twelfth · Glossary · Pricing
Price intelligence
Also called competitor price monitoring, price tracking
Price intelligence is collecting competitors' published prices for products you sell, matching them to your own lines, and acting on the gaps that matter.
What it means for retail and category teams
A price intelligence programme has four parts: deciding which products and competitors to watch, collecting prices and availability regularly, matching competitor listings to your own products, and reading the result in a form the team can act on, such as a price index, a list of lines outside policy, or a note when a competitor moves. Collection is the easy half. The value is in the matching, the freshness of the observations, and knowing which gaps are real rather than an artefact of coverage.
It is also a bounded view. Published prices and availability say nothing about a competitor's costs, supplier funding or sales volumes, so price intelligence tells a team where to look, not what to do.
Why it matters
Shoppers compare prices constantly, especially online and on known-value items, and a gap that goes unnoticed for weeks can cost volume or margin. Reacting to every competitor move erodes margin for no gain. Good price intelligence narrows the team's attention to the gaps that matter, on the lines where price actually drives the choice.
Illustrative example
The business and figures are illustrative, not customer data
A health and beauty retailer tracks 300 lines against three competitors, collected daily. On Monday the read shows one competitor has cut a sunscreen range by 15%, but only on two sizes, and both are out of stock at that competitor by Wednesday. The category manager holds price and notes the event, and instead reviews five lines that have sat more than 5% above all three competitors for a month.
In twelfth
twelfth's Pricing intelligence module follows competitor list prices and availability across the SKUs a workspace has asked it to track, from the Australian retailer feeds the workspace selects. It is organised as a Brief that explains what moved, a Tracked set that shows SKU-level coverage, prices and index, and Reports for internal briefs and seller conversations. It does not see sales, margin or funding unless those data are supplied elsewhere, and an index difference is treated as a signal to investigate, not an instruction to change price.
Related terms
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