Does an automated price optimization solution sound like a luxury for only the largest retailers with the most expansive assortments? That’s not the case! Price optimization can be a huge benefit for retailers large and small—and the positives go beyond being able to reprice.
In fact, we won’t include repricing on this list. While it is the biggest reason to invest in a price optimization solution, there are plenty of other perks that can help a business no matter its size. Here are a few reasons why this type of solution can work for your team.
Benefit No. 1: Manage Product Catalogs
A good optimization tool can really help you get a grasp on entire catalogs. The platform can serve as a central hub where you can manage all SKUs in the catalog, monitor prices, create pricing strategies, and preview recommended prices.
This will give you a high-level overview of the catalog, instead of a piecemeal view where you’re juggling tools, spreadsheets, and individual tabs. Doing it the manual way means you can easily overlook something or forget a product or a price when bouncing around sheets. With a price optimization tool, you can see catalog analytics in one location. Best of all, you can start tweaking your strategies and increasing margins from the platform as well.
Benefit No. 2: Improve Teamwork and Communication
Another benefit of this type of software, regardless of your company size and SKU count, is improved teamwork and communication. Working out of one platform makes it easy to organize all strategies and train your team on where to look and what to do. Again, they won’t have to learn which Excel sheet does what or bookmark 10, 15, or 20 links.
Wiser’s Price Optimization product, specifically, includes an Inspector feature that can be a big boost to communication. The tool automatically creates recommended pricing strategies, but then it also gives you a step-by-step breakdown of how it calculated those recommendations. That way, the pricing analyst can go to the category manager with hard data in support of the price changes. It takes emotions out of it, making it easier to get category managers on board.
Benefit No. 3: Predict the Impact of Pricing Changes
Whether you’re a small team or a large team, you need to have confidence in the price change before you set it live. Creating strategies manually might work for a time, but it makes it harder to understand the impact of your pricing decisions until the prices are out in the wild. That’s risky, and it can lead to lost profits and smaller margins because your tests are more likely to happen in the real world than back at the office.
On the contrary, a good pricing tool gives you time to measure the outcome of any new pricing strategy and what the impact would be on your bottom line. This is what Wiser’s Live Preview feature does—it gives you the ability to see the effect of strategy changes without impacting live prices. That gives you better pricing accuracy, as you still have time to make tweaks if you don’t like what you see.
Benefit No. 4: Customize Prices For Buyers and Locations
The right price at the right time can mean different things for different people. It depends on their location, their market, their buying behavior, and so on. This makes it a challenge to create effective pricing strategies manually if you’re selling across multiple regions to a wider variety of audiences.
This is where a pricing tool can help. You can use one platform to manage all your SKUs and create multiple pricing strategies based on unique criteria. That way, you’re customizing prices to best serve your customers wherever they’re located. Better yet, you can use learnings from these individual strategies to influence your overall decision-making. This brings us to your next benefit:
Benefit No. 5: Better Data, Better Decisions
Using a price optimization solution as the foundation of your pricing strategies gives you an easier way to measure the impact of pricing strategies, but also use those analytics and insights to set future prices. For instance, you can create a pricing strategy specific to a region, buyer type, and sub-category, then measure the results. What does the outcome tell you about the strategy? Should you adjust something? Take those learnings and apply them to other products?
It’s a big benefit to your workload to have a tool that can connect the dots between Price X and Y Sales. You can quickly start to support pricing decisions with hard buyer data, instead of gut feelings. Whether you’re a small team or a large one, having that quantifiable data to back up your pricing strategies will go a long way toward getting buy-in from other departments.
Price optimization can work for any retailer, no matter their size, because these tools provide a variety of benefits that can help the company, the customer, and the individual teams in charge of pricing.
Benefit No. 6: Save Time
Perhaps the biggest benefit of price optimization, outside of the ability to automatically reprice, is the time savings. Teams large and small have a ton of tasks they need to oversee on a daily basis. While pricing is one of them, it shouldn’t take up so much bandwidth and energy that other duties slip through the cracks.
Time-management challenges are common if you’re creating strategies via spreadsheets, manually updating the prices in the backend, and constantly checking sales figures to make sure everything is working as intended. How many times have you had to wake up in the middle of the night to push a price strategy live? Wouldn’t your rather, you know, sleep? A good price optimization platform can automate this process, freeing you up to do things you want to do—or at least get a little closer to a better work-life balance.
The bottom line is that price optimization is not just for the biggest retailers with the greatest budgets. It can work for any retailer, no matter their size, because these tools provide a variety of benefits that can help the company, the customer, and the individual teams in charge of pricing. Don’t forget to check out Wiser’s Price Management solution to learn more about how pricing tools can make your life easier.