Consistent price monitoring and competitor visibility enables AudioSure to strategically set profitable pricing, enhancing long-term market stability and competitive advantage in online markets.
Clear competitor insights provided by PricingHunter allow rapid, proactive pricing adjustments, enabling AudioSure to respond swiftly and intelligently to market fluctuations.
AudioSure replaced manual competitor price checks and reactive phone calls with automated pricing data, significantly reducing weekly workload and freeing time for strategic tasks.
PricingHunter’s intuitive interface empowers a single-person division to effectively manage complex pricing dynamics independently, eliminating the need for extensive training or resources.
Company Overview5AudioSure has established itself as a trusted distributor in the professional audio and audiovisual sectors, sourcing high-quality products internationally. Seeking to strengthen its position within a highly competitive online marketplace, AudioSure partnered with PricingHunter.
We got together with Penelope Schoeman, Head of E-commerce, to discuss her experience working with PricingHunter toward achieving competitive pricing success.
What are the biggest challenges in your sector? That's an interesting thing – just to give you background, we are an audiovisual distributor importing mainly from China, but also from suppliers in the UK, Netherlands, US, etcetera.
The division I oversee is very small. We redistribute to retail stores, music stores, PA installers, production companies, and events. My division is mainly an online business started in November 2023, so it's quite new. I’d say our biggest challenge moving online was understanding who we're competing with and why.
What were you looking for in a solution?Basically, we were previously taking a very manual approach. A customer would phone us and say “Hey, we see this guy is selling this at X price but you want to sell it straight from the distributor for Y price” and then there would be this big pricing war happening between the two customers, and we would need to phone that other customer and ask them to change the price.
What PricingHunter has been able to do is act as our pricing structure moderator. Now I can put all our product data through it, I can monitor it, always being able to check what's happening with our pricing. Before that it was a manual effort that meant a lot of going online, checking who's selling these individual products, what the prices are... it was very time consuming.
What was your experience of the vendor selection process, and why did you choose PricingHunter?We started this division brand new, so affordability was essential, especially with the Rand-to-dollar exchange around 20 rand per dollar. We also needed a simple, user-friendly solution since I manage the division alone.
From four vendors, I narrowed it down to PricingHunter and one other. During demos, PricingHunter’s exceptional support stood out. My account manager Manuel responded quickly, usually within the same day, and always resolved any issues I had. Knowing PricingHunter provided this support eliminated all doubts—they were clearly the right choice.
How do you find yourself extracting value from PricingHunter?It's easy to download all competitors into an Excel spreadsheet and use VLOOKUP to compare prices on our portals. Our main portal is Take-A-Lot, similar to Amazon, and we have a smaller one called Macro. PricingHunter quickly identifies flagged prices and minimum pricing, allowing swift adjustments. I can then contact account managers about customers underpricing items, protecting our middle-ground strategy—not aiming to be cheapest but maintaining reasonable revenue.
As a one-person team, my time is precious. PricingHunter significantly reduced weekly manual checks, giving me more valuable time back.
What advice would you give to other people considering going into pricing intelligence for the first time?Honestly, you know, you just need to just feel it out. For me, it was a matter of just voting down to instinct and that feeling of what's going to work, what's not going to work. You have to put it out there and see what happens. PricingHunter gave me the confidence to take the next step and I’m very happy with what we’re getting.
Final thoughts?I’d like to thank all of the team at PricingHunter - everybody that's been involved in the last year. I’m really grateful for the assistance and what you guys have done for us, especially the working relationship I have with my account manager Manual who is very customer service oriented, that goes a long way for me.