Summary of PriceMark and Products
PriceMark is a portfolio of IT vendor-focused competitive pricing and performance tools unique to the IT vendor market data toolset.
Our tools form an important resource to vendors who are looking to gain street pricing, performance, coverage, and insights to support their channel strategies.
It is built on a product database developed over the last 2.5 years where eCommerce partner websites have been incorporated into our daily price/performance monitoring process, forming a prebuilt and constantly updated resource for vendors to utilize today.
PriceMark Products
PriceMark has developed into a portfolio of competitive pricing and performance tools specifically designed for technology vendors.
The main 2 tools are PriceMark eCommerce and PriceMark Amazon.
PriceMark eCommerce
PriceMark eCommerce focuses on competitive pricing & performance data from retailer websites (i.e., e-shops selling directly to customers).
PriceMark Amazon
PriceMark Amazon focuses on competitive pricing and (re)seller performance within Amazon marketplaces.
PriceMark eCommerce
*These tools have been built separately due to there being an extra tier of channel data within Amazon marketplaces:
Vendor → Amazon → Amazon Seller →Customer
Other PriceMark tools (Roadmap 2021/22)
Includes specific non-Amazon marketplaces where seller level data exists – for example, Lazada is a huge non-amazon marketplace in a number of Asian countries. Also, expansion plans following research into LatAm and Africa where eCommerce markets are showing high growth. These are likely to be also marketplace-led.
How has the PriceMark Data resource for Vendors been built?
- We set up websites for price monitoring based on our own market research and the requests of vendor clients.
- Our method is to scrape all products within technology categories (including Data Center, Servers, Storage, Networking, Peripherals, Software and Accessories) to build a picture not only of product pricing and availability, but coverage, competitive benchmarking, partner fit, and (in the case of Amazon marketplaces) reseller portfolios, cross-sell, upsell and lead generation potential.
- Once we scrape a website, we collect relevant information from each product page – brand, product name, description, availability, price and more., and build these references into our database. This work can be time-consuming based on the brand and product naming quality on each website, and we concentrate a lot of effort to create these references, including regionalization of products, so that crosscompetitor and cross-website comparisons are accurate
- This data is then stored in database tables which include the product_snapshot, website_master, currency_conversion_rates (updated monthly), product_categorization and others
- The product pages then move into a daily price monitoring process – we scrape and store pricing (and anything else scrapeable from product pages) each day in our database and never delete data, so an historical repository exists
- An ETL process was developed to automate website checks and pricing QA to ensure the scrape process and website information remains accurate.
- Based on client needs we create categorizations and one-to-one competitive product matching intelligence to provide deeper insights built out into the front-end dashboards
- Web applications in the form of dashboards with fully-downloadable data, are set up as separate vendor client iterations in our PriceMark Cloud and access is provided via email and password.
- The process from daily price monitoring through to web application dashboard refresh is fully automated, meaning your data will always be up to date as of the previous day.
David Porter
CEO, TPC Global
PriceMark eCommerce, PriceMark Amazon