competitor's prices is very important, you also want to ensure that you have access to your own prices. One of the best things you can do to manage to do both and even more is to check out EasyCheck. Learn about how you can conduct retail audits here.

One of the things that EasyCheck includes is the ability to have photos. But why would you need it? Simply put, it allows you to see all the products on your store's shelf, their disposition, and their prices. Plus, you'll get real-time data gathering from all the sales that you are making, product by product. And as if this wasn't enough, you need to ensure that you include all the products you have a discount on at a particular moment since your returns will be different. And EasyCheck does all the data aggregation for you, so all you need to look at is the data.

So, when you get an alert about a competitor’s price change, you can immediately check your own price and adjust it in that second if you think it is the best thing to do.

In a more and more competitive world, it's crucial that you stay on top of both your competitors and the technology that allows you to act faster. Price checking is essential nowadays. You know that consumers’ behavior is changing. Customers are less and less loyal to a brand or store. The most important thing for them is the price. And this is where you need to get them by using price checking.