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The Next Evolutionary Step in Price Optimization: Market Simulation 

April 27th, 2021 (Updated 05/12/2021) | 5 min. read

By Milan Haba

The Next Evolutionary Step in Price Optimization: Market Simulation 

We’re delighted to be releasing Bijou 7.0 this week and to announce its substantial number of usability improvements for even greater efficiency. (More on these below).  

But we’re most excited to tell you all about our pièce de résistance: Market Simulation. 

Market Simulation: The Game Changer for Business 

Cannibalization is the biggest hidden challenge companies are facing today because most algorithms pretend that changing the price of one product won’t impact the sales of another. Harsh is the lesson that teaches that applying “optimal” discounts to two products at once (hoping to see the promised profitability lift in each) will, rather, result in no change or even a decline in profitability. This is because the predicted lift in the first product was calculated at the expense of the second, and vice versa. So, combined, your profit lift is a big fat zero. 

Current solutions often use price elasticity to optimize prices. While these models can maximize profit of a single product, they require masses of transactional data and are only valid for a single use. They aren’t able to predict cannibalization, calculate the total impact of a price change across an entire product category, anticipate competitor reaction or handle simultaneous price changes. 

Market Simulation is Pricefx’s next step in price optimization and has been designed to enable superior price optimization through predicted end-to-end impact simulations. 

Leveraging our Next Gen AI-based technology, not only does Market Simulation show you how a price change will impact surrounding products in your own portfolio, but it shows the predicted market and customer response to the change and their business implications. 

Because Market Simulation focuses on customer behavior rather than product transactions – looking at pricing from the customer perspective and predicting real customer purchase behavior response – it can predict how the entire market will be impacted by a price change. 

Not only does Market Simulation identify a wide range of profit, revenue and volume maximizing prices (for single product pricing, multi-product pricing and portfolio pricing – taking your multiple objectives into account), but it calculates your best response to a competitor’s price change, seasonal and markdown prices, optimal product assortments and inventory risk, as well as the impact of a new product entry. You can even see how the changes might impact your own vs. your competition’s KPIs as well as market share changes. 

Market Simulation is a game-changer. It elevates pricing from the tactical to the strategic by giving you a sandbox – a digital twin marketplace for you to play pricing war games in and where you can truly understand the impact a price will have on your business. 

And it can do it at scale. 

In Price Optimization, It’s the Little Things That Matter 

While that may be a hard act to follow, I’m sure you’ll agree that the efficiencies of your day-to-day work are just as important as the razzmatazz. So, while we’ve been cooking up price optimization magic, we’ve also been focusing on the things that will make your lives easier on a daily basis. 

Like a simplified, more intuitive workflow for the price optimization engine and customizable Dashboards for price optimization that take you to your results faster. 

In fact, all Dashboards have had an upgrade. Now, not only can you open any Dashboard in pop-up window, but you can store more settings (sorting, filtering or input values) as your default preferences. Drop-down list of available dashboards is now organized by category and system portlets can be newly added to Dashboards as well. 

The new “Home” option, global search fields at several places and active links to Deal Plans awaiting approval on the Home page, plus the My Pending Approvals and Workflows pages will help you get around faster. And you can now create global filters that apply across chart series for customers and products, or filter products by product ID or label in product detail view. 

And if that wasn’t enough, the new Mass Workflow action in LPG detail view allows you to run a workflow action (submit, withdraw, approve, deny) for more selected records at once and you can also use “Header Type” for Advanced Filtering in LPG. 

The Future of Price Optimization is Here: Bijou 7.0 

So, I‘m sure you’ll agree with me that we’ve been working hard not just to improve your efficiency and productivity, but to propel you to the forefront of competitive pricing with our Next Gen AI technology that will turn you from a tactical operator to a strategic pricing hero. It’s a real gem of a release! 

 

Want to learn more about Bijou 7.0 and Market Simulation? Click here!

Would you like to learn more? Join Toby Davidsson, our Chief Product Officer, and Milan Haba, Product Guru, on May 25th!

market_simulation_webinar_pricing software

 

Milan Haba

Senior Manager | Product Marketing , Pricefx

Milan Haba is currently Head of Product Marketing at Pricefx. Milan has more than 20 years of hands-on experience and leadership skills in product management, product marketing and segment management, in the areas of telecommunication, fintech and pricing software. On the weekends, you will find Milan walking, running, or cycling in the woods or watching the latest movies.