You can see a summary of our analysis below and you can find out more at Retail TouchPoints and in our press release.

Sam Wehbe (@swehbe)

Gazaro analyzed a sample basket of 40 products in multiple categories that were expected to draw well on Black Friday/Cyber Monday and through the holiday season. Comparing the data over the period of November 20^th to December 24^th to other months in 2011, Gazaro found that in 68% of the cases, prices were actually lower in the months preceding Black Friday.

“Pricing is a 365-day-a-year activity,” said Alexander Rink, CEO of Gazaro. “For smart shoppers who use mobile and web options to find the best deals all year round, every day is Black Friday. Smart retailers using Gazaro’s Price Intelligence solution are better equipped to deal with price transparency, increasing volumes and sales by double digit percentages.”

In a report from Retail System Research, Getting Back to Good: Retail Pricing 2010, 50% of retailer respondents increased their gross margins, in the face of a three year sales decline, when they were able to proactively control price and product mix, and 24% kept gross margin steady despite decreased sales over the same three year period.

Top North American retailers derive value from Gazaro offerings by increasing sales and profitability, optimizing assortment and product mix, and better negotiating with brands. Manufacturers can use Gazaro to understand their relative position to private label and national brands, to monitor channels and to monitor adherence to Minimum Advertised Pricing (IMAP) and Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) policies. Gazaro’s proprietary Extensible Fuzzy Reasoning Engine (XFiRE) comprises one of the world’s largest databases of retail pricing, with over 1 billion price points representing over 30 million monitored products, with 7 million new price points being added daily.

About Gazaro

Gazaro is a leading provider of Price Intelligence solutions that give retailers complete market, competitive, channel and pricing visibility to successfully calculate their path to profit. For more information, visit Gazaro at www.price-iq.com.

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Retailers looking to increase their competitive position in the market through the use of Market and Price Intelligence, subsets of business intelligence, may encounter the same issues highlighted in the RSR article.

I said may, as it will totally depend on the solution and service provider you ultimately choose.

Gazaro differentiates itself from all other price intelligence and business intelligence providers through solutions that manifest themselves in two key respects: the first is providing near real-time visibility into the market via competitive price monitoring and intelligence, assortment analysis and channel monitoring solutions. In other words, access to data, a key weakness for retailers as outlined in the report.

The second aspect deals with the second conclusion of the RSR article “retailers are even further incapacitated to make use of the overwhelming flow that is available to them.” Through a combination of analytics and a top-tier customer support team, Gazaro ensures that the intelligence gathered is disseminated both horizontally and vertically, from the associate to the merchandiser up to the C-level executive.

Ultimately, if you are a retailer and have made the decision to increase your competitive position through the use of price, market and channel intelligence then you have the following options at your disposal:

1. Use human means to collect competitive intelligence;

2. Build the technology/solutions in-house;

3. Seek out an intelligence provider who can get you data;

4. Seek out an intelligence provider who can give you the highest quality data, at the most scalable quantity, and who can also help you operationalize it.

If you’ve chosen option 4, then you’ll find that find that price intelligence, like business intelligence, can be a catalyst for making your organization a real winner.

Swehbe (@swehbe)

We’ll soon find out, as the irresistible force (Walmart) meets the immovable object (Amazon) in a battle for retail supremacy.

With its current e-commerce push, Wal-mart has been trying to gain a strategic foothold. Historically finding those ventures to be unsuccessful after years of throwing money at e-commerce without a solid vision of how to combine it’s raison d’être as a physical store, with the explosive growth of e-commerce.

This new foray into the digital world, as outlined in the article, seems to be quite focused. With an emerging ecommerce strategy and team in place things are pointing to the brick-and-mortar giant finally turning the corner on e-commerce.

What wasn’t mentioned in the article was the importance of online price intelligence and how it can be critical for any retailer trying to compete against Amazon. Apart from the economies of scale the internet has afforded a retailer like Amazon, it’s important to realize the company is built on a sophisticated analytics engine.  Case in point, recent tests run by Gazaro concluded that over the critical period of the Black Friday weekend and Cyber Monday, prices on Amazon and Amazon Marketplace fluctuated (in certain cases) on an almost hourly basis.

