In today's unstable economic climate, with consumers increasingly wary of spending on products and services, price has become a critical factor in a customer's purchasing decision. Many companies need to keep prices low to stay competitive — but how low is too low, and when should prices change, and in which direction? Checking competitors' prices manually every so often is too time-consuming and rarely effective.
Luckily, the B2B eCommerce market offers many solutions aimed at helping e-retailers stay competitive and automate pricing processes. Price optimization systems are among them: a price optimization software is a tool that helps merchants set the optimal prices for their products by tracking competitors' prices and adjusting accordingly. Such systems also save time and free e-retailers from having to manually change prices every time the market shifts. As a result, it's easier than ever to outperform rivals and generate more profit by having prices adjusted automatically to market demand.
Demand for price optimization tools keeps growing, and the number of available solutions keeps growing with it. Instead of focusing on what is truly valuable to customers, many providers try to outdo competitors simply by packing their tools with as many features as possible.
Below is a list of the most sought-after functionality that e-retailers — from general eCommerce sellers to niche markets such as automotive retail — look for in the price optimization software they use:
#1 Automation
The core function of pricing management tools is to remove the manual routine of monitoring competitors and changing prices on every site separately. Doing this by hand is a tedious chore, especially for merchants selling across multiple channels.
#2 Flexible Filters
Giving your customers the ability to filter data is very important, as it helps them get better insights. For example, e-retailers selling across multiple channels will appreciate being able to filter product data by marketplace. Those selling on Amazon and similar eCommerce marketplaces will want competitor information grouped by categories such as seller rating, shipping location, item condition, dispatch time, and so on.
#3 Real-Time Price Adjustment
Dynamic pricing is a popular and effective selling strategy in eCommerce that means setting flexible prices for products or services based on current market demand. To keep prices optimal for your customers at all times, your price optimization software should continuously monitor competitor pricing 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 build real-time, customized reports and informative product overviews, which will help them develop more effective pricing strategies.
#5 Integration with Shopping Carts
Integration with multiple platforms is what turns price optimization software into a truly full-scale solution. E-retailers build their stores on different shopping carts, and in order to modify prices on a client's store, a repricing system needs to gather data directly from that store. The most reliable way to get this access is to integrate with those platforms. This is essentially what price optimization software integration comes down to: the more platforms you connect to, the more store data is at your fingertips — and the more potential clients you can serve.
Integration Challenges
Integrating pricing optimization software with shopping carts is a long and often difficult process. Some of the main challenges are listed below:
- Each implementation takes a long time. Building an integration yourself may take several weeks or longer.
- Integration is a difficult task that requires significant effort, experience, and knowledge — often at least a month to complete a single integration. Multiply that by the number of eCommerce platforms you need to support, and the workload adds up quickly.
- eCommerce integration requires highly skilled developers with deep technical knowledge. Such developers are hard to find, as robust integrations involve significant technological complexity.
- APIs of some shopping platforms and marketplaces come with their own headaches. For example, the Amazon API is quite old and its documentation is complex and sometimes incomplete. Magento API integration can also be tricky due to inconsistencies in its documentation. Sparse Etsy API documentation can add extra development time, since its API behavior can change without notice. The same applies to other marketplaces, including Facebook Marketplace.
- One of the biggest ongoing issues with multi-platform integration is keeping up with platform updates. Integrations built for an older version of a system may run into problems when the platform releases updated data structures or endpoints.
Solution
API2Cart can help you avoid these integration pains by connecting to numerous shopping carts through a single unified API. It supports 70+ top eCommerce platforms, including Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, X-Cart, Etsy, and others — making it a solid fit whether you build pricing intelligence for general retail, marketplaces, or specialized verticals such as automotive retail.
With the help of API2Cart, your price optimization software will be able to:
- Sync prices across all sales channels
- Get product 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 a wide range of features to help you capture all the benefits of a successful shopping cart integration, with 100+ methods for managing your clients' store data — product listings, currencies, inventory levels, orders, shipments, and more.
The main benefit API2Cart offers price optimization software providers is that they no longer need to build and maintain separate integrations, or worry about supporting new shopping cart versions as they appear. Once a provider integrates its SaaS app or service with API2Cart, it can access and use data from stores on any supported platform, saving money, time, and developer resources.
We also offer flexible pricing plans and a 14-day free trial for all customers. During this period, you can test all of our features to see for yourself how powerful the service is and how useful it can be for your price optimization software.
If you provide price management software for e-retail businesses and are interested in price optimization software integration with API2Cart, feel free to schedule a call with our expert or see how API2Cart would work for your business.
