Price history: what to track and how to read it
A current price tells you where things stand today. A price history tells you how you got there: when a supplier raised prices, how often competitors run promotions, whether a product is getting cheaper across the market. For pricing decisions, the history is often more useful than the snapshot.
Three histories worth keeping
Supplier prices
How your purchase cost changes over time, per supplier. It shows which suppliers raise prices often, how much, and whether one of them is consistently cheaper for a category.
Your own prices
What you charged and when. Without it, you cannot tell whether a change in sales was caused by your price or by something else.
Competitor prices
How the market moves. Regular dips reveal promotion cycles; a steady decline signals that a product is aging or that the market is getting more crowded.
Questions price history answers
- Did our margin on this category shrink because costs went up or because we lowered prices?
- Which supplier changed prices most often last quarter?
- Is the competitor's low price a permanent change or a weekend promotion?
- Did the price increase last month affect sales?
- Which products have become noticeably cheaper on the market and need a new price?
How to read the data
Look at trends rather than single points, because one unusual value is often just an error in a file. Compare changes in percent: 5 € means a lot for a 20 € product and very little for a 500 € one. Patterns are also easier to see for a category than for a single product.
On its own, price history explains your costs. Put it next to sales data and it starts to explain demand.
Price history in YfiFX
YfiFX keeps the history of changes from every import: new products, products that disappeared and price changes are shown on charts. Together with competitor monitoring, this gives a view of both sides of a price: what it costs you and what the market charges. When the history shows a lasting change, you adjust the markup rule for the category, and all affected prices are recalculated on the next run.
Set it up once. YfiFX does the rest
14 Days Free Trial. Sign up and import your first price list today.