One Pulse feature that our customers rave about is Price Increase Suggestions. Using an algorithm, Pulse suggests price increases on products which could give you extra margin without a drop in sales volume. Pulse determines the 'Price Sensitivity' of products to ensure the price changes it suggests won't have an adverse impact on the volume being sold.

Even better, Pulse lets you track which recommendations you are going to action and automatically reports the impact of your changes, so you can tell exactly how much extra margin you gain from using Pulse.

There can be a lot of products in a retail environment. Even a small convenience store can have upwards of 3,000 products - focus (rightly so) must go on the key products driving volume and revenue. However, this means that a lot of products with small volumes go ignored or unloved.

Small price increases on these products can lead to large cash margin gains over time.

Pulse makes suggestions on products it thinks the sales of which are unlikely to be impacted by a price increase. Pulse provides you with the suggested price for each product it identifies.

You will find the Price Increase Suggestions insight on the right hand side of the main dashboard - this is where you automatically land when you log in to Pulse.

In the list of insights, you will find 'Price Increase Suggestions', along with a summary of the number of suggestions and potential opportunity:

To get started, simply click this insight and your suggestions will load. The below grid is an example of what you see when you click on this insight. You can read our How to use Grids guide for more information on how to navigate pages like this in Pulse.

Select the suggestions you want to accept by clicking on the tick box to the left of each suggestion. Click 'Actions' and select 'Accept Prices'. If you are happy with the price Pulse has suggested, click 'Next Step'. If you want to adjust the price up or down, simply click on the blue pen icon to edit, and click the save icon once you are happy. Clicking 'Next Step' will ask you to confirm your choices, and then you must make these changes on your ePoS system.

Once a sales goes through at the new price, Pulse will recognise that the price has been changed.

Visit the Campaigns section of Pulse to see the impact of the changes you have made. Price suggestions automatically get added to a performance campaign which you will find under 'Price Suggestions' on the right hand side of the campaigns section.

All price suggestions accepted in a calendar year will go into a single campaign, and clicking 'View' will show you the total additional margin earned (blue graph) along with the number of active price suggestions (orange line). You will also see a summary of total extra margin earned on these products (1), the extra margin earned last week (2), the number of suggestions accepted (3), the number of prices actually changed (4), the number of price changes still active (5) and the number of prices that were never updated (6).

1. Typically products like cigarettes and tobacco (and other categories of products like agency/lotto/magazines etc) should be ignored in respect of price suggestions. You can tell the system to do this explicitly by selecting the products and then using the Exclusions button to indicate that you want to ignore this product or category going forward.

2. The “Max Price (Grp)” presents the maximum price being charged by another retailer or shop within your group/franchise. It can act as a handy metric when making a decision to take action on the price suggestion.

3. The “Last Suggested” date is the date you last increased the price on this product as a result of a Pulse suggestion - note these only appear if that action took place over a year ago and if all other tolerances are true.

4. Pulse won't make suggestions on products where the following conditions are true:

5. The suggested price is typically based on a 5% increase, and capped at 5 cents/pence.

There are a number of actions you can take from within Pulse on a price suggestion.

1. Accept Suggested Price:
Taking this action tells the system you are going to act upon the price increase suggestion and to use the suggested price. You must then manually change the price on your ePoS system. Pulse puts these products in a campaign to track the impact of the change.

3. Add to a campaign
You may want to add selected products to a campaign, this might be nothing to do with the price suggestion itself - maybe you are unhappy with its sales rate and want to add it to a merchandising or Spotlight campaign.

Email us at support@markethub.ie with as much information about your issue as possible, and we will get back to you as soon as we can.