This blog post is focused on supporting the Shopify community. It will take a look at how Shopify Price Tracking can help boost your revenue, how Shopify users can optimise their prices to grow sales, as well as how to implement a dynamic pricing strategy.
How Shopify Price Tracking Helps Boost Revenue
Shopify Price Tracking Helps to Boost Search Visibility
Price Tracking Tools, such as BlackCurve, can boost revenue in two key ways. The first way is how they help you improve your search visibility. They do this, by flagging to you various metadata issues in your Google Merchant Centre Feed, such as where your product code (GTIN) may be invalid or missing, or where you are missing a brand name. This meta-data is critical, as it is what Google uses to categorise your products. If Google cannot understand what your product is, it will not surface your result when a search is performed. If your result is not surfaced, the consumer simply won't see you, and won't be able to buy from you. Meaning you miss out on revenue.
Within Google Shopping, getting your GTIN right is critical, as this is the data point Google uses to group you under the 'Compare prices from X+ shops' link, as shown in the above example image for the Middy and Abu Garcia fishing rods. This is a common click-through for users who are more committed to making a purchase, and it is used by the price-sensitive buyer or bargain hunter. Clicking through to it, lines up all the retailer's prices side by side, as shown in the below Middy example. Again, if you're not on this list, the consumer won't see you, and won't be able to buy from you. Meaning that once again, you miss out on revenue.
Shopify Price Tracking Helps to Boost Conversion
The reason that price tracking ultimately helps to boost revenue is that it flags to you your relative price position to competitor prices. Branded goods especially, mean consumers have less loyalty to a particular shop, as they're trusting the brand over the retailer. Therefore, using price tracking tools to identify where you are too expensive compared to the competition and making price reductions accordingly, is a fantastic way to boost conversion. The higher the conversion rate to your website, the more visitors you will have to your website. The more visitors you have to your website, you increase your chances of a check-out and thus recieving revenue.
How to Track Competitor Price Changes Using Price Tracking
Check out our earlier blog post for a deep dive into how to track competitor prices. In summary here, after you click 'Add App' on the Shopify app store, and set up a price tracking tool such as BlackCurve, you're providing the price tracking tool with your product inventory, and it can then be used to start web scraping. BlackCurve specifically collects data from Google Shopping. It acts like a user and can access Google from multiple geographic locations to ensure you get country-specific price tracking results.
At scale, BlackCurve's tool enters multiple data points, and combinations of data points every millisecond, such as your GTIN, or your Product Name into Google Shopping. It gathers all the results and then uses its sophisticated matching algorithm to filter out the correct product matches and show all the competitor prices in your dashboard and reports. It then refreshes this information each and every day so you are always up to date with the latest pricing insights.
How to Optimise Your Prices for Maximum Sales
We have already mentioned earlier how price tracking tools can help improve conversion by making sure you reduce the price of your products where you are the most expensive in the market. The second recommendation is to use price tracking tools to identify where you're more expensive than the market average price (also known as benchmark price). The market average price is used by the Google Algorithm to assess the relevancy of your product. Remember, Google wants to share the best result following a search that will lead to a click-through and/or purchase. It will therefore share your result more broadly if your prices are in line with the market average or lower price. Lining up your prices with the benchmark price, where you have historically been more expensive, will see your conversion grow.
Thirdly, price tracking tools highlight to you where you are a lot cheaper than your competitors. Whilst you will likely be getting good conversion here, it is worth re-iterating, that your visibility on the Google ecosystem is determined by your price position relative to the average market price and not the lowest. You therefore will likely be giving away too much margin in each sale if you're the cheapest. You therefore have scope at the very least to close the gap between your price and the next nearest competitor to make more revenue on each sale.
Shopify Pricing Adjustment Apps
BlackCurve provides a Shopify Pricing Adjustment App. Available from the Shopify app store here.
A 14-Day Free trial is available to all new users, after which, price tracking can be purchased for as little as $99 per month. Dynamic pricing is available from as little as $199 per month. All contracts are monthly rolling.
The Key BlackCurve Differentiators
- Speed of set up. You can get up and running with BlackCurve, in a few clicks after clicking ‘Add App’. In less than two minutes you're inside BlackCurve and we are automatically collecting your competitor prices. A lot of the vendors that you see in the app store require you to do manual matching.
- The simplicity of our reports and easy-to-use dashboard.
- Fantastic customer support. We have a philosophy whereby we try and have as many of us as possible running the help desk. So, it's not only the customer success team, but it's also people operating in other parts of the business. And that's purely because we learn from you. You guys are the retailer, we're the technology provider. And if you talk to each other, greatness comes out of it. Therefore, naturally, we feel that that gives us the ability to offer much better support to our customers.
- We don't just give you data. We give you actionable insights, supporting you with what the best pricing decision should be, each and every day.
- Supplementary services such as our Google Shopping Feed Optimisation piece is provided to all users, which helps you improve your metadata so you can be more visible inside the Google Shopping ecosystem, and boost your revenue.
- Flexible pricing engine, that offers enterprise-grade pricing safeguards. Dynamic pricing is risky, and BlackCurve ensures you never wake up to pricing that is below cost or below an expected price. If you mess the price up, sure, you don't have to honour the sale necessarily, but then you've got a damaged customer experience you've got to handle, like turning the customer down. Or, if you don't notice, you lose money. In the Shopify eco-system, a lot of the Repricers out there don't have that same level of configurability.
Ways to Implement a Dynamic Pricing Strategy with Shopify
In BlackCurve, it all starts with the Dynamic Pricing Engine. Drag and drop functionality enables you to set up simple to complex rules in seconds. An extensive rules library is available to allow you to automatically implement your desired pricing strategy. Everything from product filtering, competitor filtering, margin safeguards, and more.
The pricing rules can then be run either semi-automatically, where a price recommendation report is generated and sent to your inbox at a chosen schedule of your choice (e.g. daily or on specific days of the week). The report includes all the logic and the new recommended price. This spreadsheet can then be used as a file upload to your system that manages your webshop.
Alternatively, the pricing rules can be run fully automatically at your chosen schedule. In order for the connection to be established to your Shopify store, your channel must be configured to tell BlackCurve which Shopify price column to update.
Podcast
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📕 Read the full podcast transcript here.
FAQs
What is automated pricing for Shopify?
Dynamic pricing tools such as BlackCurve, provide automated pricing capabilities that enable your pricing strategy to be implemented by software so that prices are updated on your website in line with your desired pricing logic e.g. maintain a specific competitor price position, whilst not going below a set margin.
Does Shopify have dynamic pricing?
Apps such as BlackCurve are required to implement dynamic pricing for Shopify users.
What price tracking software tools support Shopify?
BlackCurve supports price tracking for Shopify users. The integration is plug and play, and can be configured in a few clicks.