How to Find Competitor Pricing: Track the Competition Easy

Look at the biggest brands out there—how did they get to where they are? By understanding their competition and tracking their pricing.

Knowing how your brand compares to your biggest competitors is the key to getting and staying on top. This is especially true when it comes to pricing. Your customers are more price-sensitive than ever, and they can compare prices across channels in minutes. If your competitors offer them a better value, they won’t hesitate to make the switch.

That’s why knowing how to find and analyze competitor pricing is so important in the modern business world.

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How to Find and Track Competitor Pricing

You can often find your competitors’ pricing listed openly on their websites. However, if you can’t get the data you need there, check these four places to find and track your competitors’ pricing:

The GSA Price List

If your competitors sell to any government entities, they likely don’t have their prices published on their website for all to see. However, you can likely find their prices published on the General Services Administration (GSA) website, thanks to public records. Over 11 million businesses are listed on the GSA’s price list, and each one provides services or products to local, state, and federal buyers.

Here’s how to find your competitors’ pricing on the GSA list:

• Head over to the GSA’s website and navigate to “Buying & Selling” – “Purchasing Programs” – “GSA Schedules.”
• You can select a category, subcategory, and even a sub-sub category on the overview page.
• Once you’ve narrowed the list down to your industry, look at the list of vendors to find your competitors, and you can view their price lists.

Analyst Reports

Finding analyst reports in your industry is easy: head over to Google, type in your industry, and add the word “report” to the end (for example, “software engineering report”). You’ll probably get many results, and it might take some time to find the most relevant ones. You’re looking for an analyst report that:

• Directly compares your company with one or more competitors
• Focuses on marketplace pricing trends and price comparisons
• Analyzes those pricing trends

Finding the right report might take some digging, but the valuable insights you can gain will make it worthwhile. For example, analyst reports often cover price data, price patterns, revenue, and gross profit; they’re a practical resource to explore when conducting competitor pricing research.

Review Websites

In most markets, online reviews are expected (and typically encouraged). As a result, you can find info about your competitors’ pricing strategies from review platforms like Google Reviews and G2 to social media sites like Reddit and Quora.

G2 specifically requests reviewers to post the product’s pricing, making it a great, easy-to-find resource when tracking down how your competitors price their services.

There’s an additional benefit from finding competitor pricing on review sites: you can see how the price affects the users directly. For example, if someone pays $300 monthly for a service and talks about how they bring in significantly more revenue from using it, they’re experiencing some solid ROI.

You can do what you wish with that information, like arming your sales team with ROI calculators to explain to prospects how the cost of your product or service will pay for itself and more over time.

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Your Prospects

Think about how many emails your sales team sends, phone calls they make, etc., each day/week/month. It’s probably a lot. But what does that mean? Your team has plenty of opportunities to gain insights into your competitors’ pricing from your prospects. 

It’s crucial to maintain a strong relationship with the members of your sales team; they likely have tons of pricing information from speaking to prospects.

You can do this by scheduling regular check-ins with your sales reps and encouraging them to share any pricing intel they receive through channels like Slack, Teams, Discord, etc.

Sometimes, the answer to your pricing questions are simple to find—your sales team might already have the data you need! 

The Follow-Up: How to Price Competitively

Once you’ve compiled a list of your competitors, you’ll want to categorize them according to factors like product quality, target market, etc. We like to divide our competitors into these three categories:

• Primary—these are your direct competitors that go after the same customers.

• Secondary—these are competing brands that sell upscaled or downscaled versions of your product.

• Tertiary—these are companies that sell different products than your company but are still relevant to your brand.

Categorizing your competitors makes determining how to price competitively less time-consuming and helps you focus your attention in the right direction.

Analyzing and categorizing your competitors are ongoing processes—businesses constantly tweak their strategies, and new players pop into the market all the time. Updating your list of competitors frequently is important for competitive pricing analysis and overall success in the market.

How to Analyze Competitor Pricing

You can’t conduct a competitive pricing analysis without, well, analyzing your competitors’ prices. We know this seems like a big no-brainer, but the goal isn’t just to know their prices—it’s to understand how they price.

Browse through their websites and e-commerce marketplaces and list out their product prices, the differences between brands, and any similarities and pricing strategies that you can clearly see. If your competitors operate at any brick-and-mortar locations, or you know of locations that sell the same product, it’s a good idea to swing by those stores.

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The plan isn’t to look at their prices and simply lower your own—having the lowest price isn’t always a winning strategy. Once you’ve gathered what information you can, you want to try to understand why they price the way they do. Ask yourself these questions:

• Do they price more aggressively on certain channels? For example, many businesses will price the same product differently on different platforms.

• Are they running frequent promotions? 80% of shoppers will buy from a new brand if they’re offered a special discount.

• Is their pricing deceptive? There are many tricks that some businesses use to fool their customers into believing they are getting the best price.

Is your business missing out during tax time? Don’t forget about the R&D tax credit—TaxRobot can help determine if your business qualifies and guide you through the process to get a bigger refund.