Price monitoring
and store audit with AI

Point-of-sale management is more challenging than ever. Managing consumer product categories requires a great deal of planning and organization. With more demanding shoppers and increasing product variety, it is imperative to have comprehensive, reliable and scalable information on performance indicators and customer behavior.

Thanks to the use of modern technology, such as Image recognition, this has become a reality: data converted into information on the fly: from the POS to the office.
ACCURACY: in the capture of data to make studies of variables over time and real reports, EASY MAINTENANCE OF RESULTS: to study the evolution of KPIs over time and improve weak points, FASTER ADDRESSING ISSUES: to identify problems more easily and address them quickly; these are some of the benefits that these new technologies provide us.

Among all the variables to be considered, one of the most important is the SALES PRICE AT THE POS.
Price monitoring allows you to analyze your own and your competitors’ pricing situation and strategy.
Today, all companies that market products on a large scale have to face dynamic changes in the economic situation, which impact on market prices. Therefore it is necessary to optimize our prices in order to try to increase sales without decreasing margins. Pricing is an important part of the company’s sales and profitability strategy.

In this regard, the challenges to overcome in order to have a successful and profitable strategy at the end of the day are:
Knowledge and management of product prices set in each store: with information available by zone/cluster/store/product.
Monitoring of competitors: analyze the prices of products in the same category and set a price according to our strategy.
Application of in-store promotions: according to our positioning strategy or as a quick response to the competition.

For this purpose, we now have price control tools. These are applications that can be downloaded to the operating system of the device to control the prices of products and track them both for their own products and those of the competition.
The data is stored in the cloud for a period of time, which allows to view and analyze the dynamics of prices and assists in relevant prices forcesting.

In this way it is much more accurate and faster to know the market trends regarding fixed prices and promotions and to obtain in real time the data to analyze the performance of our products.
The Ailet solution with its PRICE MONITORING product allows companies to have their representatives and/or auditors capture data on their smartphones and tablets in order to monitor their own and competitors’ prices, detect and analyze by store/type of product the real prices, and improve the pricing strategy.

This tool is fully flexible and parameterizable adhoc and provides users with a historical analysis of the defined KPIs, in the system dashboards.
Artificial Intelligence + Machine Learning + Big data at the service of POS efficiencyThe COVID-19 epidemic has temporarily changed our consumer habits. People began to save more; they reduced the number of visits to stores, and switched partially to online shopping. At the same time, the Internet channel share in FMCG sales has increased from a maximum of 2 to 3% due to the quarantine measures. This modest result is driven by the fact that the e-commerce growth factors are poorly expressed in mass-market goods. In the next 5 years, we should not expect an increase by order of magnitude in the share of online sales in retail.

In addition, the pandemic has not affected another powerful trend — the absorption of traditional retail by chain stores.
With this market structure, competition for shelf space is constantly increasing among FMCG manufacturers. Since in this product category the potential of product properties has been exhausted for long ago, now the main factor is the price.

Before the introduction of restrictive measures this spring, the retail chain stores were massively attracting customers with all sorts of promotions.
Planning to stay competitive, the management is looking closely at really new solutions for working offline. Yes, the market has successful cases of increasing revenue by increasing market share. But it is also possible to avoid the low margin trap by optimizing processes and increasing their efficiency. Modern scalable technologies and innovative approaches to sales management can improve business profitability even in adverse conditions.