From our perspective, this inclusion supports our platform’s robust nature, artificial intelligence-based processing, and real-time contextualized pricing.
According to Gartner, retail CIOs should “evaluate and deploy AI-based pricing optimization applications to improve speed and scale of decision making through smarter and faster analytics.”
Over the last year, we’ve seen the importance of this, as COVID-19 has changed the retail environment, and increased the number of retailers selling through online marketing channels. As competition in each market increases, price becomes an important differentiator, and AI-based tools that improve speed and scale can be the difference between having a lot of web traffic and having a lot of sales.
In its message to retail CIOs, Gartner recommended that they “prepare for new pricing strategies that support more frequent changes and consistent approaches across channels.” This message to experienced and new e-commerce players is one that echoes their UPPMO Maturity Curve, which points out that businesses receive the most benefit when they use contextualized real-time pricing leveraging algorithmic approaches.
The Gartner report recognized Quicklizard on the five optimization types – Initial Price, Regular Price, Markdown Price, Promotion Price, and Contextualized Real Time Pricing.
According to Gartner, major factors driving differentiation among vendors and/or data providers include:
- Use of AI throughout the UPPMO process to enhance speed and accuracy.
- High-quality visualizations that help business users understand recommended prices and align strategic goals with results.
- Tight integration of processes and pricing-execution systems to ensure timeliness and consistency of prices across sales touchpoints.
- Provision of promotion planning/calendars/layout capabilities to facilitate performance.
Advanced segmentation capabilities that will support contextualized real-time pricing:
- Structured customer data for personalization, such as loyalty data.
- Unstructured data for personalization, such as social data.
- Integration with campaign management for better marketing alignment
The report also stated that “unified price optimization provides solutions that work in tandem to support all price types and in support of pricing across touchpoints. Common requirements for these solutions include what-if scenario modeling, performance analytics, and pricing zones,” among others. These three are all part of the Quicklizard solution.
The open nature of the Quicklizard platform provides retailers with the flexibility and customizations capabilities they need to complete on multiple channels. It also enables the system to be up and running within two weeks, which is significantly quicker than comparable platforms.
Looking Ahead to the Future of Retail Pricing
With an eye to tomorrow, Gartner wrote “In future retail scenarios, it is likely that retail pricing models will move toward more contextualized, real-time models.”
From our perspective, this falls squarely within Quicklizard’s key strengths. Contextualized, real-time pricing enables retailers to adjust pricing across all channels, including within physical stores, leveraging the customer’s mobile device. Sensors, smart check-out processes, and AI will create pricing opportunities designed to reach retailers’ target goals. While this is often maximizing profit, it also includes managing inventory levels with price, building relationships with customers, or pricing to compete effectively with competitors.
Most retailers began the 2010s managing pricing using rules in Excel. Over the last decade, our own analysis shows their evolution, moving further up the Gartner UPPMO Maturity Curve. Businesses are slowly reaching toward the top of the curve, where AI automatically provides contextualized real-time pricing. As they continue on their pricing journey, Quicklizard is looking forward to continuing to support their pricing optimization efforts.
Gartner, Market Guide for Retail Unified Price, Promotion and Markdown Optimization Applications, Robert Hetu, 6 January 2021
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