We often hear “you have to watch your competitors” to be successful in ecommerce. That is true, but picking the right monitoring tools to do that is crucial. Tools can help you find the necessary information required to make better decisions. But how many tools do you need or should you use? Furthermore, what are the best ecommerce price comparison tools? What about ecommerce site monitoring tools? And how to combine these tools for optimal results?
Ecommerce monitoring is one of the most important elements of a successful online business. When you launch an ecommerce store, the success of your business depends on how well your store can compete with the online market and how customers react to your products or services. Like any other business, it is important to closely monitor your ecommerce site success factors. The best monitoring tools for ecommerce keep you informed about any unexpected changes or disruptions and provide you with necessary steps you should take in order to solve them.
It’s important for ecommerce site owners to have a solid monitoring program in place to ensure the stability of their website. Not only can this save your site from going offline or leading to high losses, but it can also give you the upper hand when it comes to improving conversion rates and increasing sales. But what if you’re not sure what to look for? This blog post will give you insight on how to find the best tools that’ll work best for you.
The first step to become successful ecommerce business owner is to make sure your product prices are correct. You need to find monitoring tools that can scan real time marketplaces for product information and alert you when a change happens. In this article I will introduce you the most popular ecommerce price comparison tools.
Which Are the Right UI Monitoring Tools for Your B2B Website?
When you go searching for the right monitoring tool, you may come across several options – uptime monitoring, transaction monitoring, paid tools, free tools, etc. – and deciding between them can be a bit overwhelming. To simplify things for you, we have compiled a list of the top some UI monitoring tools for your B2B website or e-commerce platform. So go ahead and make sure that your website’s performance is always up to the mark by using these efficient tools!
Uptime
Uptime offers a variety of attractive services like SSL monitoring, malware scanning, round-the-clock customer support, etc. It focuses on reliability and ease of use and monitors the availability of your website across six continents at one-minute intervals. If there is any issue with your website performance, it alerts you via SMS, phone call, e-mail, etc. It offers all its customers a 21-day free trial to use its services and features and decide for themselves. Also, check out this page about Kafka streams.
Sematext
Sematext Cloud offers great management and monitoring solutions through real-user monitoring (RUM) solution, a Sematext Experience, and a synthetic monitoring tool, Synthetics. It is a widely popular tool amongst developers because it provides an elaborate report on website speed, website uptime, error rates, etc. It also tells you about your users’ experience and satisfaction. You can get it for free or even go for the premium plans that start at $19/month.
Pingdom
Pingdom is an affordable monitoring tool that alerts you when any of your applications malfunction or go down. It is user-friendly and provides SSL certificate monitoring and website monitoring. It even supports real-user monitoring, which means it keeps track of user visits and also collects helpful data from actual people to help in performance improvement and analysis. Purchase it today for only $15.
Monitis
Monitis is a paid software that checks your website every five minutes. It provides many features like uptime monitoring, server health, network performance, etc. While this tool may be slightly outdated, it still provides you with elaborate as well as accurate information about browser and platform performance, the geographical distribution of users, page load time, etc. Its prices start at $12/month.
Checkly
Through the Playwright and Puppeteer frameworks, Checkly tends to simulate the users’ interaction with your eCommerce platform. It offers a Headless Recorder browser extension to aid you with writing scripts yourself. It runs this code every 10 minutes. Checkly is a paid tool that comes with a free trial. It has a very versatile alerting system that works through SMS, email, Slack, Pagerduty, etc., every time there is an error on your site. Its price can range from $7 to $499, depending on the number of SMS credits, API checks, etc.
Price2Spy
Price2Spy is an online price monitoring tool that performs comparison between market prices and makes adjustments to your product prize according to your business rules and strategies. This price monitoring tool is used by small to large brands, distributors, and manufacturers from a variety of industries all over the world. It is designed to help online retailers monitor online prices, analyze pricing data, and re-price their products while maintaining profitability.
Price2Spy is quick in identifying pricing opportunities and can tell which prices can be reduced while maintaining the desired profit margin. The software offers API integration with your company’s ERP system and allows automatic pricing in accordance with your competitors. It can collect and analyze pricing data and make pricing adjustments automatically. Moreover, it can also monitor competitor websites that prevent price monitoring applications from working and collecting pricing data.
With Price2Spy, you can see the pricing of every competitor even if they have employed technologies that prevent the monitoring of their websites. The software supports ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce, Magento, Shopify and more. It gives online retailers easy ways of integrating software into their website to perform real-time re-pricing and stay ahead of competition.
Minderest
Minderest is a cloud-based price optimization solution that allows retailers and manufacturers to enhance their price positioning in offline and online channels. The software scans online marketplaces like Google Shopping, eBay, and Amazon to compare price itemization.