If you are Wal-Mart, or any other brick-and-mortar or electronic retailer, how do you compete with those kind of capabilities that gave Amazon 44% top-line growth last quarter?

Price and Market intelligence solutions allow retailers to gain a strategic competitive advantage through complete visibility of online channels. In essence, these solutions and their analytics capabilities provide retailers with a perspective similar to the one Amazon enjoys. As a result, it is critical to any retailer crossing the chasm from physical stores to the world of e-commerce, that a price and market intelligence solution be part of the strategic and operational process. In doing so, brick and mortar retailers can stand to invent a new paradigm for commerce.

Sam Wehbe (@swehbe)

While online marketers analyze conversions rates to death, those outside the inner circle of retail may not be aware that according to a Forrester study “Understanding Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate” shipping costs were the number one reason why consumers abandoned online shopping carts.  In third and fourth place, respectively, were price checking and high prices.

Some retailers have tried to work around this issue with variety of tactics that include building shipping into the product price (mostly for unique products), free shipping on high margin products, and free shipping for minimum orders, smaller sized items or as free service to members.  All these tactics can be found in the Internet Retailer article.

With the “World Series of Retail” currently underway (Black Friday Weekend, Cyber Monday, Free Shipping Day, Green Monday and the rest of the holiday season) and with so much on-the-line,  we’ll no doubt see more advertisements about free shipping by retailers to attract and convert traffic.

I’ve said it before, in the era of consumer price transparency and hyper competitiveness, monitoring the marketplace has become a daunting task with millions of products across a wide variety of categories and brands. Monitoring shipping costs makes it even more challenging.

Price and Market Intelligence solutions should provide retail competitive intelligence across a wide variety of dimensions including at the product, brand and category level. As seen in the above snapshot of the Gazaro PriceIQ portal, the pricing intelligence you receive should also include price with and without shipping, to allow you to make those crucial decisions about product pricing and product mix. With a high-level of visibility into both, you should see your e-commerce conversion rates soar!

Sam Wehbe (@swehbe)

As highlighted through the well known book “The Discipline of Market Leaders”, retailers could achieve success through a three-pronged approach: operational excellence, product leadership and customer intimacy. These factors were made more salient through the startling growth of Wal-Mart at the height of its powers in the early part of the 2000s, as the company best able to operationalize commodities through an excellent supply chain that lowered prices for the end consumer.

Because of the rapid advents in information technology the article proposes a multi-sphere approach centered on the customer, stressing a new model for retailer success in which context, commerce, community and content all converge on the customer. Briefly, all of these variables describe the environment in which customers interact with retailers and the attitudes retailers must adopt to reflect the best interests of the customer, so as to ensure their own survival in the contemporary, and fiercely competitive, retail world.

While I’m in full agreement with this new model, what it fails to stress or include is the importance of market visibility. The article recognizes that price transparency has been achieved by consumers, but fails to fully recognize that although historically retailers have lacked the same tools that have empowered consumers, such is not the case today.

Retailers now have access to near-real time visibility into competitor pricing across a multitude of channels – at the product, brand and category level. This “price intelligence” can be the single most important variable that unites all of the above and is rendered yet more powerful by the accelerating technological trends. Through in-depth knowledge of market pricing, retailers can optimize everything from supplier relationships, product mix, promotions, to the all important alignment of pricing and brand.

The central idea is that retailers who make the consumer the focus of their raison d’être have the best chances of lasting in an austere economic environment. Pricing intelligence can be the catalyst that frames the new customer-centered paradigm and is the tool that can help retailers create precise customer focused strategies. Only through the adoption of price intelligence can they become Winners.

