Price2Spy: Elevating E-Commerce with Price Monitoring and Advanced Technologies

As disruptive technologies are venturing into retailing and e-commerce businesses, it is becoming more interesting how organizations are deploying tech-solutions for efficient marketing and customer experience. By the virtue of data analysis, enterprises can learn about prices, products and needs and take action accordingly. One such company that pioneers in designing a monitoring and repricing tool for the online retail industry is Price2Spy. In an exclusive interview with Analytics Insight, Misha Krunic, Founder and CEO Price2Spy, explains the company's journey from the foundation to incredible establishment of the firm in tech-driven market.

With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

Price2Spy idea was born out of pure necessity 9 years ago. WEBCentric (the mother company of Price2spy) owns several stores operating in the Serbian market – which is very picky in terms of pricing. Basically, Serbian customers are very careful with their budget, and before they make a purchase, they very carefully compare all available stores in order to find the one with the lowest price.

Therefore, we were spending hours and hours checking our competitors' websites manually, finding out their price changes. It was taking more and more resources and we saw no way out of it until we figured out that we can make a tool (now known as Price2Spy) which will do the hard work for us, in an automated way.

Six months later the results were incredible; our online store's turnover had grown by 32% – simply by being able to keep our prices competitive. So, Price2Spy was born – ready to be used by the e-commerce professionals throughout the world.

What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?

There are many of them, however, if I need to choose the biggest one, I would say Technical Superiority of Price2Spy. Price2Spy is great at monitoring websites that do not want to be monitored. Over the years we have developed so many ways around such bans, stealth IP traffic being the most powerful of all such methods. The beauty of this technique is that it makes it practically impossible for system administrators to distinguish regular website traffic from the traffic generated by Price2Spy (in order to monitor its prices) – that's why we call it 'stealth traffic'. Even more beautiful – banning such 'stealth traffic' would be mission impossible. Not only would they have to ban millions of IPs, but by doing it they would be at strong risk of banning their regular website visitors.

Moreover, Price2Spy's technical superiority makes it one of the few tools on the market that can distinguish between different product variations , shown on single product URL. We have recognized the need for such a solution way back in 2012, and we have been perfecting it ever since, so it can be used in a wide variety of cases, such as multiple products shown on the same page, or a product that comes in different sizes/volumes or a product whose price won't show until a number of choices have been made on the product page, etc.

How is your company helping customers deliver relevant business outcomes through the adoption of the company's technology innovations?

Well, our customers are online retail companies (eCommerce) and brands/manufacturers.

Being a competitor price tracking / dynamic pricing software, Price2Spy helps Online Retailers to automate the competitor price monitoring process, gather and analyze the pricing data and reprice products depending on their market strategy. Helps them to understand pricing strategies of their competitors and suggests products with potential gains in turnover or profit: no overpricing, no underpricing.

When it comes to Brands/Manufacturers, Price2Spy helps them to preserve brand value by controlling their retailers or dealers. Moreover, they can indicate MAP / MSRP pricing violations and thus help them enforce MAP policy.

Where do you see growth coming in for the sector?

Today, with the rise of technology, end-users are using more and more powerful tools to compare the prices whenever they need. Doubtless, it makes "pricing" one of the key drivers in e-commerce. Of course, more and more online retail companies are becoming aware of this. So far, the main interest used to come from Western countries. Nowadays, including Eastern countries, Far East and Arabic world many retailers are also aware of it. And as these markets get modern, they have started to invest more time and resources into their pricing strategies. The fact that retailers are becoming more competitive means brands need to keep a close eye on the market even more.

Which industry verticals are you currently focusing on?

Price2Spy is a tool which can be used literally in any industry. Hence, today it is used in more than 25 verticals and we have over 600 clients from over 60 countries all over the world. Actually, we aren't specifically focusing on a particular industry, however, over the years, we got stronger in some industries such as; Music, Consumer Electronics, Automotive, Health&Beauty and Pet Supplies.

The diversity of our client base enables us to monitor sites from highly developed online markets having different currencies (US, UK, AU, DE, NL etc.) or to read non-western script sites from various parts of the world. In addition, Price2Spy works with sites which are quite simple in terms of capturing price, but also with those showing prices either as images or after adding products to cart or even more complex (such as B2B login required), and this is where Price2Spy's power comes to the fore.

How have you seen the evolution of the industry? As you said that you have been here from the beginning, how has the growth been?

Like with any new service, the growth in the industry was steeper in the early days. We attribute it to the fact that many companies are offering such price monitoring services nowadays.

But, we also see cases that competitors are emerging as well as pulling out the business. So, doing business in today's world is very hard, staying in the game is even harder. Such competitive market conditions teach us that we need to listen to our clients and their ideas – it's what helps us build a better tool and be one of the key players on the market.

What are some of the challenges faced by the industry today?

The era that we are living in paves the way to technological improvements. Technologies are advancing not only in the field of price monitoring but also in the website protection. When one improves out of necessity others are improving as well. We all know that everyone, from small to giant players of the online retail world, do their best to prevent automated tools (like Price2Spy) to monitor their prices.

It is natural that some sites don't want to be monitored and will do everything to avoid price checking activities from their rivals and price monitoring tools, however, the advance in technology works both ways, so we at Price2Spy will continue to explore new ways to avoid bans. Undisputedly, the ones that aren't fighting with true weapons against their rivals will be doomed in the current competitive world.