Summary

• In today’s omnichannel retail environment, customers expect to move across channels seamlessly, making it crucial for retailers to provide an integrated and consistent experience. 
• Omnichannel price consistency is particularly important and inconsistency may lead to a loss of brand value.
• Ensuring price consistency involves monitoring prices across direct-to-consumer and partner channels through comprehensive retail intelligence software. 
• Leveraging EDITED’s Retail Intelligence platform enables retailers to not only maintain pricing consistency but also optimize strategies for competitiveness, contributing to a seamless omnichannel experience and an improved bottom line.  

Introduction

In today’s omnichannel retail environment, your customer is no longer shopping in only one place. Customers interact with your retail business in-store, through your website, on social media channels, on apps, etc.

Because your customer accesses your brand across channels, and most likely through more than one, it is crucial for you to create an integrated and consistent experience throughout your entire business so customers can move frictionlessly through their shopping experience. 

Omnichannel price consistency is particularly critical, as nowadays, consumers are going from one channel to the other fluidly. If you are not consistent, your brand might lose value in consumers’ eyes.

Importance of Omnichannel Pricing in Retail

• Companies with strong omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, compared to 33% for companies with weak omnichannel strategies (Genysys).
• 81% of customers have looked up inventory before visiting the store (Kibo), and two-thirds of customers research a product online before purchasing it in-store (Retail Dive). 

Price consistency for a brand in the omnichannel landscape includes: 

1. Ensuring you have the same price across direct-to-consumer channels (physical stores and online stores)
2. Monitoring prices across partner channels (wholesale, franchise partners, etc.) 

Verifying that you have accurate information about your business’s real-time pricing data, as well as that of competitors and your partners, is vital to creating a competitive and consistent strategy that ensures a better customer experience.

Using a retail intelligence platform, you can quickly understand performance across your channels by tracking enterprise, market, and partner data and visualizing these metrics in one place. With access to these insights, you can track and monitor your own prices and prices on your partners’ sites in order to adjust your pricing strategy and remain consistent. 

Utilizing Retail Intelligence for Pricing Consistency

A retail analytics solution provides comprehensive reporting that allows you to assess pricing performance across different channels and make data-driven decisions to enhance strategies.

1. Real-Time Price Monitoring:
   1. A retail intelligence platform can monitor prices across all channels in real time so you can identify any discrepancies and make changes accordingly. 
2. Historical Pricing Analysis:
   1. Analyze historical pricing data to identify patterns and trends, and utilize insights from past pricing strategies to optimize and adjust current pricing, while maintaining consistency.
3. Competitor Price Tracking:
   1. Track competitor pricing to ensure your prices align with the market. You can use this information to make data-informed adjustments to your prices in real time without jeopardizing consistency.
4. Dynamic Pricing Strategies:
   1. With access to your internal business and market data for pricing, you can implement dynamic pricing strategies based on market conditions, demand, inventory levels, and competitor pricing. 
5. Centralized Pricing Management: 
   1. Centralize pricing management by having a single source of truth for all pricing information. This way, any changes made to pricing are reflected uniformly across all channels.
6. Rule-Based Pricing:
   1. Establish rule-based pricing mechanisms to automate pricing decisions in your activation systems. Your team can configure rules to maintain consistency while allowing for flexibility in specific scenarios.  
7. Partner Price Management:
   1. By tracking your partner and internal enterprise data, a retail intelligence platform helps you ensure partner consistency with your own price architecture. Quickly identify discrepancies and automate changes across your strategy accordingly.  

Conclusion

By leveraging these comprehensive capabilities through EDITED’s Retail Intelligence Platform, retailers can not only maintain pricing consistency, but can also optimize their pricing strategies to stay competitive in the dynamic retail landscape. This approach contributes to a seamless omnichannel experience for customers and an improved bottom line. 

Uncover how EDITED can help you ensure consistent pricing in your omnichannel business today across both your own and partner channels. Schedule a meeting to learn more here.