How new technologies disrupt competitive shopping

On average, retailers need to monitor around 30,000 products from dozens of competitors in every country where they operate. Consumer trends evolve fast, and tracking market activity regularly has become necessary to stay competitive. Today, competitor monitoring is still carried out manually for the most part, a time-consuming and highly inefficient process involving the analysis of data samples that are neither exhaustive nor up-to-date. Fortunately, new and innovative AI-based solutions exist to exploit the full potential of real-time competitive analysis.

More products on the market

Fashion is faster than ever. Modern supply chains offer clothing makers shorter production lead times, enabling them to introduce new collections more frequently. From 2000 to 2011, European fashion companies more than doubled the number of clothing collections, increasing from 2 to 5 collections on average. Zara is capable of offering new products every week by launching 24 collections per year. This fast pace increases the number of products to monitor and forces retailers to track competitors more frequently. This process is time-consuming, inefficient, and should no longer be carried out manually.

New challenger brands

The new highly demanding consumer is increasingly attracted to authentic yet innovative brands. Many consumers even actively avoid buying from large corporations. These trends create opportunities for new challenger brands, many of which originate online.

Their digital DNA gives them a significant advantage, enabling them to use technology more effectively to engage consumers who are constantly connected through their smartphones. Challenger brands can quickly build an audience by mastering digital marketing channels in a cost-efficient way. They are also better positioned to address the needs of specific market niches, such as vegan consumers seeking clothing that does not contain animal-based products.

For established fashion brands, these new entrants multiply the number of competitors to monitor and should certainly not be overlooked.

Emerging markets

For the first time in history, non-Western countries accounted for a greater share of clothing sales than North America and Europe in 2019. According to McKinsey, emerging countries in the APAC region, including China and India, were expected to experience the fastest growth, with 7% sales growth in 2020. This is seven times higher than growth levels observed in mature European markets.

These emerging markets represent a major opportunity for fashion retailers looking to expand internationally and drive future growth. However, success requires a deep understanding of local competitors. A solution such as Retviews enables brands to analyze the product assortments and pricing strategies of local players before entering a new market.

With all products now available online, retailers have access to more data than ever before. However, they still lack many of the essential insights needed to make informed decisions, simply because human intelligence alone cannot efficiently process such vast amounts of information.

In the Industry 4.0 era, data itself has become a commodity. The real value lies in solutions capable of processing large volumes of data and transforming them into actionable insights. An innovative solution such as Retviews, an apparel industry software, can collect enormous amounts of data from online stores in the blink of an eye, eliminating the need for time-consuming manual competitive shopping.

Based on product descriptions, artificial intelligence can automatically recognize products, classify them into the correct categories, and compare them with similar competitor products. It collects detailed information including pricing, discounts, colors, materials, and available sizes.

The traditional method of competitive shopping in physical stores or manually browsing e-commerce websites has many drawbacks. These approaches are time-consuming, limited in scope, and the data quickly becomes outdated.

Today, retailers use next-generation tools to access competitor data and benchmark performance more efficiently. All information is updated daily and stored in a centralized database, making it possible to track the evolution of every key indicator over time.

Everything is available in one place, directly on the retailer’s desktop. Data collection is automated, allowing companies to monitor competitor activity more frequently and quickly identify important market changes for data-driven decision-making.

For example, retailers can analyze the assortment structure of competitors and compare it against their own. If a product category is overrepresented compared to competitors and sales performance reflects this imbalance, retailers can adjust their assortment accordingly. Likewise, if a price point is misaligned with the market, they can react immediately.

Being able to identify these discrepancies at an early stage enables faster adjustments and helps uncover potential lost sales opportunities before they become significant business issues.

For multinational companies, frequent monitoring of local competitors in every country is essential. An innovative solution such as Retviews enables retailers to track the entire market and maintain the best positioning at all times.

In the case of an international expansion, it becomes much easier to build a comprehensive analysis of a new target country and prepare for a successful market entry. Beyond speed, some of this information was simply not accessible before.

Because these solutions monitor price changes daily, retailers can identify hidden discounts, where prices are reduced without explicitly displaying the markdown to consumers. They can also track out-of-stock items and identify products that are selling particularly fast.

Flying blindly is no longer an option in today’s highly competitive retail environment. Modern retailers need an analytical solution capable of delivering insights across brands, products, and countries. Retviews enables retailers to act faster, make data-driven decisions, and remain competitive in a rapidly evolving market.

In summary, brands should focus on what they do best while leveraging new technologies to collect, organize, and analyze data, making decision-making faster, smarter, and more efficient.