"I used to price as low as I could, hoping it'd simply attract people. It turned out I couldn't make much profits that way! So I have to be aggressive, but not too much. That means checking the other retailers and adjusting my prices, continuously." Jenna, Office supplies retailer

"For me, it's just more cost-effective to rely on a service, than looking at competition by myself. I get a better use my time, a broader picture, and I can react quicker" Daniel, Electronics retailer

"The web-scrapping application was taking too much of my time, and it showed too many alerts. Also, every time one competitor was changing his site, I had to re-configure the whole thing." Jackson, Electronics and Computer retailer

"Some [databases] provide lots of info, but it's very hard to unify the results. Many retailers don't' use exactly the same title or product code, so result are not trustworthy."

Donovan, Software developer

"My business is very competitive, so my margins are low. But if my prices are off, I loose lots of sales. I figured out, for every item I carry, there's a maximum cost I can afford to improve the price tag, usually a few cents. It's a matter of deciding which items are worth monitoring, until my shop is big enough, so there's economies of scale." Daryl, Pet accessories retailer

Average Price Difference is the weighted average of the price differences between your prices and the market prices. For instance, '-3.4%' means your prices are, on average, 3.4% below the market. The Weighted Price Difference is useful as an indicator at-a-glance of your positioning vis-à-vis the market. If you see that number change significantly, you should take a deeper look into your competition, to find the most important price changes and adjust yourself accordingly.

Average Position shows the average percentage of competitors below your prices. For instance, 53% indicates out of 100 sellers, 53 have cheaper prices than you (and therefore, 47 are more expensive). The Average Position provides an instantaneous indication of your competitiveness. Keep an eye on it to ensure your positioning remains stable.

% of Sub-Optimal Prices is the percentages of your prices which are not at a proven, psychological level. You should wether raise them to the next psychological level, which will result in higher margins while keeping approximately the same volume, or lower them to the previous psychological level, which should yield significantly more sales. Look for the 'warning' indicator in your Products list, it will give your price hints.

Direct Competitors is the number of direct competitors automatically identified by the system, based on the similarity of your catalogue and theirs.

The 'Follow' checkbox allows you to specify the competitors triggering Alerts, and featured in the Price graph or Products list.

Similarity shows the percentage of common catalogue with each Seller

Price Difference is the Average Price Difference between a Seller and yourself

% Cheaper is the percentage of your products offered at a lower price by this Seller

The 'Competitor' pop-menu allows you to select which Seller or market data you want to compare with.

Delta shows the difference between your price and the Competitor price

Price Trend shows the price evolution for both your shop (in black) and the Competitor (in grey). If available, the Trend Arrow indicates the likely market price evolution in the short term. For instance, a down arrow means the price is expected to significantly go down in the very near future.

30 days, if available, summarizes the price evolution for the Competitor over the past 30 days

Kurtosis is ‘the degree of peakedness of a distribution’. It show how much Sellers concentrate around a common price level. A high Kurtosis implies a deviation from the market price is more obvious to customers. A low Kurtosis signifies prices are uniformly spread out: you may have more flexibility in setting your price, but the positioning impact will be smaller.

Volatility measures the dispersion of price changes. It is used in Finance to assess the ‘risk’ of an investment. A high Volatility means prices changes are ‘hectic’ and do not follow a smooth trend. Applied to retail, Volatility indicates the brutality of price drops or hikes. It shows you how much attention you should give to a product, as sudden price changes often mean higher margin or higher volume opportunities for you.

Once you've created your account, you can create and edit a list of Products we'll monitor for you. Any significant change on those products will trigger an alert.

Retailers: to keep an eye on their competitors and increase their profits through better pricing.

Manufacturers: to know what’s the real market prices of their product.... as well as those of other manufacturers.

Journalists and Analysts: to get a better understanding of market trends

Consumers: to get true and complete Price transparency. But let’s keep it a hidden secret between very savvy shoppers...

Comparison shopping sites simply display the listing of the Sellers they're affiliated with.

From a Consumer perspective, it is unlikely to see the best possible prices, because shopping sites don’t list Sellers who are not paying them any referral fees.

From a Business perspective, they show only a tiny portion of the market offering (their affiliates) so the prices they show may not be representative. Furthermore, because shopping sites’ business model relies upon visitors purchases, they do not provide any historical data or price prediction.

Because you're selling it. Given average retail margins, a mere 1% price change can increase net profits by 19%. There is almost no extra effort required: perfecting your prices is the simplest, fastest way to increase your profits.

Whereas anybody can research true market prices on VALU VALU, we ask a monthly subscription to monitor competitors prices for a portfolio of products, and to get access to Price predictions.

We gather all our prices by harvesting the Web and applying Data Mining techniques. A proprietary, self-learning, classification algorithm allows us to gather exhaustive data while filtering out the noise. In particular, we ensure the prices we retrieve pertain to relevant products.

It is usually more efficient to set prices at commonly used values.

Valu Valu continuously performs a statistical evaluation of the most common prices. Those prices are the most ‘comfortable’ for potential customers, and they’re the ones they naturally consider when making purchase decisions.

We automatically detects which of your prices are close, but not exactly at such levels, and display warning flags in your products listing. We also give you a hint to raise your price (and therefore increase your margin while keeping sale volume constant), or lower it to the previous psychological level, for generating more volume.

We use statistical methods to discard outliers, and then calculate a media/average price for each product. We also display the Price distribution amongst Sellers to give you a richer understanding of the market.

Valu Valu Prediction Engine relies upon previous and current data to determine seasonality, current price level and ongoing trends for product Prices.

We aggregate historical price changes through multiple dimensions, so we’re able to predict a new product price evolution based on its category or pricing characteristics, even if we do not have any prior knowledge on that product in particular.

Unlike other Price Analytics companies, we rely upon light weight, open source technologies and keep our costs low.

We also use modern data interchange formats to 'pool' the prices retrievals together, whereas other companies have to hand-scrap prices from HTML pages. But most of all, we bet that pricing is a mass problem, and that we can earn a living by providing an affordable solution to many businesses.