With Minderest, you get detailed reports on competitor pricing. It also offers data exportation, ERP integration; data storage and AI-based pricing algorithms. Whenever your competitors add inventory or change pricing or product information, Minderest sends you alerts and notifications to keep you updated about changes in the market situation.
Users can integrate the Minderest API with their ERP solution to formulate a pricing strategy to compete with large online retailers. The cloud-based pricing solution uses artificial intelligence to help with price-fixing plans that can be tuned to align with pre-determined objectives.
Minderest offers 10 configurable variables to determine a profit margin that can be automatically changed. The software optimizes the prices to match competitor pricing.
PriceManager
PriceManager is designed to help manufacturers, retailers, and other interested parties’ track online pricing. The competitive intelligence offered by PriceManager is an efficient way to increase sales and maximize profits. The cloud-based price monitoring service uses web crawlers to collect pricing and product-related data from competitor websites and stores it in centralized servers for quick processing and easy access.
PriceManager can scan your competitor’s entire website, particular product category, or specific brand, and collect complete details like product price and any other data. The online price monitoring tool can track marketplaces, shopping engines, and individual ecommerce portals to collect pricing data and provide you competitive intelligence.
Established in 2009, PriceManager is one of the oldest price monitoring service that uses state-of-the-art technology for enhanced efficiency, fast results, and high security. The software features easy-to-use interface that allows you to monitor the pricing of thousands of products online with one click. It provides detailed reports on price differentials and competition trends for the implementation of an effective online marketing strategy.
PriceManager integrates with Secret Shopper Data, Google Analytics, and your ERP system for a complete and holistic view of the pricing trends in your business vertical.
Google Analytics Google Analytics predictably gets our first recommendation on this list of eCommerce analytics tools. Google’s free software is extremely powerful, and popular enough to be installed on an estimated 28 million+ websites. Although some readers might have dabbled with Google Analytics in the past, recent updates have made the platform much more powerful for online sellers, with Google’s Enhanced eCommerce analytics providing extremely detailed data for every stage of the sales journey. Here are just a few of the things that you can keep track of: The amount of people visiting your site. The device they’re using (desktop, tablet or smartphone). The pages where visitors spend the most time. The pages that visitors quickly abandon (a term called “bounce rate”). In addition, the Enhanced eCommerce Analytics updates also allow you to: View eCommerce metrics on how your products are converting (the amount of views compared to the amount of sales). The average amount of transactions per visitor. The average order value (and refund value). The speed in which users add products to the cart after reading a sales page. There’s so much more to Google Analytics that there isn’t scope for a full review in this article. However, that leads us to a very important recommendation that few articles dare to suggest: A Controversial Viewpoint on Google Analytics We’re not disputing that Google Analytics offers masses of useful, actionable data. The problem is that for newcomers, it can be tricky to understand how to make changes to their websites based on the information they’ve been given. “Analysis paralysis” is a very real problem for beginners to the world of eCommerce, and Google Analytics can often feel a little like using race car data to gain insights into a trip to the grocery store. There are far simpler eCommerce analytics tools available if your requirements are modest, which leads us to our second recommendation:
Skuuudle
Skuuudle is a complete competitive intelligence solution that offers product and pricing intelligence for SMEs and enterprises. The cloud-based price monitoring software helps brands, distributors, and retailers increase market share and optimize profit margins through data-driven decisions.
Skuuudle’s advanced data collection engine collects data from any source at your desired frequency to provide its users with competitive intelligence on time, every time. The product matching feature of Skuuudle can automatically link similar competitor products at scale to give you deep insights across your market vertical.
The platform provides an AI-supported human quality team which ensures that the data collected is accurate and there are no pricing errors due to inaccurate product matches or relevant data. The Skuuudle dashboard is easy to use and understand and you won’t face difficulty in identifying long-term market trends, overpriced products or opportunities to increase prices.
Since Skuuudle is cloud-based, there is no heavy installation on the user side and you can access the portal via tablet, smartphone, or computer. Skuuudle also offers first-class customer support that includes personalized support and expert advice.
Best Practices for Monitoring E-Commerce Performance
To begin, it’s important to measure the service-level quality of your site performance across three dimensions:
1. Availability: Is it up and running?
2. Functionality: Is it working right?
3. Speed: Is it working fast enough?
This creates a framework to improve the shopping experience through the different layers of your technology stack.
Conclusion
Monitoring ecommerce prices has never been more important. If you want to win more buy box placements, or track competitors prices for ecommerce arbitrage, these tools are best for you. Ecommerce is booming and businesses are experiencing a great demand for their products and services. But nowadays, it takes more to stay ahead of the competition. Ecommerce monitoring tools aren’t only critical to ensure the performance of your website, but also your entire business.
Ecommerce site monitoring has become a major part of running an online store. Most of the businesses that sell online feel that it’s essential to continuously monitor the online competition. But not all of them know how to do it effectively or how to choose the right tools.