Summary

• Competitive retail shopping involves comparing prices and products from different competitors
• It helps businesses stay relevant and competitive by offering the best assortments and prices based on in-season consumer shopping trends
• Manual competitive shopping can be time-consuming, and automating the process can save businesses time and money
• Digital solutions such as retail analytics software can help businesses benchmark their assortment, identify sell-outs, assess opportunities, and optimize in-season trading
• EDITED offers a competitive perspective of customer preferences with a business view into product preferences, marketing touchpoints, location preferences, costs, returns, reviews, shopping behavior, loyalty, profitability, and more
• EDITED’s insights can help businesses drive personalization and brand loyalty, increase revenue, and control costs.

What is competitive retail shopping?

Let’s begin by exploring the definition of competitive shopping. Retail comp shopping, or seasonal competitive shopping, entails comparing prices and products from different competitor brands and retailers. Comp shopping is an invaluable tool for visual merchandising and brand and retail businesses to stay relevant and competitive. They do this by offering the best assortments and prices ausing their knowledge of the retail industry and in-season consumer shopping trends in 2023 and beyond. 

Importance of competitive shopping for visual merchandising and brand and retail businesses

Competitive shopping helps improve your knowledge of localized product trends and provides feedback that supports your product development process. Nostalgic perks  for the merchandiser previously included travel to fashion capitals to explore competitors and the market in person. However, increased saturation, globalization and proliferation of online channels and needs for operational efficiency have seen travel often replaced with volumes of manual data analysis and increasingly limited travel.

What does retail competitive shopping look like in your business today?

How many of these situations sound familiar to you? Are you manually surfing the web on competitive sites and visiting local stores to find out what is selling when everything is trending? How many hours do you spend searching trends, assortments and prices for in-season trading and longer term planning? Even more importantly, how can you stay competitively priced against key players in your market to ensure you remain relevant? You manage multiple data sources. Trying to export all data to Excel is highly manual. 

With retailers amplifying the number of products on their comms sites (a 29% increase for Q3 2022 vs. Q2 2022 in the US alone), analyzing the data from the items you care about within the billions of SKUs can be a time-consuming and costly exercise. 

Having a 360-degree view of both your competitive marketplace and your business means no more blind spots or guesswork. Traditional web surfing and store comp shopping do not provide merchandisers with the customer data they need. Discover why you need a 360-customer view of merchandising here. 

How can you automate competitive shopping?

There are several ways to automate retail ‘comp’ shopping. One way is to use a software program that automatically collects competitive price, category and assortment data from competitors. Another way is to use a website to aggregate these data points from different retailers. In a recent article, McKinsey & Co. estimated that applying integrated digital solutions to merchandising could lead to up to a 50% faster time to market, an 8% rise in full-price sell-through and a 20% decline in manufacturing costs. 

Once you have collected price data, compare prices from different retailers. You can also use it to track price changes over time to make informed assortment and pricing decisions. 

Leading global retailer Mango is established in over 50 countries worldwide and uses comp shopping to deliver customer centricity. “MANGO must have a global and local vision of the company’s positioning in each market to execute our strategy. We have different competitors around the globe. MANGO must adapt products and prices to the customer needs in each country,” said Marta Setien, Director of Pricing at MANGO.

Automating retail comp shopping can save businesses time and money. It can also help businesses to stay competitive and offer the best prices to their customers. In a modern world, where more products are being added to assortments that rely on timeliness, speed to trends and more data-backed decisions when it comes to in-season trading and adding additional seasonal styles for best-performing categories, it’s only natural that brands and retailers are looking for automated solutions to take the guesswork out of comp shopping.

What are some of the benefits of automating retail comp shopping?

• Saves time and money: Automating retail comp shopping can save businesses significant time and money. It eliminates the need for employees to compare manually.
• Stays competitive: Automating retail comp shopping can help businesses to remain competitive. It allows brands and retailers to quickly and easily compare prices and new-in products from different retailers to make decisions efficiently and effectively.
• Offers the best prices: Automating retail comp shopping can help businesses provide the best prices to their customers. It allows brands and retailers to quickly and easily compare prices from different retailers to make pricing decisions.

How can you utilize digital solutions for competitive retail shopping?

Stay relevant and remove manual comp shopping processes through automation. Benchmark your assortment locally or globally, aligned to your company objectives. You can drive revenue and increase market share by unlocking real-time and historical views of your market and customers through investment in retail analytics software.

• Identify sell outs
  • Know which products are selling out quickly across the entire market, enabling you to instantly identify the right products to trade into in minutes, not hours. 
• Product Benchmarking
  • Determine how large your assortment should be by benchmarking the size of your range against strategic competitors within target markets. 
• Assess opportunities
  • Grow your market share by identifying under-penetrated and under-served categories across every market relevant to your brand. Your marketing team will love you for it. 
• Trend Analysis
  • Optimize in-season trading with data-backed analysis of emerging trends, insight into key product attributes, colors, patterns and more. Better yet, have data to back up your theories in the Monday morning meeting.

How can EDITED help you?

EDITED understands that competitive shopping is a headache. We exist to empower people like you to put data behind your decisions and focus on customer centric merchandising. We marry a competitive perspective of customer preferences with a business view into product preferences, marketing touchpoints, location preferences, costs, returns, reviews, shopping behavior, loyalty, profitability and more. We bring you closer to your customers so you can drive personalization and brand loyalty. We help clients change the narrative from what is selling to why it is profitable, which customers are optimal, how to make more profit and what the action trade-offs look like. In addition, we can surface opportunities around new markets, new lines and new channels. These insights will influence both driving revenue and controlling costs.