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Innovation

Amazon changes prices millions of times every day

Amazon dominates big box retailers when it comes to efficiency of competitive pricing.
Written by Tyler Falk, Contributor
Here's one reason why Amazon is dominating online retail: Its ability to be efficient at price competitiveness.

That's pretty clear in a new analysis from price intelligence firm Profitero which shows that on an average day Amazon changes its prices more than 2.5 million times, more than 50-times more price changes in a day compared to major retailers like Walmart and Best Buy which change prices about 50,000 times a day.

If you've ever done any shopping on Amazon the company regularly offers the best price or one close to it, so it's no surprise that Amazon changes their prices often. But the vast difference in how often Amazon is undercutting competitor prices compared to other retailers is simply amazing. And retailers need to take note.

"The sheer scale of these price changes demonstrates why brick-and-mortar retailers need to be using an advanced online price intelligence solution if they want to compete with Amazon," says Volodymyr Pigrukh, CEO and co-founder of Profitero. "Profitero predicts that the number of price changes is only going to increase as the retail landscape becomes more competitive, and so it’s impossible for any retailer to monitor this number of price changes manually." 

But the amount of price changes has picked up significantly in the last year. One year ago, the online retailer was making less than 300,000 daily price changes, a number that has increased 10-fold over the past year. 

 
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[h/t Quartz]

Graph: Profitero

Photo: Flickr/Luke Dorny

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com

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