Ian van der Werf runs Babysteps.cl, an online baby-gear store in Chile. Car seats, strollers, monitors, the brands new parents lie awake comparing: Maxi-Cosi, Cybex, Nuna, Joie, Graco. He actively prices a few hundred of them.
Here is the thing about selling branded baby gear. The exact same car seat sits on Babysteps, on Falabella, on Paris, on Líder (Walmart's Chilean chain), and on a dozen smaller shops. Same box, same SKU, different price tags. To win the sale, Ian has to be priced right against all of them. Now multiply that by a few hundred products, each with ten or twenty competitors, and remember that any of those competitors can change their price tomorrow.
How do you keep up with that by hand? You can't. Open every competitor's page for every product, write down what they charge, compare it to your own price, update your store, then start over the next morning because the prices already moved. That is not a weekly chore, and it is not a daily one either. It is just not something a person can do.
And standing still is not free. Watch what happens to a single product when Babysteps holds its price while three competitors move theirs around, then slash hard on Cyber Day:
The cost of not having competitive prices
One product over a quarter. Babysteps holds its price while competitors wobble, slash on Cyber Day, and take the sales.
You do not just lose a price comparison. You lose the sale. That gap is the whole reason a tool like this has to exist. Marketminer checks Ian's competitors' prices for him, every day, automatically. Then it runs them against his own pricing strategy, the margins and rules he has to protect, and hands him a short list: which products to reprice, to what, and why. He stops hunting for numbers and starts acting on them.
His suppliers are also his competitors
Most stores would answer all this by trying to be the cheapest. Ian can't, and here is the twist that makes his case interesting: the companies he buys from are the same companies he competes against. They sell direct, and they set the terms.
Infanti, which brings Maxi-Cosi into Chile, will not let him price below their own site. He matches them, he never undercuts them. Bebesit, which carries Nuna, Joie, and Graco, works the other way around: his price is pegged to whatever Bebesit is charging at that moment, for a fixed margin on top. When they move, he moves.
So for Ian, Marketminer is not chasing the lowest number on the page. It keeps him exactly where each deal allows: matched against one supplier, a fixed step away from another, and never below the floor that protects his margin. The rules are his. Marketminer just enforces them a few hundred times a day.
A few hundred products, one sitting, twice a week
Twice a week, Ian runs the whole catalog. During Chile's big sale events, Cyber Day, Black Friday, Día del Niño, December, he does it daily, sometimes hourly. He calls Cyber Day "a war. An intraday war. The prices move by the hour." The faster the market moves, the more the automation earns its keep.
Here is how the pass actually goes. Ian sets the rules once: a floor under every product, a margin a suggestion can never breach, plus rules per competitor, because matching Infanti's site is a different job than holding the margin line against Bebesit. After that he lets it watch. Marketminer scrapes the competitor and supplier pages every day, so by the time he sits down the whole map is already drawn.
Then he reads what moved. He pulls the whole inventory as a CSV in one click, and every line carries its own price intelligence: where the product sits against the market, the price Marketminer suggests, the reason, how many competitors it found, and the margin floor it is never allowed to cross. Every row already carries its verdict:
- Already the cheapest. Nothing to do.
- Already competitive with the supplier. Inside the band, leave it.
- Lower to match. Someone undercut him. Follow it down, never below the floor.
- Raise to match. He has slipped under the price his supplier deal requires. Nudge it back up.
- Price anomaly. The competitor price looks wrong. Do not act on it.
