Improving product pricing strategies in retail with near real-time competitor analysis

The client was using a third-party platform to retrieve competitors’ pricing data about a variety of products. This information was used to develop their own pricing strategies and, subsequently, increase sales. However, it was difficult to expand the number of competitors in pricing reports. It also had an insufficient accuracy level because the products that were mentioned in reports matched the client’s products only by 70%. Finally, the solution did not match the accuracy requirements of our client, since it generated reports only on a daily basis and lacked real-time reporting.

N-iX has conducted extensive Product Discovery during which we elicited functional and business requirements, analyzed competitors, designed architecture diagrams and prepared the microservices architecture design, and created the platform’s UI/UX look according to our client’s needs. Additionally, our team has conducted a PoC for retrieving pricing information from the competitors’ websites.

N-iX has helped the client develop a microservices-based product pricing platform that provides insights about prices on luxury products set by their competitors. It helps sales, marketing, and B&R experts to plan effective pricing strategies. The solution allows to create date requests to get data from the competitors’ websites based on the specified market, currency, brand, product category, and product name. The pricing information is collected with the help of web scraping, where the bot automatically fetches the prices from the competitors’ websites and stores information in the database.

The solution also allows generating Excel reports, which include product names, website links, and prices for both our client and their competitor. These reports can be generated an unlimited number of times in near real-time, allowing the client to receive accurate up-to-date pricing information with minimal delay.

Finally, N-iX engineers have implemented an intuitive and visually appealing UI for the pricing platform. Additionally, we have established manual testing to ensure the error-free performance of the solution, and built a CI/CD pipeline from scratch to streamline the development process.

N-iX has developed the product pricing platform from scratch that retrieves pricing data from competitors’ websites. We have implemented the microservices-based infrastructure and an intuitive UI. As a result, we helped the client obtain several substantial benefits:

• Improved the effectiveness of the client’s pricing strategies and, as a result, increased sales with the help of accurate insights and analytics about their competitors;
• Enhanced the accuracy and effectiveness of business processes by implementing near real-time reporting;
• Accelerated time-to-market by setting up the CI/CD pipeline from scratch.