Sam Wehbe (@Swehbe)

In its annual Merchandising Benchmark Report, Retail Systems Research (RSR) focuses on the coming trends that will re-define merchandising beyond recognition. RSR refers to three key factors driving the shifts in merchandising: better computing power, IT-literate merchants, and the erratic nature of today’s global economy. In summary, we know more, work faster and do it all in a very unpredictable economic environment.

A recurring theme in the report is that crucial aspects like integrated planning, allocation and replenishment (inventory management), generating clean data, cross-channel merchandising and functionality, customer insights and finally, merchandise analytics all come together to form the main shift: technologically-based management and marketing is the 21st century solution to making merchandising predictable, visible and profitable.

The report proposes 7 tenets of 21st century merchandising, but in my view, the most important of them are following two:

1. Optimization in products must span products, prices and processes.

2. Merchants are no longer the sole intersection point between customer insights and product plans.

Here’s what these two fundamental tenets mean:

1. Retailers must process ever-increasing amounts of information efficiently, just to manage their own operations.

2. Retailers must also take into account information that consumers can readily find through multiple access points about the competition, and incorporate it into their merchandising strategies.

So, how do we connect all of the above?

The answer: market, price and competitive intelligence.

Gazaro monitors millions of products and billions of price points in near real-time.  The information represents near real-time trends in price fluctuations across competitors and channels, allowing retailers and brand manufacturers to adjust what and how much they sell for according to market demand.

Winners make it a point to get and use this kind of information at any cost. Knowing how the market moves is crucial for meeting the first tenet and secondly, price intelligence provides the answer to the second tenet. Effectively, providing the retailer the market and price transparency afforded to consumers through the Internet, Internet enabled devices and social networking.

The writing is on the wall:  for retailers to survive in the 21st century, they must think bigger, adjust faster and manage increasingly greater risks brought on by an uncertain economy. The above tenets are essential to success, and price intelligence is the key to meeting both of them.

Sam Wehbe (@swehbe)

Apple does it, Dell does it, so do many other brand manufacturers (BMs) – sell directly to consumers as part of a multi-channel strategy. Retailers, not to be outdone, also sell their very own private label brands and in the process, bypass the brand manufacturers and their wholesaler networks.

Welcome to the 21st century retail industry. With the birth and subsequent explosion of the Internet, the relationship between retailers and brand manufacturers has evolved to one that can be at times symbiotic, parasitic and adversarial depending on the hour of the day.

For today’s brand manufacturer, conducting business is a slippery slope that needs to be navigated in order to stay competitive.

Traditionally, brand manufacturers still compete directly with other major national brands on an “apple-to-apples” basis as well as with close substitutes on a “apple-to-oranges” basis (laptop vs tablet vs smart phone). They also have to compete with retailer private label brands from the likes of Best Buy, Walmart and Amazon, all the while fighting for space and exposure on those same retailer aisles.

To further complicate matters they need to protect their brand equity, distributors and channels by monitoring and enforcing minimum advertised pricing (MAP) policies and levels, and identifying and rooting out grey markets.

For the foreseeable future, this retail industry paradox is the new reality for brand manufacturers. Gone are the days of the simple supply chain, and the traditional symbiotic relationship between manufacturers, distributors and retailers.

To navigate these murky waters, manufacturers can leverage Gazaro’s market, price and channel intelligence solutions to keep a finger on the pulse of an industry in competitive hyper-drive and with ever expanding channels to ensure healthy sales, profit margins and complete channel transparency.

Sam Wehbe (@swehbe)

For most of us, the holidays are already faintly knocking at the door. For retailers, Christmas bells are already going off about what to do to attract the most customers and highest revenue through the right prices, promotions and policies.

In our view, much of the retail year can be considered the “regular season” for a sporting team, while the upcoming holiday season – Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Green Monday, Free Shipping Day and Christmas – are the playoffs, where the consequences of every well-executed play and every mistake are significantly magnified.

Taking the sports analogy one step further, here are some statistics about how important the 2010 Retail Holiday Season was to retail:

1. Black Friday: $10.69 billion on Friday and $45 billion for the weekend from a combined 212 million in-store and online shoppers.