- No competitors available. Nothing to compare against.
| Product | Current | Suggested | Reason |
|---|---|---|---|
| Videomonitor Baby Wifi Maxi-CosiMaxi-Cosi · Within more expensive half | $89,990 | $66,990 | Lower to match |
| Silla de Auto Convertible Spinel 360°Maxi-Cosi · Within more expensive half | $431,990 | $319,990 | Lower to match |
| Calentador de Mamadera MilanInfanti · Cheapest (shared) | $59,990 | no change | Already the cheapest |
| Silla de Comer Snack LX GrisBebesit · Cheapest | $47,990 | $56,990 | Raise to match Bebesit |
| Silla de Auto Extend2Fit GothamGraco · Cheapest | $329,990 | $369,990 | Raise to match Bebesit |
He filters to the rows that need to move, drops the export into his master sheet, and that pushes the new prices to Shopify. And notice it is not all "go cheaper." Plenty of rows tell him to raise, because he has drifted under the price his Bebesit or Graco deal requires, and every peso there is margin he was quietly giving away. The export was never the slow part. The slow part was always knowing which prices needed to change at all.
I did the comparison by hand once, just to check it was right. Now I just trust the numbers.
He does not just see today, either. Marketminer keeps a running picture of where his entire catalog sits against the market, every single day:
Price position timeline - last 90 days
Distribution of your products' price positions compared to competitors over time
Mostly green: cheaper half, or cheapest outright. That stretch in late March where the bars run warm is products drifting above market, the exact thing that used to cost him sales before he noticed. Now it is a glance.
When a competitor's price isn't real
Not every low price on a competitor's site is a real one. Every so often a product that normally sells for around $229,000 pesos shows up on a competitor's page at $95,000. That is not a deal you could actually check out at. It might be a bug in their pricing system, a single clearance unit that sells out in minutes, or a placeholder that disappears the moment you log in. Ian sees this most from the brands sold through Bebesit, Nuna, Joie, and Graco: a price appears that makes no sense, and a day later it is gone.
A tool that blindly matches the cheapest competitor would take the bait. It would tell Ian to drop a perfectly healthy $229,000 product to $95,000 and hand away his margin to chase a number that was never real in the first place.
Butaca Aace LX Caviar Nuna
seen on Bebesit.cl
Your price
$228,990
Flagged competitor price
$95,000
Probably a pricing bug, a single clearance unit, or a placeholder that vanishes at checkout. Excluded from the automatic suggestion, so Marketminer never tells Ian to match it. He checks it and decides.
Marketminer does not do that. It spots the outlier, marks the row as a price anomaly, and leaves it out of the automatic suggestion. Instead of "drop to $95,000," Ian gets "this one looks wrong, take a look." He checks it himself and decides. A car seat here sells for well over $100,000 pesos, a few hundred dollars, so getting one wrong is real money, not a rounding error. That guardrail is a big part of why he trusts the suggestions enough to act on them fast.
Spending ad budget where he can actually win
Babysteps runs Google Performance Max and Meta campaigns through Channable, bucketed by margin, ticket size, and how fast things sell. The leak is that those campaigns still spend money advertising products where Falabella or Líder is far cheaper. That click is not going to convert. The budget is just gone.
The data to plug that leak already lives in Marketminer, which knows, product by product, exactly how Ian's price stacks up. What he wants next is a tag he can set himself and export into Channable: within X% of the cheapest. His spec, in his words:
If the cheapest seller is more than 5% under me, don't show that product. If I'm close, keep showing it. And let me set that percentage myself.
Drop the products he can't win on, pile the spend behind the ones where he is genuinely in the fight. That one is on our roadmap, not shipped yet. But the competitive data it needs is already sitting there.
* * *
Ian's setup is not unusual. Most stores selling Maxi-Cosi, Nuna, or Cybex are in some version of the same spot: branded products, a catalog shared with the marketplaces, and supplier deals that cap how low you can go. "Just be the cheapest" was never on the table.
But here is the part that is true for every store, not just Ian's. If you want to sell more and protect your margins, your prices have to stay optimal all the time, not whenever you next find a free afternoon. Past a handful of products, no person can do that. There are too many products, too many competitors, and the prices move every day. The only way to keep up is to let software watch the market and do the repricing math for you.
💡 Keeping every price optimal, every day, is not a job you can do by hand. It is one you hand to software.
That is exactly what we are building Marketminer to be, and we want it to be the best one there is. Like it bends around Ian's supplier deals instead of fighting them, we want it to fit the way you actually price.
