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t to you by PriceEasy.
With consolidation and digital acceleration reshaping convenience retail, decision-making has never been more high stakes—or more complex.
“While some operators still rely on legacy systems or in-house tools to price intuitively, they observe that they are falling significantly behind companies that rely on top 3rd party pricing solutions—technology is improving too fast to be able to maintain the need for constant innovation when building something in-house,” said Raj Golecha, CEO of PriceEasy, a Gen 3 pricing and retail intelligence platform used in 22 countries. “Leading companies are shifting toward intelligent, integrated solutions that connect fuel and store operations with deep external intelligence to optimize prices, product mix and promotions across both forecourt and in-store.”
Golecha has closely observed the transformation of fuel convenience pricing over the past 15 years, offering insights into where the industry is headed and how retailers can adapt to the fast-changing landscape.
With AI and technology evolving so quickly, what’s the biggest mindset shift needed for retailers to stay relevant?
We believe there will be significant consolidation in the industry, not due to economic pressures, but due to technological pressures. The pace of technological change is truly unprecedented. Computing power now doubles every six months.
Retailers using legacy systems and outdated mindsets will quickly be overtaken by more adaptive players—those who know how to leverage data and technology to operate more intelligently. To thrive in this era, I believe two things are critical:
First, operators need to be open and adaptive to new technologies. Staying curious and engaged is key.
Second, they should focus on what they do best and work with the right partners to help with technological innovation. A retailer’s core strength is delivering exceptional customer experience and running sites efficiently—it may not be building complex software. One of our clients spent millions of dollars on in-house development but eventually switched to PriceEasy when they realized that even if they increased their annual software development budget tenfold, they would not be able to match the pace of innovation at which software evolves.
Pricing strategies have relied heavily on intuition—pricing is often called an art. Do you see this changing?
There’s always an element of art in pricing, but we can’t ignore the science and data needed to price intelligently. The reason fuel and convenience pricing has been so intuition-driven is because many retailers have been using legacy pricing solutions that haven’t evolved much since 2015—what we’d call Generation 2 technology. These Gen 2 systems allow you to apply rules, pull transaction data and see what happens after a pricing decision. But they don’t tell you why it happened or what will happen next.
Data and AI have changed this. Many leading operators globally have adopted Generation 3 pricing system, which uses trillions of external data points, combined with internal data and AI, to give pricing teams real insights on:
- Which competitor is pulling their volume
- How each competitor reacts to the change in market price
- What are the demographics of customers visiting their site
- How fuel pricing affects in-store revenue by time of day
In 2025, you shouldn’t have to guess how a $0.03 price change will impact your fuel and candy bar sales at 8 a.m. Your pricing system should predict it for you—before you publish your price. That’s what Gen 3 pricing is all about.
This is part one of a two-part series. Learn more about how pricing is getting smarter and PriceEasy’s Gen 3 pricing in part two of this article, coming Thursday.