Hotline price monitoring: Advantages and disadvantages

Prices have a key influence on product purchases. Therefore, it’s important to understand the value of price monitoring, as a price that’s too low leads to lost profits, while a price that’s too high limits the number of buyers.

Prices are also used to nudge customers toward purchasing specific products. Category managers often resort to tricks, such as luring people in with a low price on a product from brand X, bringing the end customer to the online store’s website, and then steering them to a different product from brand Y—again, by offering an even more attractive price, plus the opportunity to get a discount or free delivery. This shows who is illegally using your trademarks to drive visitors to their online store for malicious purposes—namely, redirecting them to a competitor’s brand.

The motives can vary greatly and depend on the terms of cooperation with a particular supplier.

Content List

• Website traffic or the buyer’s journey
• Why monitor prices on Hotline?
• Advantages of monitoring Hotline
• Disadvantages of Hotline price monitoring
• Who should monitor Hotline, and who should monitor stores directly?
• In conclusion

Website traffic or the buyer’s journey

At a certain point, every online store feels the need to attract more potential buyers to its website. One of the most effective ways to draw high-conversion traffic is to list products on price aggregators.

Price aggregators or price-listing platforms are online resources that provide users with information about products, where each product page includes content—photos, descriptions, and brief specs—and consolidates offers from various online stores.

About 10 years ago, many online stores got a significant portion of their paid traffic from search engine ads. In recent years, trends have changed: the number of online stores has grown so much that product-related ads have become very expensive because of fierce competition, and conversion has dropped sharply due to the vastly increased number of offers. Therefore, today, the practical standard for attracting paying customers to an online store for a specific product is to list product offers on price aggregators. Each price aggregator gathers potential buyers on its platform who are ready to make a purchase right now. Most users visit these sites to compare prices, and before making a purchase, 95% of them take the time to look for the best price option.

According to website analytics data from SimilarWeb, the Hotline price aggregator has the highest traffic of all similar platforms, making it the undisputed leader. This article focuses on price monitoring on Hotline.

Why monitor prices on Hotline?

The history of Hotline goes back to October 1992. It was originally created as a catalog of price lists for computer equipment, distributed via modem access. Its print version appeared in 1993 and was published weekly until the end of 2005.

The project’s founder is Sergey Arabadji.

On January 1, 2006, the hotline.ua online project was launched.

Hotline advertising is all around: on your phone, on your computer, on street billboards, in stores, in the subway, and more. This omnichannel approach is increasingly beneficial for businesses that want to raise customer loyalty, expand their customer base, boost brand recognition, and stay afloat. It combines all the possible methods to ensure convenience for customers in interacting with the company, without unnecessary duplication of features or wasted time. Over its existence, this price aggregator has become highly recognizable, and many users have become part of its community.

Thus, Hotline has remained the leader for many years, ranking first in numerous ratings, including among other price-listing platforms in Ukraine.

Advantages of monitoring Hotline

Monitoring prices of most top market players

Listing on Hotline is essentially the standard for both large, well-known online retailers and smaller niche stores—any store aiming to earn more while ensuring the efficiency of its advertising spending. By collecting data from Hotline, you can obtain analytics on all significant market players that sell the monitored product range.

Tracking the emergence of new product sellers

New sites quickly realize the need to list their offers on Hotline, so newly created online stores—previously unknown—appear with their offers. Additionally, there is a “secret community” of satellite sites. Typically, well-known stores bound by cooperation agreements and RRP compliance often resort to creating subsidiary stores and simply show up on Hotline with dumping prices. It’s crucial to track them to prevent the market from collapsing like dominoes because of newcomers. Our publication “Why do online stores engage in dumping?” describes the true causes of dumping.

Almost all online stores—and thus competitors—keep an eye on prices on this platform; their prices can change dynamically based on market conditions. The appearance of dumping on Hotline in just one offer often leads to an avalanche-like collapse of the recommended retail price.

Affordable monitoring costs

Monitoring only Hotline can suit companies with a limited budget that still need a large volume of data. The client sees in their report all offers gathered from Hotline for the required product range covered by the monitoring.

However, note that this type of data collection does not reflect the entire reality, and saving on the budget somewhat compromises the accuracy and completeness, as discussed below.

Disadvantages of Hotline price monitoring

Not everything, not always…

Not all products offered for sale are uploaded by stores to Hotline. Beyond the “In stock” indicator, some stores limit the data they upload by category, brand, margin, and/or minimum product cost (for example, only uploading products that cost at least 1,000 UAH). Thus, a certain product may be available in an online store but not appear on the price aggregator.

Hotline, like other price-listing sites, has flexible display settings for online stores’ price lists according to schedule—times of day and days of the week. Additionally, some players’ offers may be unavailable for organizational and technical reasons—perhaps an online store does not have enough funds in its aggregator account, or there’s an issue generating the XML data feed. Even major retailers have been observed with the note “The store’s price list is not listed on Hotline.”

Because of these factors, an online store’s presence among Hotline’s offers can be unstable.

On the other hand, there’s a significantly lower probability that a store not listing its offers on price aggregators for certain product lines will sell those items. For this reason, absent product-store listings can sometimes be deprioritized or disregarded.

It’s impossible to monitor Hotline products that are not attached to a product page

Hotline’s category managers create product pages as they appear in online store price feeds. However, if a particular product is listed by only a few stores (3-5), the likelihood of it getting its own official product page on Hotline is minimal. The same goes for new products—it usually takes time before they get official Hotline product pages. Exceptions are major brand new releases that Hotline editors try to add immediately after manufacturers announce them.

Technically, it’s only possible to monitor a client’s product range when you can make a match between the range and Hotline’s product pages.

Monitoring accuracy

Of course, we must consider factors directly affecting monitoring accuracy. Unfortunately, the price-monitoring service cannot influence them. Hotline category managers sometimes make mistakes organizing product pages, mixing up colors, sizes, and other key features on a single product page. Therefore, it’s essential to account for all factors when processing data and remain vigilant.

Who should monitor Hotline, and who should monitor stores directly?

Hotline monitoring is suitable for:

• Analyzing overall “market temperature.”
• Seeing which types of products are available in a given niche.
• Understanding how competitors position themselves.
• Studying what competitors sell and/or promote.

Both distributors and online stores take advantage of this. PriceCop recommends a comprehensive approach—using Hotline monitoring to complement the primary, systematic data collection that happens directly from online stores.

There are a few more nuances worth noting, such as screenshot capture and dumping notifications. It’s important to realize that only monitoring Hotline won’t allow you to implement these features. A full-fledged data collection requires gathering information directly from online store product pages.

In conclusion

For every request, there are at least two solutions. Which one you choose depends on your requirements, wishes, and—above all—functionality. PriceCop reflects the market reality by collecting data from Hotline and/or online stores.