[Case study] Citrus.ua: Adaptive pricing
2018-02-28
The Client
“Citrus” is a Ukrainian retailer for gadgets and accessories. This business has 50 physical stores, the online store citrus.ua, 11 service centers, and 5 rental locations for personal electric transportation.
The Goal
The “Citrus” team has set itself the goal of increasing revenue from online sales through competitive pricing. In order for a company's manager to effectively reprice, it’s necessary to receive and analyze competitive data. This analysis is the basis for altering the pricing policy of a company.
Previously, “Citrus” analyzed the prices of competitors on its own. Such analysis was partially correct but very resource-intensive: manual competitor scanning takes a lot of time and it results in human errors, therefore the quantity of the scanned goods is limited.
The main goals set by the retailer included:
- Increase the list of scannable products through automation
- Calculate the impact of price deviation on the site citrus.ua from competitors' prices to sales/conversion
- Configure automatic notifications about price changes to the designated managers of “Citrus” for the operational (as close to the time of the price changes) realization of prices for goods
The Decision
In order to collect and analyze the prices of competitors, “Citrus” uses
- The analytical platform Google Analytics → to collect the translation of data about the behavior of users on the site citrus.ua in Google BigQuery
- Competera- a platform based on autonomous pricing → to collect, process, clean and broadcast competitive price data, promotions, and product balances in Google BigQuery
- Google App-script service → to automate notifications about price changes
- Competera Dashboard, Google Spreadsheets, Microsoft Power BI → for visualization and analysis of the results
Using the tools above, Citrus combined and analyzed the data about the prices of competitors.
This is how the interaction of tools and data in “Citrus” looks like:
Step 1. Google Analytics → to collect and broadcast data on user behavior data onto citrus.ua in Google BigQuery
In order to analyze the impact of competitors' prices on the behavior of users on the site citrus.ua, management needs information about the number of visitors, the views of the cards of goods and the addition of goods to the basket, bounce rates, etc.
Reports in Google Analytics, due to the high traffic of the site, displays the data in a generalized (sampled) view. OWOX BI Pipeline helped get rid of sampling and the limitations of Google Analytics, so that “Citrus” analysts could analyze the actions of users in real-time.
Step 2. Competera for collecting, processing, cleaning and broadcasting data on competitive prices, promotions and product balances in Google BigQuery
To determine the impact of competitors' prices on sales, “Citrus” needs to collect and constantly update the database with the prices and promotions of competitors.
“Citrus” has already scanned the websites of competitors manually and faced the limitations on the quantity and quality of the collected prices. Therefore, the management of the company chose the second option - the implementation of a ready-made solution.
The standalone pricing platform, Competera, has become the tool to use to collect reliable data on competitors on a daily basis as well as processes and then cleans them for broadcast in Google BigQuery.
To calculate the conversion dependencies on the price of goods, all of the data is collected in Google BigQuery - a secure service with affordable rates, high data processing speed and integration tools with different CRM systems. Another advantage of Google BigQuery is the unlimited amount of downloadable data.
Step 3. Automate notifications about price changes with the Google App-script
Using the SQL query for data in Google BigQuery, the deviation of the price for certain products from the prices of the selected list of competitors can be calculated.
As a result, “Citrus” receives a report that is updated automatically and contains data on price changes for each product.
This case was realized before the setting of automatic price change notifications was added to the Competera office, therefore “Citrus” used Google to set up automatic notifications. App-script sends notifications to the managers' email about price changes or the appearance of goods from competitors (for example, if the price of competitors is lower/ higher by x% or y is not available from the competitor).
The Results
After the data on the behavior of users on the site citrus.ua and the data on the prices of competitors was collected in Google BigQuery, analysts OWOX BI and citrus, with the help of sql-requests, set up the necessary reports:
The report, “Impact of promotions on sales/ conversion”
With the help of this report, “Citrus” Category Managers track competitors' promotions and change the conversion when using promotions on their own goods. This information is used when pricing goods on the site citrus.ua.
Report, “Influence of price deviation on citrus.ua from competitors' prices for sales/ conversion”
This report allows you to analyze the prices of competitors and plan actions that’ll increase revenue, turnover and the marginality of goods, increasing the conversion of goods by using the optimal discount and, in general, by effectively managing pricing in the framework of advertising campaigns and channels. Read more in the article “How Competitive Prices Affect Conversion and User Behavior”). With the help of customized computing queries in Google BigQuery, citrus.ua analysts transmit data to PowerBI in order to visualize the reporting.
Overall Results
As a result of the integration with OWOX and Competera services, the category managers of “Citrus” can interpret market information and change pricing in order to:
- Increase the availability database, prices and shares of competitors for analysis;
- Check hypotheses about the impact of internal revaluation and competitor prices on user behavior on the site;
- Analyze what price impacts lead to more loyal users to the site.
Important:
This is the first part of the success story of “Citrus”. Once the retailer aggregates enough data about how the integration of Competera and OWOX has increased the conversion of the site and the sales amount from period to period, we will expand the case and supplement it with performance indicators.
