Pulse presents a number of insights about your store to help you increase profitability and fix issues that are costing you money. Insights can be found on the right hand side of your Dashboard when you log in to Pulse.
What is Products vs Competition?
Pulse can provide comparisons of a retailer's price to competitor prices. Having an idea of what another retailer is charging for the same product can be very beneficial when looking at your own prices.
Pulse uses this information to help the retailer make good decisions, increase revenue, and increasing consumer confidence and loyalty within the store.
If you have digital labels (ESLs), we can set up an automated price match on Pulse which automatically displays a 'Cheaper than...' message on the label when we detect a price difference. Pulse then tracks the impact of this price match. If you don't have digital pricing but would like to explore this option, contact sales@markethub.ie for more information.
How does it work?
The below grid is an example of what you see when you click on this insight. We will go into detail about each of the columns below, and you can read our How to use Grids guide for more information on how to navigate pages like this in Pulse.
Note: If you want to view any image in this article in more detail, you can right click the image and click 'View in new tab'.
Before we get into detail, we want to highlight three key areas of this insight (highlighted with numbers above):
1. Here you can see the name of the competitor being compared, and a link to the website page that this product is featured. You can copy this link and use it in the browser to see the product in the competitor's online store.
2. This section presents the date Pulse “matched” prices with that competitor. The retailer's current price, the competitor's price as on the “matched“ date and the price differential.
3. The 'Split Diff Gain' is the margin gain if you want to increase the price halfway between theirs and the competitors. It can be zero if Pulse cannot identify and current daily sales quantity.
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Selection Box: This allows you to select this product so that an action, or an exclusion can be carried out. Note: multiple products may be selected at the same time to carry out the same action and or exclusion.
Product: The product description.
Category: This is the category associated with the product.
Competitor:
Name: The name of the competitor.
Reference: The competitor's website reference for this product. If you copy this reference as a URL into your browser it will take you to that product page.Label: Details about the ESL currently associated with the product - if electronic labels are installed.
ID: The ID of the ESL.
Label Message: The spotlight message currently displayed on the label (as of early morning).Prices:
Checked: The date the competitor's price was checked.
Store: The store's current price for this product.
Competitor: The competitor's price as of the checked date.
Variance: The variance in price between the store price and the competitor's price.Daily Qty (Mth): The average daily quantity sold of this product based on last month's sales.
Split Diff Gain: The margin to be gained by changing the price to the halfway price between current and competitor price - 'Split the difference'.
Last Sold: The date this product was last sold in the store.
What should you do?
1. If Auto Price Matching has been turned on and digital labels are present, Pulse will update the labels with “Cheaper than ….” message automatically - no action necessary.
2. Split the Difference:
On the products selected, click 'Split Difference' which tells Pulse you are going to change the price on your till to the halfway point it recommends. Pulse will track the impact of this price change on your margin.
3. Add to a campaign:
You may want to add selected products to a campaign, this might be nothing to do with the price matching itself - maybe you are unhappy with its sales rate and want to add it to a merchandising or Spotlight campaign - this is an action you can almost always take with any product.
Note: All changes and matchings are presented as a campaign for monitoring of performance.
Need more help?
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.