For thirty-seven years, CPI has been providing store-specific competitive price data to the pricing departments of leading retailers, manufacturers, wholesalers and merchandising service companies. CPI's position as a third party vendor ensures that its interest in reporting price information is completely unbiased. Experienced people, feedback, and a rigorous quality control system ensure that your price data is consistently accurate and complete!

At CPI, experience has taught us that there are 6 Keys to a Successful Price Shop:

List Preparation:
The product descriptions used for ordering products and managing merchandise can be very different from those needed for finding products at competitive locations. Product descriptions need to mirror the words emphasized on product packaging. Duplicate scents, flavors, etc. can be collapsed into one description to reduce the list size (and the expense of performing the shop) without compromising accuracy. The list also needs to be categorized to mirror the location where an item is most likely to be found within a store. By focusing on list preparation, CPI provides clients with the most complete price shops possible while minimizing the per-SKU cost of performing price shops.

List Verification:
Once product descriptions have been created they need to be field-tested. Comparable products do not always have identical labels. By field-testing product descriptions prior to performing a competitive price shop, CPI provides clients with the most complete price shops possible.

Store Selection:
Some store locations, within the same chain, are better than others for performing competitive price shops. A competitor may carry a more complete line of merchandise in a suburban location than a store located in an inner city. However, an inner-city store may have a more complete line of ethnic products than a more-suburban location. Competitors should be selected based on their proximity to your locations, merchandise selection and other criteria unique to the goals of the price shop. By collaborating with clients on store selection, CPI provides clients with the most complete price shops possible.

Data Validation:
When manually entering price points for thousands of products, human error is a fact of life. Sale prices can be entered as regular prices. The price of a neighboring product can be entered by mistake and products can be incorrectly priced by store personnel. Before field-data can be entered into your systems for business analysis, it should be checked for accuracy. CPI uses a three-phase quality control system that checks field-data against other stores in a given chain, other stores in a given city and historical data for a given chain to flag specific price points for manual review. By using a three-phase quality control system, CPI provides clients with price data that is accurate and ready for business analysis.

Auditor Feedback:
Should an auditor be able to find product X in chain Y? Providing auditors with feedback on items with low find-rates and items with unacceptable price points helps them improve over time. CPI's price shops are performed by experienced auditors -- people familiar with the products and stores that CPI shops. By providing auditors with feedback on every shop they perform, CPI provides clients with the most complete and accurate price data possible.

Client Feedback:
What items will give me the highest hit rate? Which of my competitors are the most current with new products? What chains have the highest market share in a particular region? Which competitor location in an area would be best? These are all questions that CPI answers often. CPI provides clients with feedback needed for the most complete and accurate price data possible.