What is the biggest threat to retail today? Why are traditional retail businesses witnessing a steep downfall in their top and bottom lines? Forget about the numbers. Why is the very presence of real-world retail suddenly endangered?
This may surprise you, but the answer is not the COVID-19 pandemic. It is retail’s overarching archenemy, e-commerce.
In this blog post, though, we shall explain how traditional retail can overcome the challenge posed by e-commerce, turning one of its most potent weapons against it – that of dynamic pricing.
What is Dynamic Pricing?
Dynamic pricing tools consider a combination of historical and real-time market data to provide price suggestions.
The data can range from past performance to geography to seasons or even local events.
The algorithm frequently adjusts rates based on such data inputs, helping companies stay competitive at all times. Such pricing can be based on a group of people or on the passage of time.
Dynamic pricing is most suited to highly competitive industries with elastic demand for their offerings.
Airlines, hospitality, events, transportation, and most recently e-commerce have successfully implemented dynamic pricing.
The latter has always been around, but the underlying technology for its implementation is what has changed and evolved.
Why Should Traditional Retailers Deploy Dynamic Pricing as Well?
This is a critical question because tackling e-commerce is merely scratching the surface. Traditional retail has continuously operated on fixed pricing.
Fixed pricing means that there is no flexibility for retailers to attract more customers and build brand loyalty.
Simply lowering product prices is also detrimental to their business in the long run, as it subtly changes customers’ overall expectations.
Also, fixed pricing holds businesses back from capturing the incremental profits that can be earned by implementing dynamic pricing to capitalize on shifts in customer loyalty, demand, supply, and the broader external environment.
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It also allows businesses to process a large number of transactions without worrying about reduced margins.
Various studies show that dynamic pricing can grow revenue by up to 30% and increase profit margins by about 11%.
These numbers cannot be ignored by retailers fighting for every cent and dollar. The potential to grow is seemingly limitless.
Here’s what a Forbes report had to say about the future of dynamic pricing:
“In the not-so-distant future, virtually nothing will have a fixed price. Say goodbye to the familiar $1.99 and hello to a price between, say, $1.39 and $2.17, based on changing supply and demand. This is the phenomenon of dynamic pricing, and it is already rapidly changing the way we buy goods and services and dramatically reshaping our economy.”
“Companies are using artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and automation to balance demand with supply in near real-time. For the first time, all the economic forces at work (the “hand”) are finally visible in the data. As a result, for the first time, businesses no longer have to use guesswork to set their prices: They can use data to understand what their prices should be and automatically change as supply and demand fluctuate.”
Dynamic pricing can help retailers reduce waste by enabling them to sell “unsellable” products.
For instance, electronic products are being replaced by newer models, and grocery and consumer perishables are nearing their expiration dates.
Retail outlets discard such perishables worth thousands of dollars daily.
Offering customers incentives, such as reduced prices, to purchase such items will significantly increase their salvage value for retailers.
AI-based dynamic pricing engines can correctly identify the exact price needed to move products, protecting sales and profit margins.
Another significant advantage of dynamic pricing is its ability to establish strong brand loyalty.
For example, if a dynamic pricing model is effectively incorporated into a firm’s CDP (customer data platform), its AI, ML, and predictive modeling capabilities can enable retailers to generate attractive, compelling offers for their customers.
The dynamic pricing engine can be used to generate user-specific offers in the form of discounts, coupons & vouchers, and bundles for exactly those products on which the customers are most likely to spend.
It makes a strong use case for retargeting customers, encouraging them to revisit the stores and make follow-up purchases.
Now that we have covered the what and the why, it is time for the how.
How can Retailers Implement Dynamic Pricing?
The first thing you need to know is that dynamic pricing does not require some over-the-top, fancy, or complex software. Here’s what a McKinsey report says about it:
“Dynamic pricing isn’t just for travel companies or e-commerce giants, and it doesn’t necessarily require ultra-sophisticated software that changes every product’s price multiple times a day. Even traditional retailers can reap tremendous benefits from merchant-informed, data-driven algorithms that recommend price changes for selected products at some level of frequency.”
“Despite the competitive advantage that dynamic pricing can confer, few omnichannel retailers have developed this capability. Some are only now starting to explore the potential of dynamic pricing. Other retailers conducted half-hearted and poorly planned pilots that, unsurprisingly, had little impact and thus failed to get the organization’s buy-in.”
This suggests two crucial things: First, traditional retailers have the chance to gain a first-mover advantage, since their rivals are either not doing it at all or perhaps not doing it right. Second, dynamic pricing is not as hard to implement as many people think.
The process starts with the cleansing and organizing of enterprise-wide data. Smaller businesses will find it easier to do so and will likely do so in-house. For medium- and large-scale retailers, unstructured data can pose a challenge because of its sheer volume.
Express Analytics data analytics services provide thorough and streamlined data governance capabilities to cleanse, organize, and unify unstructured data.
The next step would be to develop tailored machine learning algorithms and effective response models to kick-start the process of building a dynamic pricing engine.
One of the most critical tasks these algorithms will handle is accurately estimating the price elasticity of demand for each product across every customer segment.
Price elasticity of demand, in simple terms, is a variable that denotes how much the aggregate demand of a product will change because of a change in its price.
Price elasticity is influenced by factors such as the availability of substitutes, the portion of the customer’s budget allocated to the purchase, the degree of necessity, and brand loyalty.
Needless to say, this is the most crucial factor to consider when pricing a product.
For instance, if you price a product lower than the average market price in the hopes of gaining more market share, and it turns out to be less elastic, you will end up losing profit margins.
Moreover, when computed separately for different customer segments, elasticity can help set prices differently for other customers.
Of course, we also need to ensure we do not violate any laws & regulations regarding price discrimination.
In other words, while keeping the base price the same, promotional offers and discounts can be provided to more elastic customer segments. In contrast, less elastic segments can be charged a higher price, all without violating any pricing regulations.
That is just the tip of the iceberg. Similarly, the dynamic pricing engine, coupled with the above-mentioned algorithms, also accounts for the income elasticity of demand and the cross elasticity of demand.
What are Electronic Shelf Labels and How They Can Help
As traditional retail is much more than just software and virtual algorithms when compared to e-commerce, it is only natural that a physical piece of hardware is also deployed to facilitate the dynamic pricing engines.
Therefore, one of the greatest weapons in traditional retail’s dynamic pricing arsenal is Electronic Shelf Labels (ESL).
As the name suggests, these are digital price labels that can be set up at any retail outlet with the listed products.
The advent of ESLs makes it easy for retailers, from supermarkets to electronics vendors, to implement dynamic pricing, finally helping level the playing field with e-commerce vendors.
ESLs help create a synergy among the dynamic pricing engine, price displays, and Point-of-Sale (POS) systems.
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Influenced by inventory, purchase history, and competitor pricing, ESLs help pricing managers know how to change prices. What it does is shift the store digitally. Doing so helps physical stores to compete with online sellers.
The decisive and final step in this process is to choose a strategy. There are various types of dynamic pricing strategies, and different strategies work best for different businesses:
6 Types of Dynamic Pricing Strategies
- Segmented pricing
- Time-based pricing
- Peak pricing
- Penetrative pricing
- Discriminatory pricing
- Competitive Pricing
Choosing the right fit for your retail business is crucial, as it will increase the effectiveness of your dynamic pricing engine tenfold.
