Lengow has announced a new tool that lets advertisers monitor competitors’ products. The company behind the SaaS solution is hoping to give retailers the opportunity to analyse products in real time and react accordingly by making price adjustments.
The feature uses URL crawling to keep tabs on the price of competitors’ products across marketplaces and comparison shopping sites. Merchants can place a competitor’s URL in front of their product and a robot then acquires details like price from the product description.
The feed creation and distribution company already works with a number of comparison shopping engines across Europe including kelkoo, shopzilla and ciao. The additional functionality will satisfy the increasing need from online merchants to be more reactive to price fluctuations in the market.
Price war potential
Mickaël Froger, Lengow’s co-founder and CTO, could well be giving retailers the tools to start a price war. However, he emphasised that his SaaS would simply ensure merchants’ have the most competitive prices when being published on comparison sites.
“Each e-retailer is able to watch their competitors’ prices and to do the right adjustments on his campaigns according to the results,” he said. “This way, they only send their products which have the most competitive prices on comparison sites for example.”
Lengow’s now into its fourth year of operation. Its aim has always been to give retailers the tools to optimise visibility across various e-commerce channels such as comparison shopping sites, affiliate networks, marketplaces, retargeting sites, sponsored links and social networks.