Ace Hardware Improved Margins, Pricing and Customer Loyalty With Wiser Pricing Intelligence

Ace Hardware is the world’s largest hardware retail cooperative, and the largest non-grocery American retail cooperative.

Ace’s 4,400 stores are run by 3000+ individual owners supported by Ace Corporate for collective buying power and best practices including pricing.

Ace has won top ranks in customer satisfaction for six years running and much of this customer perceived value is traced back to localization and personalization at the store level, making regionalized competitive price intelligence a priority.

Challenges

Ace manages 90,000 products across several regional markets with both national and regional competitors. Inaccurate competitive pricing information led to the following limitations:

  • Inaccurate and limited product matches: Manual compilation of ‘like’ product matches and post processing of competitive pricing data were error-prone.
  • Outdated data: At times, when individual store owners were making decisions on the data being provided, they were up to a month behind the market. Ace wanted to become more proactive with their strategy.
  • No support for zone pricing: Without regional insights, zone pricing was not possible. Pricing was approached from a sub-optimal nationally averaged perspective.
  • No visibility on private label pricing: It was critical for Ace Hardware to understand private brand pricing; however, they had no insight into how competitively priced they were versus comparable products.

Solutions

Ace conducted a formal RFP process and selected Numerator, now Wiser Solutions, as their price intelligence vendor.

Pricing Intelligence provided Ace with the following pricing information opportunities:

  • Regional pricing: Wiser provides accurate and complete competitive pricing information for exact product matches on a regional or zone basis. With timely access to accurate information for thousands of SKUs, Ace is able to “right price” the local market.
  • Private label pricing intel: Wiser provides Ace with a view into their competitors’ private label assortment and pricing intelligence for ‘like’ products, based on category specific attributes. Private brands are a critical component of Ace’s retail strategy and at the heart of many retailer-manufacturer negotiations.

PRODUCTS USED:

"During the bid process, we provided a list of our hardest-to-match product set to competing price intelligence vendors and [Wiser] more than doubled the match rate of the next closest competitor."

Andy Voelker

Retail Pricing Strategy Manager

Results

Ace Hardware can now make profitable zone-based pricing decisions and successfully leverage its private brand.

  • Product matches: Wiser increased exact and ‘like’ matches by 200% across regional markets.
  • Increased store conversions: Price intelligence is driving both store and corporate revenues and margins.
  • Improved store and corporate performance:With timely access to accurate and complete competitive pricing data on a regional basis, Ace is able to “right price” the local market.
  • Real-time pricing for private brands: With a real-time view into their competitors’ private label assortment and pricing intelligence for ‘like’ products, based on category specific attributes, Ace has a complete view of the competitive landscape.
  • Enhanced customer loyalty: Ace can effectively deliver on its neighborhood store brand promise.

Gain a Partner in Wiser

Wiser Solutions is in it for the long haul. We will be a dedicated partner to your marketing efforts as we work with you to establish baselines, run tests, optimize workflows, and turn our real-time data into confident marketing decisions for your business.

Knock that next merchandising campaign out of the park. Win market share from your competition with price optimization. Understand shopper insights to create better messaging. No matter your goals, Wiser is here to help.

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