Zones Mean Dollars in an Omnichannel World

What are the benefits that zone pricing can provide, supported by regional pricing intelligence? Here are just a few:

• Identify and seize margin and sales opportunities in regional markets. Real-time regional pricing insights can help retailers move quickly to adjust pricing when their products are overpriced or underpriced in key geographical areas. This in turn allows them to compete more effectively against both online and brick-and-mortar competitors in their region.
• Improve conversion rates and margins. With timely access to accurate and complete competitive pricing data on a regional basis, retailers get the complete picture down to the local level rather than relying on artificial national averages. This data can help retailers significantly improve conversions and margin.
• Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Zone pricing helps retailers deliver the kind of pricing that best reflects their brand proposition, whether it's based on everyday low prices or a combination of convenience, price and customer service. By fulfilling their brand promise, retailers improve customer trust and loyalty.

Retailers can take zone pricing a step further by analyzing individual customer behavior as an additional data set in establishing pricing zones. Boston Consulting Group suggests that "rich transactional data from loyalty programs and credit cards across thousands of stores can be used to understand where individual customers tend to shop. That data can be layered onto an analysis of current store locations and pricing zones. All this information can be combined, analyzed and mapped to show geographic clusters of price awareness based on observed shopping behavior rather than artificially set boundaries."