2. Cyber Monday: 9 million purchases made for a total of $1.028 billion, with 4% of those purchase made with mobile devices.

3. Green Monday: $954 million spent.

4. Free Shipping Day: $942 million spent.

5. Christmas: $36.4 billion was spent online by December 23.

With 2011’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday on the horizon – the question every retail and manufacturing C-level Executive, Director and Manager should be asking is, are we ready?  And by ready, we mean are the right tools and processes in place that will allow retailers to maximize sales and margins?

One of the biggest levers at a retailer’s disposal is price:  price IS the single biggest influencer in consumer purchasing decisions, and, as it turns out, is also one of the biggest influencers on profits. Consumers are, now more than ever, armed with with myriad technologies that help ensure they are always getting the best price.  Now, when we say the best price, we are not talking about a price war, or a race to the bottom; rather, in our view, consumers are smarter than ever, and take all factors into account when they make their purchases.  As such, the focus is on the right price, as opposed to only the lowest price – as we have seen in previous blog posts.

For retailers, this represents a threat and an opportunity:  they can very quickly gain a customer if they are “right-priced”, but can just as quickly lose one if they are not – this is the new reality for retailers fighting to survive in a hostile market.  As a retailer, how do you ensure you have the most accurate price at the right time, especially during retail’s most important time of year?

It starts with complete market visibility and ends with increased sales, margins and a competitive position.  Due to volume, scale and time limitations, human-based solutions provide little visibility. The right price intelligence solution delivers critical near real-time visibility into the market at the competitors, brand, category and product level to enable retailers to more dynamically respond to market conditions, and ensure that they are always “right-priced”.

Gazaro Price Intelligence provides an unfair advantage to retailers who use it.  However, going into the biggest and most important time of the year when billions will be spent, isn’t that an unfair advantage that you would like to have on your team?

Alexander Rink (@alexrink)

Ottawa, ON (September 27, 2011) Gazaro today announced the launch of its Price IQ™ Price Intelligence platform. The suite of Price Intelligence, Price Monitoring and Channel Monitoring solutions enables retailers and manufacturers of durable goods to monitor and analyze real-time market and price information to increase sales and margins, and optimize their product mix and pricing.

Price transparency has turned retail into an increasingly fierce, competitive landscape. According to Deloitte, 2 out every 5 of the estimated 69.5 million smartphone owners in the United States check prices while shopping in store. Traditional retailers face the reality of price smart consumers comparing prices and even making purchases from online retailers and deal finding services while walking through ‘brick and mortar’ stores.

“Retailers now lose customers faster than ever before,” said Alexander Rink, CEO of Gazaro. “They need the right price when the consumer is viewing the product, or they lose the sale.  Gazaro delivers the highest quality and quantity of price intelligence data, and we do it faster than anyone else. This enables retailers to right-price their products for increased sales, margins and product mix optimization.”

Retailers leverage Price IQ offerings to increase sales and profitability, optimize product mix through insight-driven pricing decisions and better negotiate with vendors. Manufacturers can utilize Price IQ solutions to understand their relative position to private label and national brands, and to monitor channels and enforce Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) and Internet Minimum Advertised Pricing (IMAP) policies.

Some of North America’s top retailers, with over $1 billion in annual revenues leverage Gazaro’s infinitely scalable, cloud-based Price IQ platform, which is built on one of the world’s biggest databases of retail pricing, with over 29 million monitored products, and 1 billion price points increasing at over 7 million daily.

For more information, visit Gazaro at www.price-iq.com, the PriceIQ Price Intelligence Blog, or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

About Gazaro

Gazaro increases market transparency and strengthens the connection between shoppers, retailers and brands by continuously monitoring, analyzing and reporting on millions of product price points and providing the most accurate retail market and pricing data. Real-time market, price, channel and competitive intelligence solutions from Gazaro’s PriceIQ™ give retailers and manufacturers unparalleled retail market transparency and provide a strategic competitive advantage through insight-driven pricing decisions that help increase sales and margins, and optimize product mix.

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