Your Competition, in Real Time

Seattle-based QL2 is looking to make retail-pricing strategy a little more interesting through technology that will allow retailers to monitor the competition’s pricing in real time.

“If you’ve made plans for a Q3 and Q4 based off a vendor or a certain tactic and your market shifts, you need to be able to adjust tactics to move with that,” says Thomas Safford, retail product manager for QL2 and a former PetSmart executive.

QL2 has been able to turn unstructured data into a readable format since early 2000, but the technology largely has been used by the airline industry to determine pricing and seating availability. The company is positioning for rapid growth in the retail sector, Safford says. “We spent the last 18 months really enhancing our product for retailers and we’ve had a pretty good success rate so far.”

Safford works with retailers to put together a shopping list, categories and all the sites they want tracked. Retailers can pull pricing data, circular changes and other qualifiers from large e-commerce sites like Walmart.com and Amazon.com to smaller players like North Carolina shoe store SoundFeet.com and Southwest-based Western wear outfitter Cavenders.com. That information is turned into an easy-to-read report, most typically an Excel or CSV file, and is available in real time on QL2’s secure site.

The company is currently deploying an analytics and visualization tool to sort through tens of millions of records. Some retailers choose to have changes e-mailed immediately, while others prefer to receive them on a schedule. However or whenever it is viewed, the data helps retailers determine how deep and broad they are in the mix, Safford says.

“Let’s say a retailer wants to own the kids’ market space,” he says. “They can shop all those categories from their competitors and figure out where the competition is discounting and see how they can position themselves to either distinguish themselves or go after that same exact market.”

In addition to pricing strategies, the solution contributes to the marketing department’s ability to understand competitors and how they’re operating differently across the country. For example, QL2 can take online ads and break them down according to individual or regional stores associated with a particular circular, allowing retailers to identify what’s happening in a much shorter timeframe.

“My experience with PetSmart was that typically by the time we were done analyzing and ripping apart an ad, we were still two ads behind,” Safford says. “Traditionally, you relied either on a mystery shopper or your field services to go get this information.” With the way the market adjusts so quickly today, he says, it’s imperative retailers have real-time information.

“If you have price guarantees on particular merchandise and if your competitors are beating you, it’s nice to have that information today and share that with your stores so you can do a price override right now to match or beat that item,” Safford says.

Monitors supply chain
Another feature of QL2’s retail solution is that it monitors the supply chain. A major national retailer uses the technology to track different regions with a variety of different vendors. The company monitors out-of-stocks — its own and those of its competitors — on the same items.

The retailer, Safford says, had long thought that it was a particular vendor’s No. 1 priority. By having QL2 monitor the supply chain, learned that it was a much lower priority.

As a result, that retailer “had some discussions with that supplier and was able to point out the dramatic trend and said, ‘We need to move this up or we’ll find an alternate source,’” Safford says.

Occasionally, QL2’s solution comes across a site that tries to block its spiders. But Safford says the company has unique technology that allows it to distribute the crawling loads and make it difficult to block.