How to Achieve Maximum Value from a Pricing Solution Investment

In the relentless search for competitive advantage in uncertain times, many retailers are looking to upgrade their pricing systems to be better equipped for today's economic extremes. Even before supply chains became far less reliable and costs began to rise, consumer demands for more omnichannel options and greater value – along with a new willingness to shop multiple places to find both – spurred technological acceleration in the pricing industry. Whatever your motivations are for seeking a new price optimization solution, below are key things to look for when evaluating the solution's technology foundation and the vendor's suitability.

Technology Requirements

First, let's cover technical considerations for price optimization solutions and how the right foundation can drive value for both you and your customers.

Flexibility

As quickly as retail is changing these days, any technology upgrade should be agile and flexible, allowing you to keep pace with the market and even get ahead of what's coming next.

Flexibility is also important when it comes to integration. Pretty much every retailer has dealt with feeling stuck by the limitations of legacy systems when wanting to integrate new technology. Save yourself this future headache by choosing a solution that is built from the ground up with flexible integration in mind.

Transparency + Reliability

Transparency builds trust, which is essential for change management. Your pricing team will be more open to a solution that provides visibility into the data and the science behind its pricing recommendations.

Reliability is also key for building trust. While you want your pricing team to be actively using and learning from a pricing tool, it should also allow them to be largely hands-off-the-wheel, focusing on more strategic decisions while the system just simply works.

Artificial Intelligence

Any pricing solution you consider should use cutting-edge technology, industry-leading science, and change-ready architecture. If you are building for the future, there should be no question when it comes to AI.

Retailers are rapidly leveraging more and more AI across business functions to improve operations, meet consumer demands, and adjust to market changes. And that certainly includes pricing management. Experienced, interpretable and actionable AI that delivers predictive and prescriptive capabilities is crucial to solving today's retail challenges and staying competitive in the long run.

Cloud Native

Cloud-native solutions come with a number of advantages. One, a solution built in the cloud is built with modern architecture, meaning it will be easier for you to grow, scale, and add functionality. Older systems that have merely been pushed to the cloud will still have infrastructure limitations when it comes to scalability.

Another advantage is security. As hackers get more creative and pervasive, a modern architecture allows for quicker updates to keep ahead of the attacks. Be sure to choose a solution provider with top-level security measures.

Vendor Requirements

There's a saying that when you marry someone, you marry their family, too. Well, the same is basically true when choosing a technology vendor. You aren't just choosing their solution; you are choosing their whole company.

While the solution itself is the focal point of the selection process, the vendor's experience, vision, culture, and leadership should play a role in your evaluation as well.

Experience

Perhaps more than in any other business function, when it comes to retail pricing, experience matters. Look for vendors that have experience dealing with the long list of challenges that are unique to retail pricing – vendors whose people and AI models have learned from years of optimizing prices in the contexts of cannibalization, pantry loading, affinity purchases, short lifecycle and long lifecycle items, seasonality, perishability, and more.

Be wary of new entrants to the market that have not learned from years of overcoming these very complex challenges that retail pricers face every day.

As Retail Systems Research analyst Brian Kilcourse recently noted in this blog post, "Successful solution providers add to their body of knowledge with every implementation – and each succeeding retail client should benefit from that accumulation of knowledge."

Simply put, if you work with a vendor that is new to the retail pricing game, you are going to be missing out on a lot of best practices and pricing know-how that could have maximized the value your business gains from its pricing software investment.

Vision + Leadership

Find a vendor with a strong vision. If they aren't constantly looking ahead, you'll soon find yourself falling behind. You can't prepare to address tomorrow's challenges if your technology providers are stuck in yesterday.

Look for the industry leader. Who is truly innovating, and who is merely keeping up? Are they continuing to invest in the system and make changes that drive more value for retailers?

Partnership

A vendor's job shouldn't stop once the contract is signed. A partnership between vendor and retailer is essential to customer success. True, long-term value is derived from a price optimization solution provider that learns your business inside and out.

For a vendor to really partner with you, it needs to offer support beyond just the system. Mutual success is found in collaborative communication, pushing each other to drive more optimal results, and working together on the price optimization journey.

The Worldwide Leader in Retail Pricing

With cutting-edge technology, over 20 years of AI learning, and an unmatched portfolio of top retail customers, Revionics is the leading provider of lifecycle price optimization solutions. We help retailers navigate the complexity and uncertainty of pricing with our deep retail experience, innovative science, and dedicated team of pricing experts.

Reach out today to explore how Revionics can be your guide for the price optimization journey.