Price optimization solutions from Microsoft partners
Smart retailers know that consumers respond to an effective pricing strategy. Developing that strategy, however, is no easy task. With multiple data sources providing various consumer metrics, developing the right strategy on a store-by-store basis is difficult. Intelligent pricing decisions require a firm understanding of consumer demand, competing strategies, and effective promotional approaches.
Price optimization: Helping retailers stay competitive
Price optimization software solutions can help retailers stay competitive by simplifying complex pricing data. These solutions help companies analyze various types of information, including:
| • | Sales data. Price optimization software solutions capture sales data within individual stores as well as across regions and entire chains. Retailers can evaluate this data to effectively price products and services based on sales history. |
| • | Competitor pricing. Retailers can use price optimization software solutions to track and report on competitor prices. Pricing trends are easily identified, and retailers can adjust their own pricing structures accordingly. |
| • | Supply chain data. As vendor pricing of parts shifts along the supply chain, retailers can reflect the change easily throughout their pricing structures using price optimization software solutions. |
| • | Resource costs. Over time, resource costs fluctuate, and retailers must adjust their pricing structures to balance their expenditures. Price optimization software solutions make it easy for retailers to adjust their pricing structures to accommodate these changing operational costs. |
Leveraging existing investments in the Microsoft platform
With the Microsoft platform already in place in many retail environments, it makes good financial sense to take advantage of these investments when implementing a price optimization solution. “Microsoft partners offer relatively inexpensive software solutions that enable retailers to implement effective price optimization,” says Tom Litchford, Retail and Hospitality industry director at Microsoft.
Microsoft-based solutions are built on technologies that the IT staffs of most retailers already understand, including Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and Microsoft Office 2003. By choosing solutions that make the most of existing investments in Microsoft products, retailers can begin realizing profits through price optimization without the prohibitive costs of a fully-contained system.
Benefits of price optimization solutions from Microsoft partners
In addition to the benefit of minimal implementation costs, Microsoft partner solutions also offer solid feature sets that enable retailers to maximize profits based on consumer and competitor data.
Powerful features offered by these solutions include:
| • | Automated “what-if” scenario modeling. Retailers can use Microsoft partner solutions to see the effects of a price change in a modeled scenario, before going live with a new pricing structure. This is a valuable tool for predicting how price changes will affect sales of other products. |
| • | Full visibility of supporting data. Unlike hosted price optimization tools, Microsoft partner solutions provide data transparency alternatives that enable retailers to follow through the logic of the calculations and learn the dynamics of pricing. |
| • | Flexibility for unique pricing models. Retailers with unique pricing models, such as food or convenience retailers whose prices change daily (or even hourly), can benefit from the flexible nature of solutions on the Microsoft .NET Framework. |
| • | Analysis of cross-product pricing relationships. Microsoft partner solutions help illuminate pricing relationships between products. This gives retailers an advantage when strategizing around product placement in advertisements. |
| • | Low investment cost and high ROI. Solutions offered by Microsoft partners are inexpensive for retailers to implement because they make use of technologies already in place in many stores. And while a low initial cost of implementation is good news for retailers, even better news is that they typically see a significant return on investment (ROI) on these investments in less than one year. |
Find out more about Microsoft partner price optimization solutions
To learn more about solutions that can help you achieve price optimization in your stores, please contact one of our Microsoft partners.
| • | Athens Group
Athens Group has developed a proven, leading-edge price optimization system for retailers that is intuitive, functional, easy to integrate, and significantly less expensive than other solutions available on the market. Athens Group’s Price Optimizer and Predictor (POP!) solution can cost-effectively meet your unique pricing requirements, giving you the price management and optimization tools to leverage science into the art of pricing. |
| • | KSS Retail
KSS PriceStrat is a merchandising application designed to offer powerful insight and support to your pricing and promotional practices. The KSS demand models used by this .NET solution are dynamic, allowing them to learn from sales data and self-adjust to model the effects of pricing decisions before they are implemented. Once rule-sets are defined, the system will optimize your prices around profit, volume, and margin targets—providing an ever-increasing level of confidence in demand forecasts and helping reduce the total cost of solution ownership. |
You may also contact your Microsoft sales representative for assistance in finding the right partner for your needs.
