Pricing in 2023 | eCommerce Matters Ep. 039
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Episode 39 of the eCommerce Matter's Podcast is now available, entitled 'Pricing in 2023'. On this episode, Philip Huthwaite, BlackCurve CEO, and Rob Horton, BlackCurve Chief Product Officer, reflect back on the key talking points from episodes in 2022, and make their predictions for what eCommerce companies should be doing to up their pricing-game in 2023.
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Field notes
How to improve your CPA with Pricing
Episode 31 discussed why retail marketers should be considering pricing in their campaign management. It introduced how price is a key data point in the Google algorithm to determine your search relevancy. Your search relevancy dictates your organic position based on a user search, and also how much you will have to pay to get the eye-balls (i.e. the best position on the Google Shopping Ads carousel). As most of us do not scroll down, or scroll right, if you're not considering price in your advertising, it is likely you are overpaying considerably for your Google Ads.
Too much data and pricing
It is easy to get over whelmed by how much pricing data is available, especially if you have thousands of products. eCommerce is fast-paced too, and therefore it is likely that market pricing is changing daily, especially if you're selling branded goods. Knowing how to remove the noise, slice the data to the best view, and focus on making pricing decisions on the most important products is imperative for success. Episode 32 took users through how BlackCurve can support your day-to-day tactical price decision-making.
Winning the Digital Shelf
Episode 33 explored why optimising every data point associated with your products that are included in your various data feeds to market-places, your website, and anywhere else your product is displayed to your end consumer for purchase is essential. Physical retailers will spend hours and sometimes days agonising over the display in store of a single product. It is easy for eCommerce companies to forget the power of ensuring your product names are detailed, your GTINs are populated, and more, and how if you don't optimise these elements, it will harm your visibility i.e. your consumers will simply not be able to find you on Google Search as easily. If you're not on page one, you're unlikely to be found and clicked, which is bad for business.
Pricing basics and the best pricing rules
We recommend listening to episodes 34 and 35 together. Episode 34 goes back-to-basics, and takes you through a check-list of how to get the most out of the BlackCurve Pricing Insights. Episode 35 introduces the BlackCurve rules engine, and what pricing rules we see as the most successful in terms of improving impression share and click-throughs. You may be surprised to hear that one of the most successful rules is a rounding rule e.g. making your prices look pretty to the nearest 9p.
Decision Intelligence Tools
A new term in the world of retail, we explain what Decision Intelligence tools such as BlackCurve actually are, and how they can support human decision-making, as opposed to leaving you scratching your head as to why a black-box Artificial Intelligence tool has performed a particular action.
Headless Pricing
For the bigger Enterprise businesses out there, we introduce our new Headless Pricing offering, which allows complete customisation of our pricing rules, using any data set from any of your systems (let your pricing imagination run wild!), as well as how our API can be used to get our pricing insights into an existing analytics package you may be using such as Tableau.
The Best eCommerce Software
We round up the top 10 eCommerce software that you should be using in 2023, based on our conversations with our customers. Everything from pricing, advertising, webshops, and more is discussed. All of the suggestions come with free trials, so not to be missed, and perhaps something to take a look at in January 2023 when the dust has settled for your post the festive campaign season.