Top-5 price monitoring tools for the EU market in 2023

Best price monitoring tools to look for in 2023 if you're a European supplier or seller. How are they different and how to choose the one that fits your requirements.

What is price monitoring

Price monitoring means automated or manual tracking of pricing data streams. It is used by different market players to build a better pricing strategy, and by the end of the day, get more revenue.

Who benefits from using price monitoring software

If you work in retail or e-Commerce you know how essential competitor price monitoring is for achieving great sales results. One reason for that is quite recent. Consumers, especially after the pandemic, got used to comparing prices before making a purchasing decision. Another reason is that in general, Price competitiveness is one of the key KPI for Procurement and Buying departments. So this is something that should be tracked anyway. Finally, price monitoring is crucial for brands. If you’re a brand owner — you’d want to know who sells your brand, where, and at what price (hence, you need price monitoring software to track your resellers’ pricing activities and get alerted if someone starts selling your product below your MAP pricing policies or even suggested retail price) — but you also want to make sure that your pricing strategy is correct, that you feel market trends and offer products that will be in high demand (therefore, you have to do price monitoring for your competitors to learn how they price similar products, thus getting deeper understanding of the competitive context) All in all, pricing data and price intelligence is what nowadays online retailers just can’t get away without. And just like many smart consumers use special market price tracking software tools to always get the best deals, modern retailers are not expected to do competitive price monitoring manually. Online retailers who are serious about their pricing strategy use a variety of competitor price tracking tools.

How does price monitoring work

Competitor price tracking software has been first used and built for the US market, just like many innovative solutions. And for many years, most players on the European market were American companies.

However, in recent years more and more Europe-based software startups have started offering competitor price comparison solutions. Essentially, they all do the same thing: they track prices of competitors using web-scrapping solutions, compare product prices in real time, and offer some sort of analytics or recommendations based on what data they get from the web. All that said, the results of their work are very different. And here’s why.

Challenges of price monitoring, or why not all tools are the same

1. Multichannel distribution

Imagine, you have to compare prices on Adidas sneakers sold by 10 merchants.

— Merchant 1, 2,5 and 10 sells on Amazon, eBay and Google. They use different prices on all 3 platforms.
— Merchants 3,4,6 and 9 sell only through their own online store.
— Merchant 8 sells on eBay only. This alone sounds like an not so easy task. First of all, you’d need price monitoring software that would be compatible with all the platforms. Something that would be able to scrap data from eBay, Amazon (which always blocks the scrapping but it’s a different story, for another blog post), Google plus several other websites that you tell it to monitor. It has to somehow “identify” if seller 8 who uses eBay suddenly uploads a pair of used shoes and not use it in the data set because used shoes and new shoes are not that comparable.

Even more so, Merchant 8 is a small-sized business (while all others are medium-sized) so they can’t afford an e-Commerce Manager. The business owner uploads items they sell on eBay manually. Sometimes they make mistakes with GTIN or EAN code, and a pair of sneakers — a product that is supposed to be similar to yours — gets recognized as something different.

For example, an oversized dress. Or a pair of gloves. Because, you see, scraping tools are not that “smart”. They are not humans. They can’t recognize a pair of sneakers because they look like sneakers. If GTIN says it’s a dress, the tool would consider it to be a dress. To make the long story short, most existing price monitoring tools are not perfect. They can’t find about half of possible matches being fooled by human errors or other factors.

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2. Human factor

Another challenge is the quality of pricing analytics. All reports price monitoring tools customers get are rule-based. For example, you have to tell the service that you want to be notified in case X happens (competitor A increased prices). Most simple tools would do just that — they will send you an email alert if your trigger worked (Competitor A increased the price). But what if you don’t know about new competitors? What if a new player just entered the market but you have not thought of setting the trigger for it? Only “smart” price monitoring tools and services can do that. They will analyze the market niche as a whole, would “know” who you should be competing against and alert you when new players emerge. This is why we’ve put together this ranking of the best price monitoring tools: services that provide the most reliable data and do a better job than others keeping track of your competitive context.

Top-5 competitive price monitoring tools for the EU and Uk companies

1. Aimondo price monitoring software

A company built by German founders but successfully growing in all European markets

Pricing plans: start at $500
Free trial: 14 days
Pros: while all other players track your products based on only 1 data point (GTIN/EAN) Aimondo tracks matches based on at least 4 data points (for example, brand name, size, color, etc.) It does semantic analysis together with simple web scrapping and as a result, finds 99% matches. It would also not include the outliers in the data set if some products got there by mistake. Aimondo also uses AI widely and create industry and category-wide report, allowing its customers getting the deepest analysis possible and always be proactive with their pricing.
Cons: Not the cheapest tool in the market

2. Netrivals

Pros: Great European company with a long history of tracing prices for the EU and UK-based sellers. Acquired recently by an e-comm platform.
Pricing plans: starts at $500
Pros: very experienced team, many customers to showcase
Cons: as a art of an e-comm platform Netrivals is going to focus on the platform customers than on individual players

3. Prisync

Pros: company specialises on price tracking and monitoring, it’s the only service it sells. Therefore, it gets better and better with what it does in this respect. It can do the category-wide monitoring however, this service is not included in the starter’s plan and can only be a part of the higher-tiers (begin with $200/m).

Pricing plans: Start at $99
Free trial: 14 days
Cons: If you want to track several competitors on several channels (for example, on Amazon, eBay, Google plus their own websites) your billing can easily go wild. Prisync is good for small businesses that track only one channel or only limited competitors and have a small number of SKUs to track.

4. Minderest

Pros: One of the oldest companies in Europe that does price monitoring. Got almost all 5 stars on Capterra, and got many positive reviews from the customers. Why being a European company is important in general? Well, EU has much stricter GDPR rules than the US. And those directly impacts the quality of web-scrapping. If the company sees EU as the core market it would improve it’s web scrapping practices and adjust them to the GDPR rules changes. If the company is US-based and caters to the US customers mostly, they won’t bother that much.
Pricing plans: starting from $200
Cons: unfortunately, still can’t track about 30% of matches

5. Revionics

Pros: A fantastic tool for retail price optimisation
Pros: has a very long history of working with the EU-based retailers and brands. Revionics use AI to generate better category-wide reports, it uses AI to also find better matches for your products elsewhere.
Pricing plans start from $400
Cons: Revionics presumes quite challenging setup and requires some extra labor-hours from the employees to go through the learning curve and the installation.

What price monitoring tool to choose

You’d think that the most important factor for the decision making process would be the budget. However, if you want to solve a specific problem (like for example the one we described in the beginning, with 10 Merchants selling your product on various platforms) the monthly bill will be more or less the same from all the vendors. Why? Because the same problem requires the same usage of infrastructure.

Therefore, when tasked with choosing the best price monitoring tool for your business decide:

— If you need complex market-wide reports and analytics or you can get away with simple known competitor tracking
— If you want to get high quality data and exclude all the outliers or you can do manual checks when you have to change prices
— If you want a solution that would be fully integrated with your ERP system or you’re fine with checking out several dashboards and tabs throughout the day.

Based on the answers to these questions choose the solution that meets all your needs

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