In these unstable economic times, with consumers increasingly wary of spending on products and services, price is becoming a critical factor in a consumer's purchasing decision. Many companies need to keep prices low to be competitive -- but how low is too low? When should prices change -- in either direction? Scoping out competitor's prices manually every once in a while is too time-consuming and often not effective.
Luckily, the B2B eCommerce market offers many solutions aimed at helping e-retailers stay competitive and automate various processes. Price optimizing systems are among them, coming as the assistants for merchants to set up the optimal prices for their products by controlling all competitors’ ones. They also save time and exempt e-retailers from the need to manually change prices each time. So it’s now easier than ever before to outdo the rivals and generate more profits by having your prices adjusted automatically to market demands.
Price optimization armory for the business has become a popular demand, so the abundance of solutions keeps growing at a steady pace. Instead of concentrating on what is really valuable to the customers, providers of such services often try to excel the competitors by packing their tools with all possible features.
We have compiled the list of most sought-for functionality that e-retailers would appreciate having in the price optimization software they use:
#1 Automation
The core function of pricing management tools is an exemption from the manual routine of monitoring competitors and changing prices on all sites separately. It is a tedious chore, not to speak of multi-channel retailing.
#2 Flexible Filters
Offering your customers the opportunity to filter data is very important, as it enables them to get better insights. For example, e-retailers that sell multi-channel will appreciate the ability to filter their product data according to marketplaces. Those selling on Amazon will definitely want to have their competitors’ information grouped according to different categories such as seller rating, location the products are shipped from, item condition, dispatch time, etc.
#3 Real-Time Price Adjustment
Dynamic pricing is a very popular and effective selling strategy in e-Commerce that means setting flexible prices for products or services based on current market demands. To keep optimal prices for your customers all the time, your price optimization software should continuously monitor competitor prices data and automatically perform repricing.
#4 Pricing Analytics and Reporting
Your customers will appreciate up-to-the-minute actionable data, visualized in clear reports at their fingertips. Enable them to create real-time customized reports and informative product overviews, which will be of great help in developing effective pricing strategies.
#5 Integration with Shopping Carts
Integration with multiple platforms is what can help price optimization software become more encompassing solutions. E-retailers build their stores on different shopping carts, and in order to modify prices on clients’ stores, repricing systems need to gather information from the customer’s shopping carts. And the optimal way to get this access is to integrate with those platforms. The more platforms you are connected, the more customer stores’ data is at your fingertips and the more potential clients you get.
Integration Challenges
During integration you will face some challenges as is quite a long and difficult process. Some of which are listed below:
- It takes a long time for each implementation. Developing integration may take several weeks or longer if you're doing it yourself.
- Integration is a difficult task that requires massive effort, experience, and knowledge. Also, it takes at least a month to complete single incorporation. So, you can assume how long it will take for your developers to build numerous integrations with eCommerce platforms.
- eCommerce integration requires highly skilled developers with expert technical knowledge. Such developers are hard to find, as a robust integration is embedded with significant technological complexities
- There are a lot of troubles connected with APIs of some of the shopping platforms and marketplaces. For example, Amazon API is really old and its API Docs are really complicated and sometimes don’t provide all the necessary information. Magento API integration also isn’t so easy because of the inaccuracy of its API Docs. Lack of Etsy API documentation can cause extra development time and investigations and its API behavior can be changed without notification;
- One of the biggest issues with integration with the numerous shopping platforms is the introduction of their updated versions. Your programmers could have designed the integrations based on the previous versions of the systems. Thus, while attempting to access updated versions of the data, you may encounter some issues.
Solution
API2Cart can help you avoid integration pains and perform integration with numerous shopping carts at once. It provides a unified API that works for 40+ top eCommerce platforms including Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, X-Cart, Etsy and others.
With the help of API2Cart your price optimization software will be able to:
- Sync prices across all sales channels
- Get products lists along with prices, images, descriptions, etc.
- Access order history
- Create coupons based on a number of conditions
- Import contacts from stores and build segmented lists
- Generate smart reports
We offer an impressive number of features to help you reap all the benefits that come after a successful shopping cart integration. We come with over 100+ methods to manage your clients’ store data connected with product listings, currencies, inventory levels, orders, shipments, etc.
The main benefit that API2Cart offers to price optimization software providers is that they do not need to develop separate integrations or to care about developing support for new versions of shopping carts when they appear. Once the providers integrate their SaaS App or service with API2Cart, it can access and use data from stores based on any of the supported platforms, which will save money, time, and developer resources.
We also offer flexible pricing to all our customers and provide you with a 30-day free trial period. During this time, you can use all of our features so that you can see for yourself how powerful our service is and how useful it is for your price optimization software.
In case you provide price management softare for e-retail businesses, and you are interested in integration with API2Cart, feel free to schedule a call with our expert or see how API2Cart would work for your business.
