Managing Competitor Price Monitoring for Ecommerce Product Variants

What are the most frequent product variant listings in the business

Flourishing business management in e-commerce industry needs expertised skills to manage natural corner cases that are part of the trade itself. Product variants are one of the key issues that need specific attention from Ecommerce merchants, and they need to be managed with extreme care.

Product variants have been the hot topic on forums and part of online/offline discussions. In other words, it’s a quite common corner case in e-commerce as it’s almost related to every aspect of e-commerce operations, like the product listing, pricing, shipping and all.

As the most trendy global e-commerce price intelligence software out there, DataCrops price monitoring software has a solution for handling the problematic competitor price tracking situations where product variants come into picture. And in this blog, we will demonstrate you what are the most frequent product variant listings in the business and how DataCrops handles them better, and why it’s really important for different e-commerce verticals.

Also Read: How to Increase Ecommerce Sales using Competitor Price Monitoring?

What precisely is a Product Variant?

A product variant is the parent product’s numerous variants, like diverse sizes and categories. The delicate part of these products is that, they are factually the variants of the demanded same product. In Ecommerce world it is known as the listing of products under the same product URL, however they are not completely the same, and may differ in color, size, flavour and much more.

These disparities also alter the pricing for the product variants, so they are listed under the same product category or URL but may not be the same although their parent product is identical. So, this makes price tracking and web data extraction tougher where the standard URL extraction or ordinary scraping thinks there are single price points for every URL and listed product. This complexity or logic leads us to the claim that being able to manage this tricky situation, a competitor price tracking software can be the best option.

Product Variant Listings on E-Commerce Portals

Not every e-commerce site is same. So, we see multiple ways to list product variants in different e-commerce portals. DataCrops can manage all of these variant price tracking cases effortlessly, to let its users facing these situations to continue growing in their online businesses with well turned-out competitive e-commerce pricing.

A) Product variants listed as divided rows

From the customer point of view, this listing format is the most comprehensive and instinctive way of demonstrating product variants comparatively.

The customer or the consumer effortlessly select the required product variant given at the picky line of variants, and adds the product into a shopping cart, with the individual price point listed on that particular line.

From price monitoring software solution perspective, these variants listed as lines can be illustrious from one another; by just knowing which variant’s price is essential to be tracked? Here, by using DataCrops variant price tracking solution feature, users can point to the best direction, by adding URL extensions initiating with “#” at the end of the unique URL, and add the line count that they desire to get the price points from.

For example, if the users need to track the price for the variant being listed, all that’s required to be done is adding the product URL into the DataCrops account, at the URL end-point.

By doing that, the user will be pointing DataCrops software solution to the particular product variant, each time it extracts the pricing data and information. This will simplify the things and complexities led by multiple price points under a sole URL.

Also Read: How Online Retailers Can Make Extra Profit?

B) Variants listed in different drop-down options

In contrast with the above case of listing variants as detached lines, some Ecommerce portals prefer to limit the amount of product information displayed and the online shopper’s needs to make a drop-down selection for the precise variant option.

This time, we have product variant options that come into view as drop-down choices however not as visible lines.

However, thanks to DataCrops Ecommerce price comparison software technology, when the drop-down is pointed, the variants all over again appear as listed one after the other, and the user applies most of the clicks for choosing the desired variant. So, for a competitor price monitoring & tracking software solution, being able to imitate the precise same user behaviour becomes a prerequisite.

DataCrops in this scenario needs to pick the correct drop-down choice, by defining the right line of that explicit product variant in the opened drop-down form. And when the user adds that URL into DataCrops dashboard it will let the user monitor the desired price for the spot on product variant.

Also Read: How to Increase Ecommerce Sales on Amazon & eBay?

C) Product variants in the form of clickable buttons

Here, all variant information is listed together subsequent to or under every product. So, to add the accurate variant into cart as a online shopper, we require choosing the accurate variant by clicking on the exact variant.

DataCrops here powers and imitates the shopper behaviour from a price extractor’s viewpoint, so it should before now be clear for you that DataCrops can also assist its users to monitor the spot on variant prices in such situations.

Here, also the precise # extension has to be added at the end of the main product URL. So, for the particular variant, adding # at the end of the main product URL and adding that URL into the DataCrops account all done automatically will let the user to receive proper price-points for the relevant product variant.

