The Pricing & Profitability Playbook
Expert advice, valuable tools and detailed research to help your brand effectively manage price and maximize profitability. Bookmark this page as we'll be updating it regularly.
Marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, Fnac Darty or Bol.com create a unique competitive environment where brands have to compete against other third-party (3P) sellers that are also selling their products. Winning the Buy Box is foundational to eCommerce success — because if you don't win the Buy Box, all your investment in search and content is actually funding 3P sellers.
Cracking the code:
How to stay on top of price for the leading retailers
PRO TIP:
Losing the Buy Box impacts more than just sales. Brands can drop about 3 organic spots, on average, when their Buy Box win rate drops from 85%+ to 75-85%. Inevitably, a drop in search position can prevent your products from getting found online, especially if you fall from page 1 to page 2 — which our research shows could cause sales to drop by 33%, on average.
"Profitero allows us to understand the total impact of promotional spending on our brands. Not only can we understand which promotion types and discount levels are driving the most volume, we can also track potential negative affects on Average Selling Price, which erode margin. Without this critical information, we wouldn’t be able to maintain the 100% growth on Amazon we are seeing year over year.”
Director of eCommerce
Leading U.S Beauty Manufacturer
Utilize assortment differentiation and price pack architecture to avoid pricing compression.
Assortment differentiation is one of the few strategies at a brand's disposal to maintain control over pricing
Featuring Andrea Leigh, VP of Strategy & Insights at Ideoclick
Leverage data to inform pricing decisions internally as a brand manufacturer
In many situations and countries, discussions around retail pricing and MAP policies are not feasible. In these cases, using data to optimize other areas of your pricing strategy is a valuable option.
Featuring Keith Anderson, SVP of Strategy and Partnerships at Profitero
Understand impacts of lost Buy Box, and how to gain control over 3P sellers.
Channel conflict can often cause you to lose the Buy Box, and greater power to 3P sellers. Understanding how 3P sellers are selling your products and creating promotions to undercut them is a valuable strategy to managing price across retailers.
Featuring Andrew Mark, Group Manager of Amazon at Panasonic
With the Profitero app, you gain access to:
Daily online pricing and Buy Box insights for 600+ retailers:
- Get daily alerts to know immediately when you’ve lost the Buy Box
- Size your sales loss due to 3P sellers and identify 3P sellers winning the Buy Box
- Gain better visibility into unauthorized 3P sellers to clean up your distribution network
- Diagnose why you lost the Buy Box by tracking product availability, pricing and other digital shelf metrics
- Detect MAP violations so you can enforce control with more confidence
Top pricing use cases
1. Tracking price changes
2. Identifying MAP violations
With the Profitero app, you gain access to:
Customer Loyalty Analysis
Get a grasp on customer switching and retention patterns to understand how much of this behavior is due to pricing vs. other factors, and learn if your category or brand is at risk.
Benefits:
- Understand when brand switching and substitution is happening
- Diagnose reasons why consumers are switching to other brands, e.g., lower prices
- Identify which of your categories and brands are most at risk
- Track trends to pinpoint any changes in unique vs. repeat customers
With the Profitero app, you gain access to:
Price Pack Analysis
By analyzing price pack trends, Profitero helps you better understand what pack sizes consumers want, and what they are willing to pay in your category, so you can identify and fill whitespace opportunities.
Benefits:
- Ensure products are right-sized and right-priced for the channel and/or retailer
- Identify pack size & pricing gaps and whitespace opportunities in your product portfolio
- Minimize price-matching by differentiating products by channel/retailer based on the facts
- Support new product development to align with what consumers want