If you’re basing your price comparisons only on the competition’s online offerings, you’re probably not getting the whole story.
Even rock-bottom discounters are bound to have price variations between their physical and virtual platforms. Case in point: Aldi.
RDSolutions evaluated 9,500 price comparisons across nine geographically dispersed Aldi supermarket locations. Two locations were complete fullbooks and prices were compared across the total store; seven locations were partial fullbooks and prices were compared across part of the store.
The results: 77% of items online carried a greater than 10% markup over in-store prices; 13% were at 10% markup, and 3% had an online markup of less than 10%. Just 6% of items were priced the same in-store and online.
Overall, RDSolutions research revealed 30% of items were not consistently marked up, and nearly 90% were marked up 5% to 15% online compared to in-store selections.
Lessons learned:
- Online data is likely not adequate for clients requiring exact in-store pricing
- Reverse engineering the in-store price from the online price will yield unpredictable results
- While there may be an intended mark-up online, execution of the mark-up at individual store locations is volatile. Web pricing is less granular than in-store pricing.
With such volatile markup taking place at individual store locations, a snapshot of online pricing is anything but a clear picture.
RDSolutions’ recipe of online scraping and in-store teams can deliver more accurate price comparisons and make you more competitive in your marketplace. Our Intrics platform will help you understand how your catalog performs for your unique combination of markets and competitors with data available in every U.S. market across an ever-expanding selection of retailers. With multiple ways to view pricing data across a market, you’ll always have a representative sample that isn’t driven by the outlying prices of a single store.