Key Takeaways

Working with e-commerce companies of a range of sizes around the globe and 1000+ total number of clients really teaches us a lot here at DataCrops.

So, ride along and feel free to explore our solutions by taking a free DataCrops product demo here to start off automating your competitor price tracking procedures covering all the Ecommerce scenarios.

Steps to make a Price Comparison Website

Build a Price Comparison Website

Price comparison sites have become much popular almost immediately after the E-commerce revolution. The value proposition offered by the price comparison websites assists consumers to save a substantial amount of money while online shopping. The capability to check the price of a product on several E-commerce portals at one single place brings in handiness and saves adequate time. It provides a profitable business opportunity by drawing noteworthy revenue from affiliate advertising and sales. Building a price comparison website is not as easy as it sounds and needs technical proficiency and a consistent means of price data acquisition. We will make you explore significant steps in building a price comparison site

1. Choose a niche

The revenue perspective of a price comparison portal fully depends on its niche. Choosing the precise niche and targeting it is a vital part of making any winning website. You could also target correct geographies that have a higher demand for your products and related revenue potential to boost the traction further. Price comparison sites are more profitable when they work with focused consumer products. You might want to regard as the factors that affect the purchasing decision of products in a niche before entering into it.

2. Affiliate partnership

The most important revenue source of price comparison web portals is affiliate marketing. Most of the E-commerce portals have a powerful affiliate system by means of which you can get a commission for the online sales you make for them. To get initiated with this, you will first have to sign a business partnership agreement on admired E-commerce web portals that you will be utilizing for price comparison. Once approved as an affiliate partner, you will be given a referrer code or name that can be added to the different product links going out from your price comparison portal. Joining as an affiliate partner is a very simple procedure, which should not be a reason for any concern.

3. Technical Setup: E-commerce Price Comparison Software

This would be the most complex characteristic of commencing a price comparison website. There are diverse methods by which you can set up the price comparison software engine that would empower your comparison portal. E-commerce price comparison software will compare the different lists of products and related prices, providing precise market adjustments within an exact range. This requires superior data extraction software; DataCrops does this best match up to any other solution, as it is set-up with a centre on E-commerce price comparison.

Build it from base

Hiring a software company dealing with pricing intelligence software will be the best bet if you are demanding to make a price comparison software engine by involving your innovative ideas and their technical expertise. This would clearly be somewhat a costly alternative. However, the benefit of quality work and business results will be better if you hire an experienced price intelligence software company. They will have the proficiency to work with existing price comparison engines that might sync with your requirements. Developing a customized price comparison engine will consume more time and efforts. However companies like DataCrops build flexible competitor price monitoring and price tracking software which is an added advantage to build a price comparison website portal.

Price comparison software in the backend

If you don’t want to invest in a price comparison engine build from the base, there are ready-made solutions that can fit your budget, time and enable you to quickly start with your portal. The only difficulty is that it might not accomplish all your business or technical requirements.

Web data extraction software

Now that you are ready to create and work with your own price comparison website, it’s time to extract or acquire the required price as well as product data. Data being the prime fuel of any price comparison software engine, there should be a firm system in place to collect and load this data into your website portal. Web data extraction and crawling technologies are utilized to fetch or extract online product and price data from different E-commerce websites for real-time or near to real-time comparison. Also as the quantity of products will increase the scale of web data extraction need to be increased too. Price data can be attained by using web data extraction software which will come along with the price monitoring software set up when you opt the software from companies like DataCrops which provide end-to-end price comparison software tools.

Price comparison site management and maintenance

Since managing and maintaining a price comparison website is a challenging job, we advise going with a web data extraction service provider who also offers price monitoring software for the pricing as well as product data. It is vital to note that the overall quality of the information has to be of high-level accuracy for your price comparison website portal to run efficiently. Key Takeaways Going ahead with a price comparison site is not as problematical as it might look from outside. Once set up, data intelligence is the only thing you should concentrate on to keep the price comparison website lively and help in growing your business in terms of revenue. Related Articles: What is the Role of Competitive Intelligence in Travel Industry? How Hotel Pricing Intelligence can assist Hoteliers yield more Profits?