Price- and deal-savvy consumers are conducting more extensive research on potential purchases. Because of these thrifty browsing strategies, retailers are seeking ways to price inventory more efficiently and excel in a competitive marketplace. By meeting — and exceeding — customer expectations, retailers can ensure they’re not missing out on sales opportunities.
Progressive retailers are implementing technology to track competitors’ pricing and assortment in real time. Assortment Intelligence, a tool featured in the Upstream Commerce suite, is designed to enable retailers to monitor assortment changes at competitors’ web sites. Merchants then can adjust their own product mixes accordingly.
The Upstream Commerce Retail Intelligence Suite is a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that utilizes advanced artificial intelligence, semantic analysis, data mining, and image-recognition algorithms to offer retailers real-time competitive price monitoring and analysis, as well as product and assortment intelligence.
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The tool offers functionality to view, compare and analyze the overlap between a retailer’s assortments and its competitors’. The tool also was developed to help retailers become more competitive in the following ways:
1. Allow a retailer identify competitors’ products that they don’t currently carry, but may wish to add to their assortment.
2. Determine specific products or collections they carry exclusively, for which they could elect to command higher prices.
“Assortment composition is far too critical a merchandising decision to leave to the non-real-time, highly variable nature of human assessment, judgment and action,” said Amos Peleg, CEO, Upstream Commerce. “Assortment Intelligence transforms classic manual merchandising by giving retail owners, executives, managers and buyers actionable and timely product assortment insights.”
