Summary

• Competitor and market intelligence solutions (CMI) have begun replacing manual data scraping, saving retailers valuable time.  
• These CMI tools provide deep data analysis and insights into the market and customer behavior. 
• Finding the right CMI solution that connects competitor, internal business, and customer data is crucial so you can see the full performance picture. 

Introduction

The world of retail has changed more in the last five years than it has in total for the past couple of decades.

With the rise of digitalization and continued advancements in AI, almost every aspect of retail has evolved. 

Luckily, while these technological advancements are changing how retailers function, they are also providing critical solutions to help optimize the way we do our jobs.  

What Is a Competitor and Market Intelligence Solution?

Gartner[1] recently defined competitor and market intelligence solutions in its 2024 Hype Cycle for Retail Technologies as follows:

“AI-enabled competitor and market intelligence (CMI) solutions track demand signals to provide granular product sales performance. CMI solutions deliver competitive advantage for retailers as they enable real-time, granular insights into their competitors’ digital product, pricing and assortment strategies.”  

Historically, retailers performed this process themselves, at times with outdated scraping tools, requiring significant effort and time, only to skim the surface of the available data. 

Now, these advanced CMI solutions save retailers crucial time by replacing manual data scraping and tracking demand signals across millions of competitors’ websites, promotions, and products. 

Why Do I Need a CMI Solution?

A competitor and market intelligence solution not only saves valuable time, but also provides deeper insights into the market and, ultimately, customer demand.  

Accessing market data for a contextualized view is essential for retail success. However, to truly succeed, retailers must take a market-informed, profit-aware, and customer-centric approach. A CMI solution that connects all of this data for a unified view is the key. 

Be Market-Informed

Alone, market-informed means gaining a competitive edge by benchmarking against competitors and identifying product trends, market movement, and whitespace opportunities.

Gartner points out that competitors’ assortments contain millions of SKUs, and they make millions of price changes every day. It is impossible to keep up with all of this without advanced technology.

A CMI solution gives retailers a competitive advantage with real-time insights into the market, allowing them to understand competitor decisions and uncover whitespace opportunities. For example, this solution tracks demand signals, making it possible to tell which of the missing products in your assortment are bestsellers within a peer group of competitors.

Be Profit-Aware

A profit-aware view means maximizing revenue and optimizing profitability by connecting business performance, promotional activity, price adjustments, product exposure, and inventory status.

A CMI platform like EDITED combines a retailer’s internal performance data with external competitor and market data to give a complete understanding of your true profitability. 

Gartner highlights the growing adoption of dynamic and real-time pricing to ensure consistency and competitive prices. Utilizing this technology can help retailers stay ahead in the fast-paced retail environment and make the most profitable choices. 

Be Customer-Centric

The customer is at the center of retail. To succeed, you need to know who makes you money by understanding product preferences, buying patterns, promotional and discount activity, and returns behavior by customer segment. 

“CMI solutions aid the transformation toward customer-centric merchandising as they enable a more holistic understanding of customer behavior.”[1]

Hyper-personalization and increased customer expectations are on the rise, and this solution helps ensure you make informed decisions that are personalized to reflect what your customers want to see. With CMI, you can see how your customers interact with your competitors and compare this to how they interact with your brand. 

Conclusion – EDITED’s Three Lenses

EDITED’s Retail Intelligence Platform is uniquely positioned to bring together advanced, AI-enabled competitive and market intelligence with your internal business and customer data. By looking through these three lenses at once, retailers gain a complete view of performance and opportunities to take action. 

This holistic analysis empowers retailers to identify assortment gaps, optimize pricing strategies, enhance inventory management, and create the most effective site merchandising plan. 

Book a demo here and discover how EDITED’s connected competitor and market intelligence can bring clarity to your business.  

Sources: 

1. “Gartner’s Hype Cycle For Retail Technologies, 2024,” July 29, 2024, pages 16-18