Changes in the marketplace happen often, and they happen quickly. Any retailer, regardless of if the company sells business to business (B2B) or business to customer (B2C), is probably familiar with the drastic effects price changes in the marketplace have on margins.
If you are a business owner who has scaled up your business to the point of having a presence in multiple marketplaces, then you will see price fluctuations in each market–which are based off supply and demand–vary drastically. This makes it exponentially more difficult to figure out how each change in price is affecting your overall margins for a specific product.
If you have the luxury of hiring an internal team of financial experts whose sole job is to monitor ricing in each individual marketplace, you may be able to stay ahead of the margin losses. Of course, only about 1% of companies can afford such an internal financial analysis team. The rest–which may, unfortunately, include you–may be losing an immense amount of value from the goods they are selling.
To solve this problem, many retailers are turning to third-party repricing by contracting emerging innovative companies such as goTRG. These third-party companies use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to increase their clients’ profit margins. They incorporate automated real-time pricing to their suites of fully-managed solutions as a way to dynamically adjust product prices and velocities, all based on market conditions. This drives previously unmatched sales performances. The integrated AI operates with min/max pricing, which ensures that the retailer won’t go below a profitable price–but also won’t exceed a sellable price. Retailers can now achieve pricing optimization that will move inventory at such a rate that the retailer won’t have to turn to liquidation or product disposal.
Of course, marketing strategies will change, depending on whether a retailer sells B2B or B2C. Fortunately, these innovative goTRG and similar companies can offer retailers over 20 omni-channel market choices. These tech companies incorporate repricing tools such as 9040TM for price control, intelligence, data collection, and analytics. 9040TM automates millions of sell price decisions a day. This software utilizes deep learning technology to track over a thousand different websites and a curated 500 million market data points to create automatic product catalogues and provide instant dynamic pricing. What’s more, these technologies allow you, the retailer, full control of operations through dashboards with interfaces that are easy to comprehend and manage. Although AI provides the retailer with automated pricing, the dashboard will allow the retailer to use its pricing feature to control prices, should he or she decide to override the system’s decision.
Third-party companies harness the full extent of their technology, facilitate multi-channel sales, fulfill all orders in their fulfillment centers through warehouse management software, and support your customers. As opposed to second-party outsourcing, integrated third-parties maintain their clients’ brand integrity. In fact, they augment a brand’s integrity by allowing the retailer–you, in this case–to put your focus on becoming an expert on your inventory, working directly with your customers, spending time in your storefront, marketing, and managing the other day-to-day operations of your business.
Some links in this post may be paid.
Photo: Getty Images