Willard Bishop provide some good case studies in their current Competitive Edge publication entitled, "Loyalty Cards: To Have or Not to Have?"

There are many food retailers who currently do not have loyalty cards. A significant contributor to their hesitation is the perception: “they’re just another discount delivery vehicle”. Another criticism: “cards can’t build loyalty when shoppers have them from every operator”. While it’s true that many retailers have treated loyalty cards as just another TPR delivery device, and others have siloed the data internally, the best are using loyalty data to develop truly shopper-centered merchandising plans, identify opportunities, and scorecard progress. This month’s Competitive Edge highlights some case examples showing how loyalty cards fuel the development of shopper-centered merchandising.

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Competitor monitoring, which includes tracking competitors’ prices, stock availability, new and delisted products, is a key element in successful price management for online and offline retailers. Monitoring multiple competitors and hundreds or even thousands of products in-house, can prove to be very time consuming and expensive. Profitero is a newly launched web service that solves this problem in minutes. Profitero automatically monitors online competitors’ information, benchmarks each client’s product against their competition and empowers retailers with relevant, timely and accurate data with which retailers can set their prices and increase sales.

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Abstract retailer data is useless without understanding the competitive landscape. Profitero is committed to making competitive analysis fast and easy with relevant and timely information. One of Profitero’s current customers Elena Pozuelo Andres, marketing manager of PCCity.es, affirms "Profitero is helping us to build a strong price strategy in our online sales. But most importantly, we now have real time information about the prices and promotions of our competitors!”

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Profitero is one of the winners of the European Seedcamp 2010 competition, the winner of Irish Innovation Cubed 2010 and the finalist of Dublin Web Summit 2010. Profitero is supported by Enterprise Ireland – a government agency for the development and growth of Irish enterprises in world markets, and HotHouse Venture Programme.