The fact is becoming clearer that price is king in retail. With Amazon and direct-to-consumer brands like Asos, Everlane, Warby Parker and others saturating the retail market, traditional retailers — such as Kohl’s — are having to really circle back internally to revise their pricing strategies and discover areas where they need to improve. One of the primary areas that retailers are uncovering as problematic is geo-pricing. Retailers have known for a while that geo-pricing — tailoring pricing based on specific regions and locations — is pivotal to remaining competitive. In particular, the rise of Amazon’s dynamic pricing capabilities, which adapt prices every 10 minutes on its vast product catalog, is of increasing concern for traditional retailers. Furthermore, they are becoming all too aware that their current approach and infrastructure is too antiquated to deliver the results that they need to remain relevant in today’s market.

With the increase of digitalization, the world changes more and more quickly, and pricing is a key battleground. And when I say that it changes more quickly, think in seconds or minutes, and millions of times a day. Amazon shifts product prices millions of times a day, an average product’s price can change every 10 minutes or so. With this pressure, retailers — both bricks and clicks — have been forced to jump into the deep end to compete with the help of pricing algorithms, dynamic pricing and other pricing solutions.  The ability to update your prices, logic and rules based on changing market conditions is a key competitive advantage now and going forward. This is prevalent in retail and e-Commerce and I am seeing it majorly affect traditionally B2B markets. I get to see the transformation and evolution of pricing across industries — retail and e-Commerce is a perfect use case in the pricing revolution. Having dynamic and competitive pricing capabilities as well as the flexibility for retailers to make changes without depending on their IT organization is key to agility. As Salesforce’s Marc Benioff said, “Speed is the new currency of business.” In addition to being fast and flexible, what direction is pricing going and what can we do about…

PriceSpider, a data and consumer analytics technology firm, has acquired ORIS Intelligence, which provides near real-time analytics on pricing inconsistencies for brand manufacturers. Details of the transaction have not been disclosed. Leveraging its proprietary “spidering” technology, PriceSpider collects data from thousands of e-Commerce sites to provide analytics into product data, competitive comparisons, purchase decisions. Ultimately, the solution is designed to help brands enhance their presence and increase sales. With ORIS, PriceSpider can prioritize the integrity of pricing data “above all else,” PriceSpider CEO Anthony Ferry said in a statement.

John Russo, our Retail leader, and I recently visited Amazon’s 4 Star store in New York City. The concept is simple enough — popular items, biased towards gifts/specialty items, with 4-star reviews or higher on Amazon.  I walked in expecting to see a lot of the technology innovations that we’ve come to expect from an Amazon Go or similar concept… but realistically it looked like a nice, normal gift shop…no crazy ceiling with a million cameras or other loads of unusual hardware. What the store did have was Electronic Shelf Labels (ESLs). At Eversight we’re a big fan of ESLs and their breakthrough capabilities when it comes to digitizing the physical shelf. But a big dilemma that we wonder about is how ESLs will realistically support dynamic pricing in store. 

At a recent industry event, I quipped that this is “the best of times and the worst of times” for retailers. Implicit in my comment — which was a paraphrase of the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities, the Charles Dickens classic about the French Revolution — that the retail industry is undergoing a revolution of its own. Never mind the “retail apocalypse.” What retailers have begun to realize is that the demise of their businesses is not a foregone conclusion. This is a time for retailers to take action, not sit idly on the sidelines. In 2018, we saw more retailers take action by equipping themselves with the most important weapon for battle: customer strategy fueled by customer data science. Why is this happening? It could be that the ever-looming threat of Amazon, which has ventured boldly beyond e-Commerce and into physical spaces as well, with the steady spread of its 4-star stores throughout the U.S. It could also be the emergence of grocery discounters that are forcing retailers everywhere to rethink pricing and overall value propositions for customers. It could also be the example of retailers of all sizes to embrace the art and science of…

When it comes to pricing, Amazon is still king. The e-Commerce giant maintained its price leadership position on the broadest selection of popular items, averaging prices that were 13.4% lower than retailers carrying the same items in Q2 2018, according to a study from Profitero. Walmart had the most competitive…

Most retailers are already engaged in data analytics and predictive modeling. Today, using data to predict more successful outcomes — ultimately leading to increased sales — is not as mystifying a concept as it was even a year ago. But with a market being upended by an omnichannel imperative and consumer demand for instant gratification, how can e-Commerce retailers continuously and dynamically test out business models and strategies, refresh their questions and findings, and find out what works, particularly when it comes to pricing and promotions? Advances in AI have a role to play here. Machine learning is very powerful in point prediction, point estimates in price — the goal being to make sure you are dynamically pricing. And it’s very effective when pricing at speed. It can help improve recommendations based on a continuous learning loop, and it’s particularly applicable in price and promotion optimization.

Anytime I read the trades, glance at news headlines, or talk to other executives, AI seems to be the solution to all of our problems. Everyone is talking about AI. Emerging tech companies now have AI solutions at their forefront, but for companies looking to expand their e-Commerce reach globally, especially within emerging markets, AI is not the solution. When it comes to e-Commerce issues, specifically at the local level — frequent cart abandonment, low payment conversion rates due to network instability, consumers’ inability to pay with the right credit card — we can't wrap them in an AI blanket. These problems can only be solved through offering locally-relevant solutions that minimize friction at the checkout.