ChannelEngine: competition statistics

About this article

This article describes ChannelEngine's competition statistics feature, how it works, how to make the most of it, and more.

Table of contents

Introduction

Competition statistics of the current day

History of competition statistics

Introduction

Knowledge is power, and certain channels provide you with more knowledge than others. One of the most powerful features within ChannelEngine is the competition statistics, which provides you with valuable data on merchants selling the same products sold by you.

Competition statistics of the current day

Channels that support ChannelEngine's repricing feature display the tab Competition statistics under the Pricing section. These statistics show your competitors, the buy box winners, and your position.

Note that these values are gathered during the night, so the real-time situation may be different.

Products

The Products table shows channel statistics, and how many products are repriced.

• Active reprice rules - all active reprice rules for this channel.
• Active listed products - all listed product that have not been deleted.

The following values relate to the products that are in a listing attached to an active reprice rule:

• Price overridden - of these products, the number of products using a price override (mainly when using fee reductions). The price of these products are not controlled by the repricer, and are therefore excluded from the statistics.
• Repricing - the remaining number of products that do not have a price override.
• Products - the number of products for which ChannelEngine has imported competition price data, and do not have a price override. All other values in the other charts are a subset of this value. This number can be lower that the previous one, for various reasons:
  • not all products are correctly exported to the channel yet
  • no competition price is imported yet
  • no competition price has been sent to ChannelEngine yet (Amazon)
  • no competition price information is available (bol.com)

Competition

Next to the Products table, there is a column chart with the composition of the competition:

• Only you - the number of products for which you are the only seller.
• Marketplace - the number of products that the marketplace itself also sells.
• FBA - the number of products with one or more sellers using the marketplace's fulfillment services (fulfillment by Amazon, Logistiek via bol.com, etc.). This may include you. Therefore, ChannelEngine also shows:
  • FBA (You, no FBA) - the number of products with one or more sellers using the marketplace's fulfillment service, while you do not.
  • FBA (You, with FBA) - the number of products with one or more sellers using the marketplace's fulfillment service, including you.

Buy box winner

The first pie chart shows the number of products for which either you or another merchant have won the buy box. In some cases, no buy box is awarded at all.

The second pie chart provides more details on the buy boxes you won, and how many were with or without marketplace fulfillment. It also shows who were the other winners: the marketplace itself, marketplace fulfillment sellers, or regular sellers.

Other seller wins the buy box

You can also have an estimate of the difference between your prices and the prices from buy box winners, in the cases you are not the buy box winner. A pie chart shows the distribution of price differences: same, higher, or lower. Because lower is what is expected, it has the green color.

Next, a table shows the average difference in both amounts and percentages.

Percentages

For certain charts and tables, selecting the 123/% button changes the product counts to percentages – or vice versa. E.g.: you have the buy box for 25 out of 50 products, which shows as 50% when toggled to percentages.

History of competition statistics

You can view the competition's history for a certain period by selecting the History button. The values shown have the same meaning as for the Date view, but presented in line charts over a period. The 123/% toggle button works here too. For the average differences in price to the buy box winner (bottom left), the values are always shown in percentage because the counts are not relevant over time.

Note that the day considered to be the start of the week depends on the language you are using ChannelEngine in – for some it is Sunday, for others it is Monday.