Assortment optimization

While the right price is said to be the most important profit lever, no price can make up for not having the right product.

Here’s three activities that Price API can help you with your assortment:

1. Use the Amazon Marketplace to never again miss a trend.
2. Analyze your competitors’ assortments to understand their positioning and craft winning strategies.
3. Use market data to make better purchasing decisions.

Let’s dive into them one by one.

Never again miss a trend

Amazon famously uses their own market place as a research tool. Tapping into the wisdom of the crowd, they never miss a trend. When a product kicks off it usually takes just one to three weeks for Amazon to sell it themselves — if the metrics make this profitable.

Price API makes this easy:

1. Find the Amazon top seller categories that are relevant to your customers.
2. Use Price API to frequently get the 100 top selling products in this category or monitor the corresponding movers-and-shakers list.
3. Compare the products with your own assortment to identify gaps.
4. Send a list of interesting products to your category manager — because, let’s face it, they will have a better judgement than any software.

Bonus tip: Enrich the profile of each product to look at with information on the competition — number of competitors and prices — as well as reviews to give more context to the decision making. Of cource, Price API can provide that information, too. See: make better purchasing decisions below.

Analyze your competitors’ assortments

To succeed in your competitive landscape, you will want to understand your competitors well. What is their positioning? In which areas do our assortments overlap?

Price API offers three simple ways in which you can collect data to answer these questions with certainty.

1. By looking at your overlapping assortment
2. By looking at each competitor’s assortment
3. By looking at top sellers of a category

Here is how each of the methods work, step by step:

Method 1: Overlapping assortment

This works very straight forward. Just compile a list of GTINs (EANs or UPCs) and run them through a price comparison site that is relevant to your market, for example Google Shopping.

In the results, you can identify each of your competitors with all of their overlapping assortment. It also includes their pricing and availability. Pure gold.

Pros:

• Very easy to do collect
• Directly compares to your assortment
• Available in all data sources

Cons:

• Misses the part of their assortment that you don’t carry yourself

Method 2: Competitors’ assortments

Some marketplaces and price comparison sites show each seller’s assortment. Price API can collect this list for you. Talk to our experts if this is feasible for your market.

Pros:

• Identifies products you are missing
• Shows your competitors’ positioning

Cons:

• Not available for every market

Method 3: Top sellers

With this method, you start with one or more categories.

1. Choose relevant categories.
2. Request top selling / clicking products in these categories.
3. Request all offers for each of these products.
4. Optional: Filter products by relevant competitors

Pros:

• Identifies products you are missing
• Shows your competitors’ positioning
• Available in many data sources

Cons:

• More steps, more difficult
• Does not cover less important long tail products

Make better purchasing decisions

Now that you have identified products that sell good, should you add them to your assortment? And if so, how many units should you put on stock?

With the right market data of Price API, you can put more confidence into these decisions.

• Ratings: How satisfied are customers with the product? What return rates are likely?
• Competition: Who is already selling the product? What are their prices?
• Price: Which price can I achieve, thus what purchasing conditions do I need?
• Quantity: How many units can I sell at this price, looking at the demand indicated by the market data?